Earlier this week, the great rural blog The Daily Yonder posted a cool map of government data of average compensation in rural counties (includes wages, employer contributions for pension plans, insurance plans, government social insurance and bonuses). Here’s the post and a larger version of the map. The data is from 2008, which might be a [...]

Small towns are rightly known for their kindness, but they also have a real susceptibility to cliquishness, to wariness of outsiders, and that’s something that has to be overcome if they are to attract new people to live there.

I had a chance Monday to do some checking in on some of the things going on in some Central Nebraska over the past few weeks. Here’s what I found: Burwell — The big news out of Burwell is that the city council is taking bids for the Community Memorial Health Center, Burwell’s city-owned nursing home [...]

This week, I did what I always do during the first week of October — walk alongside high school marching bands as they practice for this weekend’s Harvest of Harmony parade and field show in Grand Island. Each year since 2004, the Independent has run three profiles of bands in the area that will be marching [...]

A nice, quiet weekend shift on Saturday gave me plenty of time to check in on what’s going on around Central Nebraska. Here’s a few items I found noteworthy — I wrote this on Saturday, and I must have been hungry. (An explanation of Nebraska Notes is here.) Albion (and Ord) — The Albion News reports that city [...]

I got to report last week on one of my favorite stories of this summer: the local production of an original play to re-enact Loup City’s 1934 riot. This is a chapter of rural Nebraska history that I doubt many in the area are terribly familiar with, particularly younger or newer residents. (I had never [...]