38 Nebraskaland • November 2025
t was after midnight, and Billy McNamara and three other
volunteer fi remen were manning a hose inside the second-
fl oor dining room of Omaha's Grand Central Hotel. Billy
was "a popular young man and soon to be married." A
hotel employee, he knew the building well.
When other fi remen warned Billy and the others to get out
of there, Billy replied (as reported in the Omaha Bee) "that he
had been employed in the hotel so long that he did not feel
like going back on it just then." Nearby, John Lee — another
young man, married less than a year — "proposed to stay
with the fi re till (sic) the last moment."
They saw no immediate danger. They had time.
Eight years earlier, in 1870, Omaha leaders decided their
growing city of 16,000 residents needed a fi rst-class hotel.
Selecting the southwest corner of 14th and Farnam streets
(where the Paxton Hotel stands today), more than 120
prominent men bought shares in a joint company and eagerly
anticipated the money that well-to-do travelers would spend
By David L. Bristow,
Nebraska State Historical Society
I
Sept. 5, 1878. Aftermath of the Grand Central Hotel fi re. NSHS
RG2341-PH0-270
Burning of
the Grand
Central
Hotel
