The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Lincoln (Nebraska)

LINCOLN, a city and the capital of Nebraska, county seat of Lancaster co., on the right bank of Salt creek, a tributary of the river Platte, and at the intersection of the Burlington and Missouri River, the Midland Pacific, and the Atchison and Nebraska railroads, 50 m. S. W. of Omaha, and 475 m. W. by S. of Chicago; lat. 40° 55' N., lon. 96° 52' W.; pop. in 1870, 2,441; in 1874, about 6,500. It is built on a beautiful and gently sloping prairie. The streets are lighted with gas. The state house is a handsome edifice of white limestone, erected at a cost of $100,000. The state university, with a brick building costing $150,000, and the state agricultural college are situated here. The United States post office and court-house building, for which an appropriation of $130,000 has been made by congress, is now (1874) in course of erection. Just beyond the city limits are the state penitentiary and insane asylum. A mile and a half W. is a salt basin, where good salt is manufactured. Lincoln has a board of trade, three wholesale houses (one dry goods and two groceries), a foundery, a marble shop, a spring-bed factory, a pork-packing establishment, two bookbinderies and blank-book manufactories, three job printing offices, and five banks. There are four public school buildings, one of which cost $55,000, with a system of graded schools, including a high school; four hotels, a public reading room, an opera house, an academy of music, two daily and three weekly newspapers, a semi-monthly periodical, and nine churches, viz.: Baptist, Congregational, Disciples', Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Protestant, Presbyterian, and Universalist. Lincoln was laid our in July, 1867.