Highway 20 Is 99 Years Old

Emeritus Professor Darrell Norris has been traveling his favorite highway and doing presentations on Nebraska's longest stretch of road–Highway 20. Norris, an English Geographer and painter, said he loves the history and the quaintness of the communities that reside on Highway 20. Norris had done a presentation in Plainview the first week of June. 

"I'm in love with the communities on route 20, as it shows. In some of the more interesting communities I will pick a historical building and paint it," said Norris. "At some point, I will try to paint the Golden Hotel. It has such a history, and its location on Hwy 20 makes it that much more interesting to me."

"The road has several legitimate claims of importance. It is trans-continental, extending all the way from Boston to the Pacific coast at Newport, OR. It was among a handful of projected coast-to-coast Federal Highways in 1926. Among the first such roads, U.S. 20 was also the last, finally extending from Yellowstone National Park to the West Coast in 1940. That's not all: U.S. 20 is doubly the "last transcontinental" because, unlike all the other coast to coast highways, it was never smothered by an Interstate Highway or cut off by highway renumbering short of the West Coast. Moreover, and I think most of you know this, Highway 20 is America's longest road, at a prodigious 3,283 miles—other estimates vary, but this is the best. Over most of its length, the highway is still a two-lane black-top. Iowa is an anomaly, as usual! Widening Highway 20 has never been needed because traffic is quite light. It's light because it is generally flanked or sandwiched by East-West Interstates, notably I-90 and I-80. Without widening, the highway's old roadside commercial architecture was left untouched, so when I surveyed Highway 20 thirty-three years ago, many roadside buildings pre-dated WW2. Most of them, alas, have since disappeared altogether.

For years I treated Highway 20 as a museum of the American commercial roadside. It takes commitment, stupidity, or both to survey eight hundred gasoline stations, for example. I paid little heed to the communities along the road. If the main road went past them, not through them, I drove past as well. As you know, many communities along Nebraska Highway 20 are located near the road but not directly on it. In the past, the road generally took in the main street.

Perhaps, like me, slow movies and dull concerts make you drop off to sleep. Presentations with on-screen spreadsheets and a bland speaker are even worse, I think. They led to some of my best classroom naps. So I try to make my talks as colorful as possible and free of number-crunching tedium.

That said, hard numerical evidence has its place, especially as a corrective to over-generalization and lazy stereotypes. New Yorkers, for example, believe they know all about the Great Plains. But calling your communities "Flyover Country" attests to simple ignorance of and prejudice toward your world, its successes, and its challenges.

In my talk, I settle on the 33 communities along Highway 20 as an "open necklace," distinguishing between the near-identical beads that serve most of your needs and the essentially residential, smaller, and more varied places that punctuate the gaps between the larger service centers, all blessed with high schools."

1. There are 33 communities along Highway 20 beyond the Sioux City, IA, metro area and its margins.

2. The largest, Chadron, is a college town, and the smallest, Nenzel, in Cherry County, is one of several tiny hamlets with no services at all.

3. The combined population of all 33 communities is just over 24,000 residents, making the provision of essential services a challenge.

4. The communities span over 400 road miles. Laurel and Harrison are a day's drive apart. This "stretching" of the population compounds the challenge of service provision.

5. Nebraska's median age is 37 years. Aside from Chadron and its college population, only one community along Hwy 20 has a lower median age. Migration imbalance and aging in place play roles; they are mostly beyond the scope of my work for now.

6. In some instances, median age exceeds 60 years. These places are, in effect, retirement communities. The largest, Merriman, has only 88 residents, the smallest 18. Most of these small places are along the western half of the highway between Valentine and Harrison.

7. Nebraska's most recent reported median household income is $75 thousand. Only four of the 33 communities exceed that figure. Anomalies aside, the lower-income places are small, with senior citizens a large share of their population.

8. Nebraska's median home value is $269 thousand. Peak values along Hwy 20 are at Chadron and Laurel, a Sioux City exurb. Both are only slightly over $150 thousand. Values lower than $100 thousand are quite

common along Hwy 20. Low value tends to be most associated with small places west of Valentine. Plainview is an anomaly. Low home values do restrict residential opportunities elsewhere and encourage "aging in place."

9. Overall, 34 percent of Nebraskans hold college degrees. Only the "usual suspects," Laurel and Chadron, exceed this. Unsurprisingly, a higher education background is much less prevalent in the smaller (often retirement) communities. Plainview is anomalous. Hibernian-Latino O'Neill is not.

10. Roughly half of Highway 20's communities in Nebraska have held on to at least 50 percent of their peak population. Roughly one quarter have lost 80 percent or more. Most of the latter were never large to begin with. The largest places have mostly avoided extreme population loss if we deem a 20 percent loss from the Roaring Twenties railroad era resource bonanza "acceptable." I do.

11. Historically, just about all the 33 places, and then some, could boast a Post Office and usually an associated general store. Over time, rural mail delivery and cost-savings led to closures. About one-quarter of our Hwy 20 communities have lost their post office. In most cases these hamlets lack all other community services and resources.

12. But close to half the places along Hwy 20 not only provide a wide range of community functions but, in fact, provide a complete range of the dozen or so most common services.

13. The 'threshold' for this full array seems to be a resident population of 500, with 1000 a near-guarantee of viability, unless external decisions and cost-cutting upset this near-miraculous equilibrium.

14. The high school is a key element of this stable array, as to a lesser extent are the bank, health-care facility, and public library. The status quo looks pretty good, but functional loss could lead to serious repercussions.

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