aka: The Magic City - Porkopolis - South"O" Douglas County, Nebraska

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARLY SOUTH OMAHA

In 1882, on high rolling ground just south of Omaha, a group of Omaha's most prominent businessmen were trying to persuade Wyoming cattle baron, Alexander Hamilton Swan, to invest in a stockyards operation on land that would one day become the Magic City of South Omaha.

In the autumn of 1882, Swan surveyed the Nebraska terrain, considered the flooding of the Council Bluffs, Iowa stockyards a year earlier and asked the Omaha businessmen if they wanted to develop a great industry on the spot to become South Omaha. With their agreement began the association of a stockyards operation, meat-packing industry and a large community. First came the stockyards, then the meat-packing companies and finally, a flood of hard-working European immigrants looking for jobs and a place to settle and raise their families.

From 1854, when the Otoe Indians left, until 1884 when the stockyards operation began, the present site of South Omaha was a place of about a dozen homesteads. With offers they could not refuse, those early German and Irish settlers agreed to sell 1,875 acres at $1.69 an acre. They sold to a land syndicate formed by Alexander Swan and such prominent Omahan's as William A. Paxton, Leverett Anderson, C. R. Schaller, John A. Creighton, Peter E. Iler, John A. McShane, Thomas Swobe and Frank Murphy.

An area was registered for a township with the Douglas County Clerk's office on July 18, 1884 for a new town that would be called New Edinburgh. The town name was in honor of the wealthy Scotsmen who had agreed to supply financial backing but did not at the last minute. As a result, the area became known as South Omaha in recognition of the Omahans who finally contributed.

By 1886, South Omaha had reached village status with a population of 1,500 and was declared a city of the second class. At this time, it had no jail, no church, a gambling house, two houses of ill repute, a justice of the peace, a deputy sheriff, a post office and no constable. It had three general stores, a drug store, four meat markets, three blacksmith shops, five hotels, eight saloons, two lumber yards, two coal yards, a feed and flour store and countless boarding houses. By 1890, the city had 8,000 residents and by the first decade of the 20th century, a population of 26,000. It rose to a population of 30,000 by 1915 when the city was annexed by Omaha.