Our Town Broadwater

LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) - It’s a small town on Highway 26, but if you look just beyond the main highway in Broadwater, you’ll find many amenities, and plenty of history.

We talked with Marlene Yeager about the town at her bed and breakfast called “The Farmhouse Inn”.

“We are small, there’s no doubt about that,” Yeager said. “But we do have two bed and breakfasts in town. There’s the old community hall, that’s been renovated into the Starr Street Diner. The old high school is now the village office. It also has the Broadwater library, and on the other end we have two rooms renovated for the museum. If people want to see the museum, they can just come off the highway, stop by the office, and we can let them in. I’m the village clerk, and I’m there the first through the 10th of the month.”

The town is filled with history.

“Back in the day, this was just prairie,” Yeager said. “That was until the railroad came. We had some brothers by the name of Smith that owned a lot of land around here. They donated some land to build a settlement. Then the Kincaid Act came into being, where the government would give away a section of land to settlers, and people started coming in. At that time, we were Cheyenne County. But Cheyenne County was split and we became Morrill County. Bridgeport won out in the selection of where the county seat would be. But Broadwater remained active.”

Yeager says in the town’s heyday, the community had a theater, and even a newspaper until 1958.

“North of town, we had some paleontologists come out,” Yeager said. “The unearthed a stegomastadon, and the fossils of this animal are currently on display in Morrill Hall.” Yeager says the town also features a small quick mart on the highway, as well as a number of homes. The proximity to Scottsbluff makes the town a nice place to call home, while having some of the amenities of a bigger city close by.

Copyright 2022 KOLN. All rights reserved.