NSA Traditional Cache

The Nebraska School of Agriculture was established in 1913, not as a college, but as a State-run high school for those who had completed their 8th grade education. It was promoted as a place that agriculture and home economics would be taught along with the regular high school curriculum, but its primary benefit for many western Nebraska families was that it became a boarding school—providing supervised dorms for kids who lived too far from any high school to travel back and forth from home each day. Many a Sand Hills rancher traded chickens and eggs in exchange for a son or daughter’s room and board here.

Most of the prominent towns in Southwest Nebraska vied to become the location for NSA. When Curtis was the surprising winner of this vote some of the others complained. The Holdrege newspaper “blamed the powerful educational lobby of the state. They did not want a second agricultural school (to compete with the one already in Lincoln). If it must be established it must go to some third rate town which would never develop it and be left to struggle along and probably die.” But it did prosper and graduated over 3000 young men and women before closing in 1968. At that time it ceased to be a high school but continued its mission of Agricultural education as the Nebraska School of Technical Agriculture, a 2 year technical college.