This enabled Hemingford to win by a majority of sixteen votes.

ton officials had an engine fired up and a coach attached, loaded with Burlington detectives, special agents, and other employees, which they intended using upon evidence that the mob had left Alliance. This special train was to have been run to Hemingford and the posse coin-eyed by team, a distance of five miles, to Nonpareil, and would be there to defend the seizure of the records upon the arrival of the raiding party. However, the then county officials, of whom the author was one, supported by the sheriff. Eugene Hall, armed with Winchesters guarded the records and had the raiders appeared they would have met a very warm reception.

The county seat was moved from Nonpareil to Flemingford on January 1st. 1891. The county officials occupied temporary quarters

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

from then until the May following, when the commodious courthouse which had been promised by the people of Hemingford, backed by the Lincoln Land Company, was erected. Hemingford remained the county seat from the latter date until the month of March, 1899, when by a large majority vote of the people, cast at a special election held previously, it was moved to Alliance, where the officials occupied temporary quarters in the Phelan Opera Block until the following July.

Alliance, the County Seat

In the meantime, the county commissioners purchased of the Lincoln Land Company, to whom it had reverted, the Hemingford courthouse, at a price of fifteen hundred dollars. This was moved to the present court house site. at Alliance on the Burlington railroad, and was considered a great engineering feat. The building was forty-five by fifty-four feet with trussed roof forty feet in height. E. W. Bell, yet a resident of Alliance, superintended the removal. This court house was used for county purposes until November, 1914, when the present magnificent court house was completed and occupied.