The Town Under the Lake

The lake is down again. Lake McConaughy, Nebraska’s largest lake, the big reservoir on the North Platte River above Ogallala, fell below twenty-three percent of capacity by early September, and the boat ramps ended in dry gravel long before the water did. On the north shore, past the storage units and bait shops of the relocated town of Lemoyne, the lake bottom has come back into the air. Concrete foundations sit in rows along a vanished street. A raised slab marks where the vault of the Lemoyne State Bank stood. The concrete columns of an old filling station rise out of the mud. The state of Nebraska drowned this town on purpose in 1941, when Kingsley Dam closed and the reservoir began to fill. Eighty-five years later, in a dry year, the townsite is open to anyone who wants to walk it.

I drove the shore road in September and walked the townsite. Calvin Berry, a local historian whose family roots in the valley run to 1907, was out there walking it again, as he has at each low-water return. He identified the old Lemoyne State Bank for the KNOP reporters, and the raised slab in the middle of its foundation, where the vault had stood. He pointed out the foundations of Gus Samuelson’s general store next door. The foundations also hold one family story, about the banker’s son, Melvin Adams Sr., and the lumber worker’s daughter, who were next-door neighbors before they married. What is left is not much. The street grid is still readable underfoot. Over the last two decades, wave action has dissolved the old railroad beds and the highway gravel, and each low-water cycle carries more of the town out into the lake.

The town was real before it was a reservoir bed. Lemoyne Jacobs, an easterner, settled on this bend of the North Platte in the cattle-drive years; Keith County’s own published history dates his arrival to about 1875. He wanted a railroad, and he spent years asking the Union Pacific for one. In 1909 the railroad completed a branch line through the North Platte Valley, across Jacobs’s land, and in 1911 the town was surveyed and named for the man who had brought the rails. A school district formed in 1915 with nineteen students. Local businessmen pooled their money and built a hotel in 1918. A Presbyterian church went up in 1919. By the middle of the 1920s about two hundred people lived there, shipping cattle to Omaha from the stockyard, buying groceries at Samuelson’s, depositing in George Adams’s Lemoyne State Bank. A photograph in the state archives shows the town sign around 1938. It reads POP. 110.

Nobody meant to erase a town. C.W. McConaughy was a grain merchant and a mayor of Holdrege who noticed, driving home through farm country, that wheat grew tall where snow had drifted around corn shocks the winter before. Water held back and released later was the whole idea. On November 26, 1913, he organized the Tri-County Supplemental Water Association to build two reservoirs near Plum Creek, and he made a Minden banker named George P. Kingsley his vice president. “My heart has been set on fire with a vision,” McConaughy wrote, in words the Platte Basin Timelapse project preserves. For two decades they pushed the vision through drought years and skeptical farmers. Rival projects fought it for water rights, and legislatures met it with strong opposition. Kingsley died in 1929. In 1934, federal engineers studied the valley and said one big dam on the North Platte near Keystone would serve better than two small ones on Plum Creek. McConaughy could not accept the change. He resigned from the board of the association he had founded.

Then the state built the machine that would take the valley. The 1933 Legislature, meeting in the pit of the Depression and the dust years, passed Senate File 310, the Enabling Act that created public power and irrigation districts as public corporations and political subdivisions of the state. The Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District organized under it and carried the Tri-County Project to Washington. At the Public Works Administration the work became Project 3400, carrying a $19 million grant and a $24 million loan against a $43 million cost. Construction began on March 13, 1936. Electric dredges pumped sand from the riverbed into the dam’s flanks and a slurry of loess clay into its watertight core. When the work stopped, 26 million cubic yards of earth had gone into the fill, and the dam ran 3.1 miles across the valley and stood 163 feet high. At completion it was the second-largest hydraulic-fill dam in the world, behind Fort Peck. Its reservoir was designed to hold about two million acre-feet. Central even made a film about the work, a silent record of the dredges, and called it Plain Magic.

The machine needed the valley floor, and the valley floor was occupied. Old U.S. Highway 26 had to move. The Union Pacific’s valley line had to move north, and the town of Lemoyne sat in the reservoir bed. Nebraska law had already written the procedure for this. The district held the same powers of eminent domain as an irrigation company. The state constitution promised more than the federal one: the property of no person shall be “taken or damaged for public use without just compensation therefor.” Washington’s clause speaks only of property taken. The procedure ran through the county. Appraisers were appointed, they walked the land, they filed their award with the county judge, and the landowner got thirty days to appeal to the district court. If the condemnor deposited the amount of the award, it could take possession while the appeal ran. If the landowner did not appeal, the award was binding. The whole machine ran on paper.

One file shows what the machine produced. Farm ground belonging to the Feltz family sat in the path of the relocated highway. On May 19, 1939, the appraisers filed their report assessing the taking at $2,473.80. The district paid the money into court on June 14 and told the clerk to hold it while both sides appealed. At trial the jury cut the number. Their verdict came back at $1,914.12. The jury’s answers to the court’s special questions survive in the Eighth Circuit’s opinion: $343.75 for 8.15 acres in one section, $279.50 for 11.18 acres in another, and $1,290.87 for the damage done to the 308.82 acres left behind. That is about $42 an acre for the first strip and $25 an acre for the second, in the spring of 1939, for land the water was coming to cover. The district had taken possession on April 29, before the appraisers even filed. Because the jury’s verdict came in below the award, the family collected no interest for the wait. The case is Feltz v. Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, decided by the Eighth Circuit in 1942.

There are more receipts. Clara Woodgate lost 9.40 acres to the district in a proceeding that began in the county court of Lincoln County and ended in the Nebraska Supreme Court on June 7, 1940. The same term produced Schultz v. Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, which fixed the measure of damages the appraisers were to apply: the fair market value of the land taken, plus the difference in market value of what remained, before and after. The formula is clean. It can be taught in a sentence, and it prices dirt with complete sincerity. Applied to a town, the formula’s limit shows at once. A formula built on market value can only see what a buyer would pay. Nobody was buying in Lemoyne in 1938.

The Feltz file holds the harder lesson. The family tried to claim for something the taking had destroyed beyond their fence lines. Down the valley stood Belmar, a Union Pacific siding with a loading place, a little store, and a post office, one of the shipping points strung six to ten miles apart along the river. The project removed Belmar from the map. What the Feltzes offered to prove was that losing their shipping point cut five dollars an acre off their half section; the trial court refused to hear it. The judge’s reason survives in the record. Destruction of the town of Belmar was, in his words, “damage common to all of the inhabitants around it,” and what is common to all cannot be claimed by anyone. The Eighth Circuit agreed. In 1943 the Nebraska Supreme Court applied the same rule to Keystone, holding that what all property owners alike lost when the railroad relocated could not be recovered. There it is, in the reporters. The law priced every acre.

So the town took the money and moved. Planning started in 1937, and the work went building by building. Houses and stores were jacked off their foundations, set on timbers, and hauled less than a mile north, out of the bed and up the hill. The relocation plat was called New Lemoyne, and the name never took; people just kept saying Lemoyne. The bank moved out of the valley. Some families looked at the new lots and chose Ogallala or Brule instead. What could not be moved was torn down, and what was left stood empty in the path of the water. The gates closed in 1941. The dam was dedicated on July 22 of that year, and by then the reservoir was rising over the streets. McConaughy did not see it. He died on April 15, 1941, three months before the dedication, still unreconciled to the site, and the lake took his name anyway. Kingsley had been dead twelve years. His name went on the dam. The lake got the name of the man who had quit over the site, and the town got the water.

The state kept its receipts. A woman from the town kept everything else. The district’s records sit at History Nebraska in Lincoln. On twenty-five rolls of microfilm purchased from the National Archives rest the project files: the audit reports with their cost schedules for lands, rights of way, and easements, the loan requisitions under Docket 3400, the trust indentures. Next to that official memory sits the Cora Baumann collection, thirteen boxes and a shelf of oversized volumes. Baumann was born at Old Lemoyne on May 5, 1918, the daughter of Herman and Minnie Soehl, and she went to school in the town before finishing at Ogallala High School in 1937, the year the moving started. She spent fifty years documenting what the lake took, folder by folder, organized by township section and family name, the Harrises, the Stansberrys, the Soehls, the Kurkowskis, the Bishops. The school district’s attendance registers are in her boxes. Her scrapbooks of construction clippings run from 1937 to 1941. One folder holds a poem by a Lemoyne resident named Julius Hoffman: “Tis wrong not right / To put out of sight.” After she died in 2006, her son Loy gave it all to the archives, where anyone can open it.

The lake gives the town back on a drought schedule. The foundations surfaced in 1956, and again in the low water of September 1990, and again on September 14, 2004, when the reservoir fell to its lowest level on record, around 350,000 acre-feet, a fifth of capacity. Each return is rougher than the last. The wave action of the high years keeps grinding at the rail beds and the road gravel, and the town that comes up out of the water is smaller each time than the town that went down. Nate Nielsen, the Kingsley Dam foreman, told reporters this fall that winter inflows will run poorer than normal unless a strong El Niño arrives, because the reservoir now depends on irrigation return flows from upstream, and those returns keep thinning. The lake still does its work. It feeds irrigation serving more than a hundred thousand acres and runs the hydroplants, and its beaches make it one of the state’s most popular recreation sites. The district made its last payment on the federal loan in 1972; the debt to Washington was paid in full.

The townsite asks one question every time it surfaces. What does the state owe a place it drowned on purpose? Grant the record its due first. The drought was real, the dust was real, and the purpose was as public as a purpose gets, debated for two decades, enacted by a legislature, financed by the federal government, and repaid to the last dollar. Nebraska’s constitution promised more than the federal floor requires, payment for property damaged and not only property taken, and the checks cleared. The state did not steal Lemoyne. It bought Lemoyne, house by house and acre by acre, at prices set by disinterested appraisers, with appeals heard by juries. All of that is true, and the files prove it.

The same files cut the other way. The awards cover acres and severance damages, plus the strips condemned for a relocated highway. Nowhere do they cover a town, because the law calls a town’s destruction damage common to all, and what is common to all belongs, for purposes of payment, to no one. That doctrine is the arithmetic that lets a state drown a community deliberately and settle the account as pasture. Just compensation was just to the parcel. It carried no line item for a main street, a school district, a church organized in 1919, a boy and a girl who met as neighbors and married. The money side of the account cannot be reopened now, and no one is asking for that. What remains owing is the honest entry: the awards printed next to the foundations, the admission that the check was the price of the dirt and that the town went unpriced.

The lake will come back up. It always has, though the dam foreman says this winter’s inflows look poor unless a strong El Niño arrives. Either way the slab of the bank vault will spend most of its years underwater with the fish, and the rest of the town will keep surfacing on the dry years to ask its plain question. Calvin Berry walked the foundations in September knowing the cycle by heart. “So maybe this time is goodbye,” he said, and he has said goodbye before. The curb lines are out there now, in the air, legible to anyone willing to get mud on their boots. When the water returns, they will go under again. The town has come back every time the water let it.