Reporting to headquarters this #ThrowbackThursday!
This week’s highlight is a black and white stereoscopic photograph of a Renaissance Revival-style house on the A.T. “Headquarters” Ranch in Wheeler County, Nebraska. The house, a two-story concrete block structure, has a hipped roof with flared eaves, gabled pedimented dormer windows at the attic level, a porch running the front length of the house, and two large corbelled brick chimneys extending from the roof. Information printed on item: John Nelson, Photographer, Ericson, Nebr. U.S.A.
According the the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, the concrete blocks for the house, built in 1906, were made on site. Because it was centrally-located on the 40,000+ acre ranch and was used as a post office 1908-1909, the house became known as “The Headquarters.” The name Headquarters later “was also used in reference to the A.T. Ranch.” Owned by the Allerton-Thompson Cattle Company, the ranch provided cattle for the stockyards owned by Samuel W. Allerton, a millionaire from Chicago. Allerton’s nephews, A.C. and Charles Thompson, who managed the ranch, built the house. The ranch acreage was sold off in 1916-1917.
This image is owned and published by the Nebraska State Historical Society. They digitized content from the John Nelson and the J. A. Anderson collection. John Nelson came to Nebraska with his parents at the age of seventeen from Sweden. His photographs tell the story of small town life in Nebraska during the first decades of the twentieth century. John A. Anderson was born in Sweden in 1869. He came to Nebraska with his parents and settled in Cherry County. He worked as a civilian photographer for the army at Fort Niobrara (Nebraska) and later worked as a clerk at the Rosebud Reservation (South Dakota) trading post.
See this collection and many more on the Nebraska Memories archive!
The Nebraska Memories archive is brought to you by the Nebraska Library Commission. If your institution is interested in participating in Nebraska Memories, see http://nlc.nebraska.gov/nebraskamemories/participation.aspx for more information.
