Sandhills Town Seeks To Double Its Population -- Sort Of

Photo by Mike Tobias, NET News

Nebraska Educational Television reports that the population of the small central Nebraska village of Taylor is growing. Sort of.  

Black-and-white plywood villagers are filling the community, thanks to the work of artist Marah Sandoz.  

“I want as many wooden people as there are actual people in Taylor, which is only 182,” said Sandoz.

According to NET, it was her husband’s teaching job that brought Marah to Taylor. A couple decades ago she got involved with a local economic development group brainstorming about ways to help the fading village, which sits on the edge of the Sandhills near Calamus Reservoir.  Were there ways to use the history (in the form two buildings; the historic, but closed, Pavilion Hotel and a former filling station turned visitors center) and the two state highways that intersect here to Taylor’s advantage?

Sandoz hatched the idea of life-sized plywood cutouts depicting people who might have lived in the village between 1890 and 1920, the boom years when Taylor had twice as many people as its current population of less than 200. 

Why are the villager cutouts created for Taylor in black and white? "We went with black and white because it mimics that black and white film era, so it looked like it was from the past," Sandoz said. 

Taylor will get a lot of traffic Sept. 25-27, because the town is part of the route for the annual Nebraska Junk Jaunt. 

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