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Population One, All in Favor

The election notice goes up on the tavern wall. That is how the mayoral race begins in Monowi, Nebraska, the only incorporated village in America with a population of one. Elsie Eiler tapes the announcement up inside the Monowi Tavern, the bar she and her husband bought in 1971, and then, as the BBC’s filmmakers recorded, she votes for herself. She wins unanimously. She has won every year since the count fell to one, because she is the entire electorate and the entire government: mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, and bartender of Monowi, population one.

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The Neighbor the Census Invented

The 2020 census counted two people in Monowi, Nebraska. The arithmetic surprised the only one of them. Elsie Eiler has lived alone in the village since her husband Rudy died in 2004. She is the mayor, the clerk, the treasurer, the librarian, and the keeper of the Monowi Tavern, the last business open in a town of 0.21 square miles on the far northern edge of the state. When the new census figures came out in August 2021 and showed Monowi’s population doubled, she gave the Lincoln Journal Star the only answer a competent count of one allows. “Well, then someone’s been hiding from me, and there’s nowhere to live but my house. But if you find out who he is, let me know?”

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Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

The county seat of my boyhood summers just voted, five to nothing, to pull its surveillance cameras off the poles, the first town in Nebraska to do it. The reasons cut deeper than the invoice. Ord, Nebraska sits eleven miles up the North Loup River valley from the village of North Loup, where I spent the summers of my boyhood on my grandfather’s place, and in the mental geography of a ten-year-old those eleven miles separated the known world from its capital. North Loup had a few hundred souls, a grain elevator, and Popcorn Days. Ord had the Valley County courthouse with a square built around it, implement lots, storefront commerce enough to dazzle a village kid, and a radio station whose call letters spell the valley itself: K-N-L-V, North Loup Valley, on the air at 1060 since 1965 with farm markets in the morning and high school ball at night. When my grandfather’s rooftop antenna strained for television it caught one signal, 10/11 out of Lincoln, and that was the extent of the visible world. Ord was “town.” You washed up a little before going.

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