Guide Rock, Nebraska

Episode 128 / 18 July 2019 / 136 min / full

Follow That Blood Trail...

""This is Guide Rock, Nebraska... it's in south-central Nebraska, right on the border to Kansas down there"" about 0:05:04

The case: Murder of Virginia Barone (October 2013). Read the case file.

The figures, as told in 2019

Population

215

Median age

about 40

Median household income

$37,128

Median home value

$22,975

Cost of living

about 77

Religious

about 72%

Property crime

▼ just low

Violent crime

▼ just low

Registered sex offenders

five

Residents per registered sex offender

41 to one

Deaths per 1,000 residents

number 37 on the list of top 101 counties in America

History, in brief

• Guide Rock was named after a prominent rock bluff which they called Bluff Parher, a French name. about 0:09:21
• The bluff was an important landmark to early trappers and to the Pawnee Indians in the area. about 0:09:34
• The town itself was first settled in about 1870. about 0:09:48
• It was named after a French trapper who saw the bluff and used it as a guide. about 0:09:57
• The city council voted between Guide Rock and Spotted Tail as the name for the town, and it was a 6-6 deadlock. about 0:10:59
• The secretary, George Simpson, cast the deciding vote in favour of Red Cloud, so Guide Rock became a different town. about 0:11:06
• The railroad came through Guide Rock between 1881 and 1882. about 0:12:36
• A settler family who arrived around 1871 built a cabin on the homestead from walnut logs hewn and notched with an axe, with the cracks plastered with sand and lime; snow still drifted onto their beds through the walls. about 0:13:36
• That first cabin was still standing a century later, after a second and third house had been built on the same hill. about 0:14:03
• In the fall the family made sorghum molasses by pressing juice from cane and boiling it in large open kettles; cornbread, molasses and meat or game was the common diet. about 0:15:18
• Droughts, bugs and grasshoppers were ever-present threats to the early settlers. about 0:15:51
• Later, larger farms came in and the farm population decreased as farms were consolidated, and the town has shrunk ever since. about 0:16:05
• Many people in the county drive about 40 miles to Hastings, Nebraska, where the jobs are. about 0:16:38
• Webster County is represented by the licence plate prefix 45 because it had the 45th largest number of vehicles registered when the system was established in 1922. about 0:17:14
• Webster County has a predicted average indoor radon screening level greater than 4 pCi/L, which is the highest potential level. about 0:17:49

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