Hooper marks its 150th anniversary in 2026, counting from 1876. But people were living on the town site a decade before that, and the streets were drawn on paper five years before it. Depending on which moment you treat as the beginning, Hooper was founded in 1866, in 1871, or in 1876 — and all three have a legitimate claim.

Here is what actually happened in each of those years, drawn from the accounts collected in the town’s centennial history, including one written by a woman who was there for most of it.

1866: Two People on a Bluff

The earliest account we have was written by someone with a direct line to it. In February 1900, the Hooper Sentinel published a piece called “Our Town” by Mrs. Jerry Denslow — before her marriage, Anna Sutton, daughter of one of the first settlers. She was writing, as she notes, thirty-four years after the town was founded and twenty-four years after it was incorporated.

Her account opens in the autumn of 1866, with a young married couple standing on the bluff above what would become Hooper:

The early frost had touched leaf and shrub and turned their green to gold and red. The sinking sun shown aslant upon neighboring bluffs, and cast long shadows across the thick, ripe prairie grass below. On down through the valley in gracefully meanderings, flowed the famous Elkhorn River, plainly outlined by its fringe of forest tree. On either side stretched a vast domain of rich undulating prairie land through which wound a single ill-defined wagon road.

The couple were A.Y. Sutton and his wife, and by Denslow’s account they “became the first settlers on what later became the town site of Hooper.” They drove stakes to mark a homestead and built themselves a house, a barn and yards. The following spring, others followed.

There was no town yet. No plat, no post office, no name. Just a homestead on a bluff above the Elkhorn.

1870: The Railroad Decides Where the Town Goes

What turned that homestead into a town was the railroad, and the sequence matters.

In 1869 the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley railroad was built through the valley by the railway financier John I. Blair, and, in Denslow’s phrase, “for the first time the shrill whistle of the locomotive echoed and re-echoed through our valley and over our prairies.” Blair bought the Sutton farm, platted a station on it, and named it Hooper.

The first person to move to that station was O.A. Himebaugh. He had farmed on Maple Creek since 1856 and had been buying grain, lumber and coal at a temporary railroad station six miles east of the present town. He also acted as an agent in land purchases — which, as one account dryly notes, put him “in a position to know of the proposed location of the village, even before the information reached the wide-awake people of Fremont.”

In the spring of 1870 he moved his family to the new station, built a house, and a few months later built an elevator. He handled the first grain shipped from Hooper, and for years afterward controlled the entire grain trade.

The next to arrive was James Colwell, a blacksmith. The second building put up was a hotel, built by August Koppelkom in 1871, later known as the Tillman House. A post office was established about the time the town was platted, with George W. Pugh in charge; the mail was handed out from the freight room of the depot, which also served as the town’s first church.

February 1871: The Town on Paper

Hooper became a town in the formal sense when its plat was recorded — and this is the first place the sources stop agreeing.

The account reprinted from the History of the Elkhorn Valley says the town “was platted by John I. Blair, on February 15, 1871,” on the east half of section 17 and the northeast quarter of section 20, township 19, range 8. Another account in the same book says the plat “was recorded February 4, 1871,” with Blair as proprietor and L.D. Richards as surveyor.

Eleven days apart, in a book that prints both without comment. One may be the date the plat was drawn and the other the date it was filed — but the sources don’t say so, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

1872: The Deeds Catch Up

Here the story gets genuinely strange, thanks to Gertrude Alperstedt, who went through the Dodge County deed records and reconstructed the chain of title.

On 23 July 1871, the federal government sold the land Hooper stands on to the Union Pacific Railroad Company — part of a grant made under acts of Congress of 1862 and 1864. Union Pacific then sold it on to Cyrus H. McCormick and John Duff, as trustees, at $10,000 per mile.

And on 27 June 1872, that land was sold to John I. Blair for $9,634.99.

Which raises an obvious question: if Blair platted the town in February 1871, how was he buying the ground under it in June 1872, and how had the government only sold it to the railroad in July 1871?

This isn’t necessarily a contradiction. Railroad promoters routinely laid out and sold town lots on land whose paperwork was still in motion, and Blair was doing this across the region at scale. But it does mean the tidy sentence “Hooper was founded in 1871” is covering over something messier.

The paper trail continues: Blair and his wife Ann sold the land on to the Elkhorn Land and Town Lot Company, filed 8 January 1873. The instrument laying out the original town of Hooper — blocks one to eight inclusive — was dated 20 December 1872 and executed before a notary public in Warren County, New Jersey. The town was, in the most literal sense, drawn up two states away.

October 16, 1876: A Village at Last

Hooper became an incorporated village, governed by a board of trustees, on 16 October 1876. The first board was A.D. Harwood as chairman, with William Pellens, E.H. Airis, Peter Dressen and John Beebe as trustees, and George B. Parsons as clerk.

By then it was a working town. One contemporary description counts “a brisk little village of 200 people” with two elevators, four general stores, a hardware establishment, a hotel, a post office, an agricultural warehouse, a brick yard, a drug store, a photographic gallery, a barber shop, a harness shop, a shoe shop, two blacksmith shops, a restaurant and a saloon.

It also had a school. Denslow notes that up to 1875 the village had no school within its limits, so a small frame schoolhouse was moved in from the country — “and myself installed as teacher.”

And it had begun to worry about its reputation. In 1876 the Fremont Herald reported an ordinance passed in Hooper that October banning hogs from the streets, yards and houses. With that, the Herald observed, Hooper could no longer be called the “Dodge County Herd Yard.”

So Which Year Is It?

The town counts from 1876, and that is the defensible choice. Incorporation is the moment Hooper became a legal entity with a government, a boundary and a name recognised by the state — the point at which it stopped being a place where people happened to live and became a town that could act.

1866 is when people arrived. 1871 is when the streets were drawn. 1876 is when it became Hooper in law. The 150th anniversary in 2026 counts from the last of those.

Where the Sources Disagree

Local history hardens fast. A confident sentence gets repeated until nobody remembers it was ever uncertain. So here is what the sources in Hooper’s own centennial history genuinely do not agree on:

  • Who was first. Denslow says A.Y. Sutton and his wife, in 1866. Another account calls O.A. Himebaugh “the first settler,” in 1870. Both can be right — Sutton settled the land, Himebaugh settled the town — but the accounts don’t make that distinction themselves.
  • The plat date. February 15, 1871, or February 4, 1871.
  • Which railroad. Two accounts name the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley. A third has Blair acting as president of the Sioux City & Pacific, with Hooper owing its origin to that road’s Elkhorn Valley Branch.
  • Who surveyed it. One account credits L.D. Richards. Another says the first house went up in 1870, “before the plat was surveyed by O.A. Heimbaugh” — which is either a second surveyor or a misspelling of Himebaugh, the grain dealer.
  • Names and spellings. Koppelkom and Koplekorn. Dressen and Dessen. Pugh and Pew — the centennial book prints “G.W. Pugh (sic) Pew” and leaves it there.

And One Thing Nobody Knows

Who was Hooper named after?

Most accounts say a railroad official of that name, prominent at the time, and many add that he was the depot agent at Wisner. That is the ordinary answer, and it is probably the right one.

But the centennial history preserves a second version, and is honest enough to say it doesn’t know whether there’s anything in it. In this telling, when the railroad builders came through, they got up a wagon race — up the hill that was then a good deal steeper than it is now, before dirt was cut from the bluff and spread along Main Street as fill against the high water table. Settlers lined the slope and shouted the teams on. The winner, so the story goes, got the town named after him.

Whether that man was the same railroad official, or whether the race happened at all, nobody has established. We would like to.

If you have a family record, a letter, or a version of this story told to you by someone who heard it first-hand, we would like to hear it.