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.

Towns and Villages of the County

The first village in the county was old Nonpareil, first called Buchanan because many of the settlers in the immediate vicinity came from the town of Buchanan, Michigan, and desired that the new town be called after their old home town. This name was later changed to Nonpareil, at the instigation of Gene Heath, eidtor and publisher of its sole newspaper called "Gene Heath's Grip," in imitation of those frontier publications, "Bill Barlow's Budget" and "Bill Nye's Boomerang." Mr. Heath being a printer, the word Nonpareil which is the name of printers' type appealed to him as more euphonious than that of Buchanan. He being a Democrat and influential with the then Democratic Administration, he was influential enough to have the postoffice named in accordance with his wishes- -- -Nonpareil.

This village, at the time the county seat was located there, consisted of two general stores, a blacksmith shop, two livery barns, one bank, one newspaper, two hardware stores, a harness shop, one law office, one feed store, lumber yard and agricultural implement depot combined. Nonpareil ceased to exist soon after ili'- removal of tin- county seat to Hemingford in 1891, There is nothing left to mark its site frame school house which yet stands