POOLE in the Past...

Excerpts from Bassett's 1916

HISTORY OF BUFFALO COUNTY    The Village of Poole in Buffalo County had it’s beginning about the year 1889, a little trading post with one store, a grain elevator, and was known as Pool’s Siding.  In the year 1905 the Union Pacific Railroad Company completed a depot and installed an agent.
In 1876, W.W. Pool came to Nebraska, taking as a pre-emption claim 160 acres in section 12... in what was later known as Cedar Township.  In 1883, Mr. Pool and others organized the Nebraska Land and Cattle Company, which engaged in cattle raising, the company having some ten thousand acres of land in Beaver and adjoining townships... In addition to stock raising the company cultivated about thirty-five hundred acres in mixed crops, and in 1889 grew 800 acres of wheat.
   ... Mr. Pool being engaged extensively in the cattle business, and living some distance from a commercial center, and it being before the days of telephones, he constructed a private telegraph line from his ranch to Ravenna, and himself and two of his daughters became fairly expert operators.  At a later date, when the Union Pacific branch was built to Pleasanton, a siding was put in near the Pool ranch and named Pool Siding, and later the name changed to Poole.  The first and only agent at Poole has been J.C. Mahoney.

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