40 Nebraskaland • March 2025
low-cut bodices of Victorian times. The skirts were long and
had trains, for no lady would have allowed an ankle to be
seen in those days … ."
In each of these stories, people accepted inconvenience or
great expense to recreate something from their old life back
east. But sometimes extravagance had a political point, as in
1869 when Thomas Kennard and a few other prominent men
built expensive houses in the new state capital of Lincoln. At
the time, many people doubted that the state government
would remain in such a tiny, out-of-the-way village. Spending
money on a fancy house demonstrated confi dence and
prompted others to invest in the would-be city.
Even folks far from the capital worried about public opinion
— as photographer Solomon Butcher found out when he
visited the David Hilton homestead in Custer County in
1887. Historian John Carter writes that "the family still lived
in a sod house, a situation of considerable embarrassment to
Mrs. Hilton — so much so that she steadfastly refused to be
photographed in front of it.
"To make the picture to her liking, Mr. Hilton and the
photographer had to drag the pump organ out and away from
the house so that she could
show friends back east that she
had one without revealing the condition of their dwelling."
Sometimes refi nement had more to do with the kind of
society that people hoped to build. Beatrice, for example,
was still a rough frontier town in the 1870s when a group of
local residents led by suff ragist Clara Bewick Colby decided
to open a library.
A letter to the Beatrice Express argued that a library was
necessary to "give tone to the community while still in its
youth, and to bring in more of those of whom we can never
have enough, i.e., people who ask what opportunities the
place aff ords for mental culture."
We tend to assume that pioneers were a rough lot (and
sometimes they were) or that they were plain-living people
who spurned luxury — although that was often out of
necessity rather than choice. Few Nebraskans could aff ord
some of the extravagancies described here. But the taste
for refi nement reveals how people not only comforte d
themselves with nice things, but also how they looked to the
future, not seeing their crude present reality so much as their
dreams of future prosperity.
N
Visit NSHS's website at history.nebraska.gov.
Built in 1858, the Herndon House at 9th and Farnam streets was Omaha's fi rst big hotel, the fanciest place in the territory.
NSHS RG2341-2-P46
