Dorchester Times: June 3 Storms Do Considerable Damage In Saline County

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

June 3 Storms Do Considerable Damage In Saline County

Dorchester and the surrounding area suffered considerable damage in Tuesday night's hail and wind storms, which came in two separate waves.

Pictures published with this posting are from the Dorchester and Wilber areas, as posted on social media. (Readers can click on the images for a better view.)

Still, all things considered, Dorchester fared much better than some other areas of Nebraska, including Blair, where at least one dozen were injured by baseball sized hail, and parts of Omaha, where residents were being evacuated by boats, according to the news wires and the Lincoln Journal Star.

In north-central Nebraska, where the severe storms first fired up around noon Tuesday, hail chased scouts off a river and wind tipped a truck along a highway.

In northeast Nebraska, pictures of hail the size of tennis balls emerged from Norfolk, and later, we saw hail-damaged homes in Plainview and car after car minus windows on an auto dealer's lot in Blair.

There were water rescues and evacuations in Omaha, as some parts of town were drenched with 4 inches of rain in less than three hours, the weather service said.

There were tornado warnings in the Nebraska Panhandle and across parts of central Nebraska. Radar indicated a tornado on the ground west of Beatrice beginning about 10 p.m., but it lifted before reaching the city and hadn't caused any reported damage.

The story of the day was the extensive hail damage and the flooding in Omaha.

Blair was among the areas pounded by hail, with the Woodhouse Auto Family of dealerships tweeting that 4,500 vehicles in their $152 million inventory were damaged.

Blair City Manager Rod Storm said hail “broke most of the windows out of everything.”

Electrical power has been restored to all but a few hundred customers in eastern Nebraska who lost electricity when powerful thunderstorms rolled through.

Omaha Public Power District says that, as of 8:25 a.m. Wednesday, 859 customers still had no power. Spokesman Mike Jones says the number rose Wednesday morning because power was cut to more than 730 customers in one area so a tree could be removed from some wires. The outages peaked at more than 5,100 around 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Nebraska Public Power District said 122 customers in Craig and 747 customers Tekamah have no power. Both cities are in northeastern Nebraska.

Norris Public Power District said about 100 customers in DeWitt, Lewiston and other areas don't have power, down from around 3,500 who lost electricity during the storms.

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Dorchester: A Good Little Family Town

Dorchester, Nebraska (est. population 630) is located in northern Saline county. Close in proximity to Interstate 80, Dorchester is only 25 minutes from the state capital of Lincoln (est. population 250,000) and about 55 minutes from Omaha (metro population 725,000).

Dorchester's median resident age is 37 years. In 2005, Dorchester had a median family income of approximately $35,600. The median house value was about $63,000. About 95 percent of Dorchester residents commute to work via Interstate and highways.

The village has a quality public school, which received a $4.1 million expansion and modernization in 2008; it offers a small classrooms and individualized attention. Total enrollment of grades K-12 is around 230-250 students.

Ancestries of the Dorchester area are primarily German (42.4%), Czech (24.9%), Irish (12.5%), English (5.4%), and Dutch (4.9%).

Dorchester Historical Facts

* On July 4, 1871, the railroad reached Dorchester.
* Incorporated in 1881, Dorchester's population grew from 200 to 500 by 1882.
* In 1882, Dorchester had 90 buildings, 35 of which were businesses or public facilities. Brick buildings lined both sides of Washington Avenue for two blocks.
* Dorchester's longest-running newspaper was The Dorchester Star, which was published until the late 1940s.
* By 1889, Dorchester's population is said to have reached 800, while the town housed an opera house, a two-story brick schoolhouse with a bell tower, and four churches.
* By the 1910s, Dorchester had electricity, a water tower and a fire department.
* Dorchester's main arteries, Highways 6 and 33, were graveled in the 1940s.
* Dorchester's first irrigation well was drilled on Chris Weber's farm and rural electrification was finished following WWII.

A Village with History

Dorchester is one of the "alphabet towns" on the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad line built west from Lincoln. The town site was selected for its pleasant location in the northern part of Saline County, about eight miles west of Crete. This situation is an attractive one, being on the level prairie land, midway between the West Blue River and Turkey Creek. The first named stream is three miles north, and the latter about the same distance south from the town. Dorchester was platted in 1870 and incorporated in 1881. The name "Dorchester" came from either for a suburb of Boston by that name or a town in England. No one is sure. Two of the very first settlers were James Seely and Edward McIntyre, who both made Dorchester their permanent home.

Dorchester: In The Beginning

Here is a look at Dorchester around 1890, less than a decade after its official incorporation, as documented by Andreas' History of the State of Nebraska:
* POPULATION: "About 300, and is made up of a substantial and progressive class of citizens, who are moral and industrious. ... The town grew but very little until the year 1879, for the reason that Pleasant Hill, on Turkey Creek, a short distance south, was the county seat and naturally drew a trade for quite a large scope of country."
* BUSINESS: "The business and professional interests of the town are represented by three general merchandise stores, two drug, one grocery, one furniture, two hardware, and two millinery stores, one bank, two restaurants, two hotels, three livery stables, a post office, one newspaper office, two elevators, two lumber yards, two coal yards, two blacksmith shops, two lawyers and four physicians."
* SCHOOL: "The schoolhouse is a good one. The schoolhouse was built in 1872, since which time the public schools have been continually kept up. The present schoolhouse is 24' x 40' in size, two stories high. The school is graded and consists of three departments. The house is found too small, and arrangements will soon be made to increase its size."
* CHURCHES: "There are three substantial churches."
* HOMES: "The residence portion of the village is made up of neat houses of different styles of architecture, but none of them very large."
* NEWSPAPER: "The Dorchester Star, which was established August 21, 1881, by H. C. Bittenbender, who edited it until January 19, 1882, when he sold it to Ryerson & Bullock, the present proprietors. The Star is a bright weekly paper, five-column quarto, in size, and is Republican in politics."