The Story Behind Nebraska's 'Ghost Counties' Will Leave You Baffled

If you were to look at a map of the brand new state of Nebraska 149 years ago, you may have been looking at a picture of ghosts…ghost counties, that is. At the time, western Nebraska was still wild and sparsely populated, and not many people really knew what was out that way. Popular mapmaking company Colton printed maps with six counties in western Nebraska that did not exist…and the mistake wasn’t caught and corrected for a decade.

US GenWeb/Harper’s Common Geography, 1887, Harper & Bros. Publishing

(Neither of the maps here show the ghost counties. The map above is from 1887 and the map below was printed in 1908.)

The Colton map showed the counties of Grant, Harrison, Jackson, Lyon, Monroe, and Taylor. At the time, none of those counties actually existed.

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US GenWeb/The New International Encyclopedia, by Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, NY., 1908

The mistake was made when the Colton company somehow got their hands on an early legislative bill that laid out the counties exactly as the Colton map showed. That particular bill never passed and county boundaries were changed, but the Colton map was already made. The long and difficult process of making new steel plates to print new maps prevented the mapmakers from correcting their mistake. The incorrect Colton map was printed until 1873, and since Colton was so trusted, other companies had copied their version and continued to do so until 1877.

For more than a century, no one knew how the imaginary counties came to be on the Nebraska map. Then Western Nebraska Community College English instructor Brian Croft dug into the archives of the Nebraska State Historical Society and found the old legislative bill. For the entire story, be sure to check out this article in NebraskaLAND magazine.