Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Was there an ordinance?
- Sign?
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | ||||||||
| 2000 | ||||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
email 11/25/07
This town is absolutely unreal. Everything seemed to be fine at first, when we bought it and visited, and when I came to do renovations last winter by myself. We “settled” here this summer, and all was well until they “found out” (their terminology) that my wife and kids are Jewish.
Members of the city council have in my presence referred to us as “fucking Jews” and they liked the idea of us buying this church until they found out that “a bunch of Jews were ‘gonna buy it.”
My daughter was picked on so bad in school that her hair started falling out, and she’s starting to attend, of all things, the Catholic school tomorrow. She was being told things like “you don’t really believe in God” etc. The last time I spoke with the principal of the school I explained that we had to actually have a talk with her about suicide, and he glibly said “oh that’s too bad.”
And it’s not just us. We’ve been told a lot how the “Black Family” was treated so well when they lived here, though nobody knows their names other than “the Black Family” and that they were only here for nine months.
This fall a Latino family moved in, and the father didn’t speak English. His 12 year old daughter had to translate hate mail from English to Spanish to her father, and they left after only five or six weeks.
We had a contractor working on the church until August, when they quit for reasons we weren’t aware of, and then we found out it’s because the rumor was “They’re cheap and won’t pay.”
My son has autism, and on Halloween my daughter went trick or treating, and took along an extra bag for her brother, and someone in this town thought it would be amusing to not give him candy, but a half eaten greasy sausage.
We get tailgated when we pull into town, and the other day my wife was followed for miles, and we don’t know who it was.
After we move, I think Wynot would be a definite addition to the list.
The town also “has a siren that goes off at 7AM, Noon, and 6PM. As a matter of fact, all the other little towns around here, except for Hartington, has a 6PM siren. Someone told me it’s because the farmers need to know what time to stop working, another person told me they had no idea why there’s a siren.”
I was reading some of your future research questions and had some ideas I wanted to share with you about this town (and sorry for ‘jumping the gun’ on the response). Wynot (in Cedar County, Nebraska) has old newspaper articles accusing people of being “unAmerican” for not being able to speak either German or English, and I believe this was from a story from 1913.
When we first moved here I got lots of anecdotes from people about “being made fun of” for being Danish, rather than German, which the town overwhelmingly claims as first heritage. (This is somewhat an address to the homogeneity question.) When someone first told me this, I thought they were exaggerating, and likened it in my own mind of a White person saying they were a “victim of racism” because “The Black lady at Burger King was mean to me.”
I’ve since found out that this town in its past has redlined Irish people, though I can’t find anything documented.
I did indeed ask about the sirens. The very first thing I was told back in January when I came up on a “renovation vacation” was that it was for my “safety” and I assumed it meant tornadoes, thinking it was testing. THEN I was told it was for the farmers, but the town’s only 100 years old, and not sure what the purpose of it would be after Timex started mass producing.
And then something else actually struck me while reading excerpts from the book. When the lady who did the article interviewed me, she said at two different times: “Nobody needs to know that.” The first was that I was born overseas, the second was that my family is Jewish. The town seemed genuinely fascinated with my “Buddhist-ness” but obviously not so much with my wife and kids’ Judaism.