Some Nebraskans, wrote Addison E. Sheldon in his 1939 foreword, still remembered what it meant to cut the first wagon track across an unbroken sea of grass — to find their own fords, devise their own gully crossings, and leave a trail that others could follow and improve. He called this book “another road starter,” and the description fit. It was the first attempt to gather the story of Nebraska’s land and people, together with a guide to every corner of the state, into one compact and portable volume: the first Nebraska Baedeker.
The work behind that modest claim was considerable. Sheldon noted that more than a hundred writers, researchers, draftsmen, and photographers had been drawn into Federal service for over two years. They handled thousands of books, newspapers, and manuscripts, and they traveled the state from the black prairie soil along the Missouri to the pine-ridge country beyond the sandhills. The Nebraska State Historical Society, which sponsored the guide, lent its staff in an advisory and critical role, while the editors of the Federal Writers’ Project shaped the final manuscript.
In their own preface, J. Harris Gable and his colleagues described the guide frankly as a group enterprise. Field workers — assisted, they noted, by volunteer consultants and even schoolchildren — gathered the raw material: they interviewed old settlers, combed newspaper files, consulted every available record, and clocked the mileage for the tours along state and federal highways. District and branch offices checked the field notes; the state editors then tried to see Nebraska in broad perspective while preserving the flavor of local material, giving preference, they wrote, to midwestern idiom and spelling.
That double ambition — the wide view and the close particular — gives the book its character. The State in Review opens the volume with essays on the natural setting, the Indians, the long arc of history from exploration to statehood, and the distinctive unicameral legislature, then moves through agriculture, industry, transportation, the ethnic elements, folklore, education, the arts, architecture, the press, and literature. Cities and Towns profiles Beatrice, Fremont, Grand Island, Hastings, Lincoln, Norfolk, North Platte, and Omaha in turn. The heart of the guide is its Tours: thirteen numbered routes, with their lettered branches and sections, that thread the state from the Missouri bluffs to the Wyoming line and from the Dakota border down to Kansas and Colorado.
The editors made no claim to be the last word. They asked readers who found errors to report them, so corrections might be made in future editions — the confidence of people who knew their book was a beginning rather than a conclusion. More than eighty years on, that openness is part of its appeal. Like the wagon road Sheldon remembered, the guide was meant to be followed, tested, and improved, a trail laid down for anyone who came after.