Lincoln: It Has a Ring to It

Rooted in the Plains · Jul 29, 2026 · 7m · transcript

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On July 29th, 1867, three men sat down in a private home in Lancaster, Nebraska, a settlement of fewer than fifty people and voted to make it the capital of the state. Twenty-two years later, that same ground was home to fifty thousand people, seventy factories, eighty wholesale houses, and thirty-one miles of streetcar track.

In this episode, I take you on a walk starting at the spot where it began, then through Lincoln's Haymarket district, tracing the city that grew out of a prairie vote. Along the way, the first federal building built from Platte River limestone, an Omaha…