Ghost towns abound in Nebraska
Not all stories are about how the West was won. More often than not, it was lost with dreams of getting rich quick and settlements that popped up overnight both fading forgotten into history. Ghost town is the term that came to embody this trend, one abundantly common across Nebraska and the Midwest. Today, Nebraska has 146 cities and 384 villages, according to the state s official website. But Lilian Linder Fitzpatrick s 1925 work, Nebraska Place-Names, attempts to study the origins of how more than 1,100 communities many of which were long gone then got their names.