Perfectly Preserved 1950s Small Town Discovered In Western Nebraska

Story by Ben Plowman 

| Published Oct 6, 2009

When Molly Valchek first pulled up at the gas station in Big Springs, Neb., 350 miles West of Omaha, she found the antique-looking place quite charming. When a friendly attendant came out to pump her gas, she began to get suspicious. When he tipped his hat to her and called her “Ma’am,” Valchek knew she had stumbled across something extraordinary, a town later determined to have remained virtually unchanged during the past 60 years.

“At first, I thought maybe it was some sort of town festival, with all the American flags and old trucks everywhere. But when I started to interact with the locals, it felt as if they came from a place that time had forgotten,” Valchek said.

After a native Big Springsian spent several minutes explaining how a series of vague superstitious omens meant the frost would come early this year, Valchek knew she had to contact the University of Nebraska-Lincoln so the academic world could study the anomalous town. After she spent a half hour unable to get a signal or pick up some Wi-Fi on her phone, Valchek was forced to drive to the nearby town of Ogallala, where she e-mailed professors Peter Bleed and Patricia Draper from the UNL Anthropology Department.

“E-mails like Molly’s are fairly common,” Bleed said. “For example, there was a big uproar a few years back when we thought the entire town of Broken Bow might be somehow incapable of understanding modern technology. Fortunately, we did eventually locate a cell phone and were able to debunk that claim. With Big Springs, however, there is nothing present that would lead us to believe the town has made any substantial changes since a few years after the end of the second world war.”

Professors Bleed and Draper, along with a team of graduate students, took thousands of samples from the town and conducted surveys on more than 50 of the town's 400 inhabitants.

“One thing that kept emerging time and again in these surveys was a fundamental
misunderstanding of current events,” Draper said. “For example, we asked the residents who the current president was and found it almost impossible to garner a direct answer. We would go so far as to lead them on, asking ‘What about Barack Obama, is he the current president?’ over and over. They kept saying, ‘No, that’s no president of mine.’”

In addition to not knowing the current president, the residents were also unaware of the popularity of foreign-made automobiles, the revolutions of cellular phones and the Internet and even the U.S. loss during the Vietnam War.

“It makes perfect sense,” said graduate student Kristin Tornosky. “If you had stopped interacting with the outside world in the 1950s, of course you would believe America would continue its dominant position in Vietnam and the world, that nobody would dare buy cars from Japan or that the only fast-food restaurant was McDonald’s.”

As for a theory of why the town has remained cut off for so long, Draper compared the town to a monastery.

“It’s almost like a monastery of everyday living, cloistered away in the middle of nowhere. Only, in addition to the Bible, they’re reading a farmer’s almanac, and in addition to God, they are worshiping America,” Draper said.

When asked if Big Springs should be told of the advances of the past six decades, Draper smiled.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t want to be the one to tell them separate isn’t equal.”