The Story of Blue Springs and Wymore, Nebraska

Through the early years of the 1880s, Wymore quickly became the Darling of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. With that notoriety came the naughty along with the nice.  The city was built, block-by-block, with the Railroad in mind.  Within a few blocks of the train depot, hotels popped up almost overnight. The first hotel, The Potter House, was completed in 1882 and shortly after The Palmer House and the Cottage Hotel.  In the summer of 1887, Wymore’s crown jewel, The Touzalin, opened its doors.  

Imagine for a moment, stepping down from the station in 1890 to the sight of a fine Victorian hotel with a glimpse of a bustling city all around.  Just north on Nebraska Street past the hotel was the Livsey Opera House and across the street awaited the Livery Stable offering the finest teams of horses & buggies in Southern Gage County.  If you were only in town for the day, a ticket on the Wymore Blue Springs Railway offered a ride to the town churches and on to Blue Springs and back.  The restaurants and saloons catered to the men of the Railroad as well as its customers.  Then, as now, the noon whistle announced lunch hour intended then for the men working at the Railroad shops.

During what may have seemed to be an ideal time to have lived, the railroad towns of the prairie were a world apart from ours.  Boredom came quickly to the single young men who were pushing westward in search of their fortune and with the coming of the Railroad the saloons and brothels were quite obliged to accommodate.  In deed, in the 1880s brothels were no more outrageous than saloons.  The madam’s and inmates of houses of ill repute were fined when too much of a fuss about them stirred the town and proceeds were placed in a town’s school fund.

From the neighborhoods of Kansas City close to the train depot evolved a familiar saying:  Brothels opened up to quench the boredom of travelers and railroad men waiting for their next train.  The train brakemen, who carried red lanterns as part of their job, took them along with them to the brothels and paid extra for the madams of the house to watch for their next train.  They set the lighted lanterns in the hallways or near the windows so they could be found when the train whistle was ready to blow and it seems there were enough brakemen lanterns to light the neighborhoods in the dead of night with an eerie red glow.   Hence – RED LIGHT DISTRICTS came to be.

Wymore, in those days, was no different from other railroad towns. Well the only difference was the houses of ill repute, three of them that we know of, weren’t near the Depot but on the outskirts of town, yet all within a block of the tracks.

There was the small frame house west of Fouts Street across the tracks in Blue Springs where its been said  Prairie Doves would cool themselves on the front porch in the hot summer evenings while the town drove by close enough to try not to notice. 

And in the Roaring Twenties the large new foursquare just south of the Arbor State Park entrance off 7^th Street was rumored to house Painted Angels right through the midst of the Dirty Thirties.  By the end of the Depression, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had cleaned up the house and it became a respectable dance hall where the upstairs balcony overlooked the dance floor and the millwork was painted black.

Middy Gillhouse, a native of Concordia, Kansas purchased the old stone house on North 4^th Street in 1909 and by the next summer she was in town arranging to sell the property. Middy’s marriage to Theodore Gillhouse had ended the year before but she was quite self-sufficient having made handsome investments in properties in Grand Island, McCook, Fremont … and Wymore. The rumor was she was quite wealthy renting the properties for an outrageous sum of $5 a day.

The Gage County sheriff made an early morning raid on the house arresting Middy and one Ollie Clark and took them to a hotel in Beatrice for safekeeping. The front-page story in the Weekly Wymorean on August 18, 1910 titled the story:  STONE HOUSE CLOSED …”The blinds are down at the House on the Hill  and there is rejoicing and sorrow that it should be thus.”  Gillhouse was charged with leasing the property for immoral purposes and Clark was charged with being an inmate of a disorderly house. Middy bonded out for $400 and the Clark woman $100.

When court convened on August 30, 1910, twenty subpoenaed witnesses were present along with the defense attorney who was rumored to have loaned money to Middy on occasion for her infamous property on 4^th Street.  The ladies in question, it seemed, had other obligations that day and failed to appear.  Their hefty bonds were forfeited in lieu of probable lesser fines and that was that.

Perhaps more interesting was the statement in the newspaper article of how the old house had the reputation as a house of ill repute for nearly 20 years.  So just who owned the property before Middy came along ?  The Gage County Deed’s Office shows Samuel Wymore signing it over to The Lincoln Land Company in 1881 and it was the Lincoln Land Company who sold it to Gillhouse in 1909. 

The limestone house, sometimes known as 4 chimneys, long since covered in stucco and now standing in ruin, was built sometime during the 1870s. It was probably built around the same time Robert Wilson was building his limestone house on the east side of the road to the Blue Springs Cemetery between 1869-71.  The stone was most likely cut by hand from the same hill  – Mathew Hill just east of the river road out of Blue Springs.

In 1870, George Wymore held the patent to 160 acres of the land where the house stands. When he claimed his stake on the land he was 23 years old and his wife, Louisa, was 17, their daughter, Margaret Jane, was 3 and son William was born that year.  It seemed impressive that this young man would cut the stone for the small stone cottage but he and his wife and children weren’t alone in Southeast Nebraska.  The Wymore family (Johnson & Sarah (McMains) Wymore) had siblings and cousins scattered across Gage & Pawnee Counties and his older brother, Samuel's, homestead bordered George’s property.  While Samuel Wymore was fulfilling his obligations to receive 160 acres of homestead land, he was also buying up land in the area and in 1875 George sold his property to Samuel … which presents an interesting question: did George build the old stone house or did Samuel ?  For surely one of them did.

When Samuel Wymore negotiated his historic deal with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, he signed over his homestead and the land George had sold to him along with other landholdings to the Lincoln Land Company, a company the railroad incorporated to manage the sale of the lands they held title too and build towns spaced about 10 miles apart along the track.  Wymore’s homestead was in the Original track of town and George’s old patent was in the Summit Addition. For some unknown reason, The Lincoln Land Company held onto this section of town for nearly 30 years and the stone house built before 1881 was rented out clandestinely, mostly likely for the convenience of the railroad …

Meanwhile downtown, The Touzalin Hotel opened its doors in late 1887.  Samuel Wymore invested a lot of money into the building, but he would never see a profit.  Elisha P. Reynolds & Company built the hotel and the final cost escalated to $62,000. In 1887, no less than 14 mechanic liens were filled against the contractors before the doors were even open.  With a Saloon, a fine Dining Hall and 65 well appointed rooms, the grand Victorian structure struggled to make ends meet and went through a succession of managers and owners.  In 1914, it was sold at a sheriff’s sale and the new owner changed the name to The Vendome. 

Since before the 1900s, the Nation had struggled with the effects of alcoholism on family life. Saloons as well as houses of ill repute were targeted by societies such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for the flow of liquor and its drain on family finances.  In the 1910, William Jennings Bryan took the side of the “Dry” track:  "The fight against evil is always an uphill one, and the hill is never steeper than when you fight the liquor interests.” 

The citizens of Nebraska were deeply divided over the liquor issue; Lincoln for example considered itself leaning “Dry” while Omaha was most definitely at “Wet” town.  Times were changing and in 1916 Nebraska voters approved a statewide prohibition amendment. Prohibition passed in Nebraska almost simultaneously with limited woman suffrage, and with the full support of the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association. By law, there would be no more booze when the law formally went into effect in 1917.  National Prohibition would not come to pass until two years later in 1919 and when the Nebraska law went into effect, bootleggers from all corners of the nation, Chicago in particular, turned their focus on Nebraska and never looked back until Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

In 1915, a tunnel was dug from the City steam plant (City Hall) to pipe steam to the Vendome Hotel, which kept the building warm and toasty.  The tunnel was large enough to walk through and encased in bricks.  Legend has it as the decade wore on and Prohibition became the law of the land, more tunnels were dug to saloons and restaurants making it convenient for people who didn’t wish to be seen on the streets to move about the City.  The Vendome, it was rumored, housed a Speakeasy in the basement and when word came that the law was headed to the hotel; gambling tables, booze and probably a gangster or two were hidden behind a cellar door in the tunnels. How they thought that was a good idea when the City obviously knew about the tunnel .. is a question worth pondering. 

to be continued