166 



CITIES, AMERICAN. (LINCOLN.) 



2,208 miles in the State are tributary to the 

 city. It is a center of fruit-packing and ship- 

 ping. A company has been organized for 

 orange-auction and forwarding. The lead- 

 ing jobbing business is the wholesale grain and 

 feed trade. There are 90 wholesale establish- 

 ments and 500 retail, which employ nearly 

 5,000 hands. The amount of business capital 

 in both branches is $20,000,000. A cotton- 

 house, with gin and press, is being erected, 

 and the city will eventually become a cotton- 

 center. There is a direct line of steamships to 

 New York. A new charter has recently been 

 granted, by which the corporate limits are ex- 

 tended. The public schools number eleven, 

 white and colored, with an attendance of 2,254 

 pupils. The value of school property is $70,- 

 500. There are also private, art, and music 

 schools, and a Young Men's Christian Associa- 

 tion. The streets are paved, and there are 

 shelled roads. It has lumber-mills, cigar-facto- 

 ries, a brush-factory, boiler and machine shops, 

 founderie*, marine railways, jewelry and curio, 

 carriage and wagon, and ice factories, a coffee 

 and spice mill, binderies, and other manufact- 

 uring industries. 



Lincoln. The capital of Nebraska, in Kent 

 County, 65 miles southwest of Omaha ; popu- 

 lation, 35,000. There is no river here, or 

 natural site for a town ; but the place was 

 chosen to be the capital when it was a mere 

 cross-road because of its central position in 

 what then constituted the population of Ne- 

 braska. The State became owner of the town- 

 site, and sold nearly $400,000 worth of lots 

 within a few years, so rapidly did people as- 

 semble and property appreciate. Lincoln is 

 now the railroad- center of the State. The 

 Burlington route's trains enter and leave over 

 six different lines ; the Union Pacific has lines 

 both north and south ; the Elkhorn route 

 comes in by two lines, and the Missouri Pa- 

 cific by one. At least 1,000 men are em- 

 ployed here by the railways alone. Partly 

 as cause, partly as effect of these railroad fa- 

 cilities, an enormous wholesale and jobbing 

 trade has arisen. The sales of groceries 

 amount to $4,000,000 annually. Agricultural 

 implements, cigars and tobacco, dry goods, 

 drugs, and liquors follow, augmenting the 

 wholesale business to $12,000,000 annually, 

 making it a serious competitor in trade with 

 Omaha, St. Joseph, and Kansas City. As a 

 grain-market Lincoln is important. Her mer- 

 chants own seventy-five elevators in all parts 

 of the State, and handle three fourths of the 

 cereal-crop of Nebraska i. e., from fifteen to 

 twenty million bushels of corn and small 

 grains. Ten Eastern grain-dealers maintain 

 buyers here. Live-stock forms another ele- 

 ment of prosperity. Three quarters of the 

 total shipment of beef and swine from the 

 State passes through Lincoln, and is quartered 

 in her immense stock-yards. Two pork-pack- 

 ing houses represent, combined, a plant of 

 $200,000, and can pack 5,000 hogs a day ; a 



beef-packing house is soon to be built. Fac- 

 tories of several kinds are rising. The brick- 

 and-tile works employ 150 men the year 

 round, and can make 50,000 common bricks 

 and 12,000 pressed bricks daily, besides all sorts 

 of tiles. The Lincoln canning-factory is capable 

 of packing a million cans of vegetables and 

 2,000 barrels of vinegar in a year. In all, TO 

 factories are now counted in the city, whoso 

 combined product amounts to $8,000,000 an- 

 nually. As the capital of the State the city 

 has many public institutions, some of which 

 are imposingly housed. The new Capitol is 

 a stately edifice, after the style of the Capitol 

 at Washington, built of white limestone from 

 the bluffs of Platte river, and capped by a 

 dome rising 200 feet above the trees of the 

 park in which it stands. The interior is hand- 

 somely finished, and the whole building cost 

 $500,000. Three miles southward is the State 

 Insane Asylum, and the Penitentiary stands in 

 another suburb. The post-office and other 

 Federal offices occupy a large and ugly struct- 

 ure on the public square, and a county court- 

 house is soon to be built at a cost of $200,000. 

 Lincoln derives a large part of its distinction 

 from its institutions of learning. Here is the 

 State University, occupying a group of large 

 buildings in shaded grounds, which form a 

 park in the midst of the town. These grounds 

 were reserved by the State, and the main 

 building was erected in 1870, at a cost of $140,- 

 000, out of funds accruing from the sale of city 

 lots. Since then other buildings have been 

 added, laboratories furnished, etc., until now 

 this university is one of the best equipped in 

 the West. It is under a board of regents, and 

 will ultimately embrace an academic course, 

 an industrial college, and colleges of medi- 

 cine, law, and the fine arts, to which will be 

 added special advanced courses ; only the first 

 two are organized, as yet, under sixteen pro- 

 fessors and several instructors. A preparatory 

 school is attached, and the tendency of the 

 curriculum is toward modern and practical 

 requirements, rather than toward classical 

 training. This appears in the prominence 

 given to the Industrial College, which offers 

 two courses, leading to the degrees of bachelor 

 of agriculture and bachelor of civil engineer- 

 ing. An experimental farm is carried on by 

 the State in connection with this college. In 

 1887-'88 this university had 400 students. It 

 is free to residents of Nebraska, and receives, 

 without further examination, the graduates of 

 about twenty accredited high-schools in the 

 State. Besides this, the Methodist Church 

 opened . in September, 1888, the Wesleyan 

 University. It occupies a building costing 

 $70,000, three miles from the center of the 

 city, and owns 240 acres of gift land. This 

 school is designed to be a university, and 

 among its foremost departments will be a 

 polytechnic school. A third university, just 

 founded, is under the care of the Campbellite 

 Church ; and the Koman Catholics support a 



