Raising Funds a Nebraska Historical Marker for Dewitty-Audacious Township

We're still at it and need your help!

https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/310W61/ab/14wwe5

Raising Funds for Nebraska Historical Marker on Highway 83

The Nebraska State Historical Society recently approved a roadside historical marker for DeWitty, the longest lasting, most successful African-American rural settlement in Nebraska. Descendants of a legendary Sand Hills settlement, the Cherry County Historical Society and a Nebraska-born author are teaming up to have a historical marker placed along Highway 83.

DeWitty — in later years called Audacious — was settled by Homesteaders returning after the Civil War in Dawson County from Buxton Elgin, Settlement, Kent County, Ontario. The settlement placed a high value on educating its children, an ethos they had brought from Canada.  More than 100 families lived in the settlement during its roughly 40+ years of existence.

In the early 1900s, a group of these homesteaders laid claim to land along the North Loup River in Cherry County, just west of present-day Brownlee. They were taking advantage of the Kinkaid Act of 1904, which allowed settlers to claim 640 acres of land, or one square mile, in the 37 counties that comprised the Sand Hills.

A Town of New Beginnings and Lasting Legacies - Their point was not to establish a generational farming community but to establish a base for their children and future generations as well as excel in whatever field they chose.  And they had the audacity to think they could. 

Now that the marker has been approved, the group is trying to raise the $5,100 the state historical society requires as payment.

Donations can be mailed to or dropped off at or mailed to:

Security First Bank

PO Box 480

Valentine, Nebraska 69201

Make checks payable to: “DeWitty Historical Marker Fund.” 

We also have a secure funding site

 https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/310W61/ab/14wwe5

Joyceann Gray and Marcia Thompkins great granddaughters of DeWitty homesteaders William P. Walker and Charlotte Hatter-Riley Walker, say:

“When we can clearly mark where our ancestors have been — and by name — we can ensure the full story will be told and we can then better understand the purpose of our journey.”

Example of Nebraska State Historical Society Marker

“This is really the tale of two communities: DeWitty-Audacious and Brownlee,” says Stew Magnuson, former Nebraska nonfiction book of the year winner, and author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: Nebraska-Kansas-Oklahoma, which has a chapter on DeWitty-Audacious. “Relations between the two communities were by all known accounts, excellent. The mostly Danish settlers of Brownlee and the African-Americans in DeWitty held a July 4th picnic together every year. William P. Walker was the county Veterinarian and supported both communities. His daughters Goldie and Fern became county teachers as an example of the dreams for their children coming true.

Some of the one-room schoolhouses were integrated.

 Teacher Goldie Walker Hayes and her one room school

There is also another photograph in history books that shows the Brownlee residents on the day they came to help build the DeWitty Church. People had to depend on each other in that remote, harsh land,” says Magnuson.

Magnuson first encountered the DeWitty story in a Nebraska land Magazine article he found in his grandparent’s home in Stapleton, Nebraska when he was a teenager.

“The thought that there was a black settlement in the Sand Hills blew my mind because I had been raised on a diet of Hollywood westerns and TV shows that portrayed the American West as populated only by white folks and Indians. The towns and homesteads were in fact far more multicultural and racially integrated than the media and history textbooks have portrayed. I hope the sign does a little to dispel that myth,” he says.