Parking lot work uncovers history

Dirt work on a City of McCook parking lot in the 100 block of East B exposes the basement of an early-McCook business building. (Connie Jo Discoe/McCook Daily Gazette) [Click to enlarge]

A City of McCook parking lot improvement project uncovered an old building foundation, and sparked memories for a rural Hayes Center woman whose great-uncle owned the building.

Doris (Nelms) Vlasin said her great-uncle, Will Nelms, owned a brick building on what is now the north side of the 100 block of East B, operating out of the basement a dray service that sold and hauled mostly coal during the early 1900s.

Doris said that her father, Vernie Nelms, (who was Will's nephew), moved to McCook from Bartley in about 1929 or 1930, and Vernie then operated a barbershop beside Will's dray service in the basement.

Will rented the upstairs to Whitten's Hatchery. "Oh, I remember the chickens and the ducks, and all that quacking and clucking," Doris laughed.

Doris said she remembers that she and her siblings played with the Whitten children. She also remembers a small cafe, "Moffitt's," in a building just east of the one her great-uncle owned.

"When Dad left McCook to move to Hayes Center, in 1942, he sold out to a man named Fitzwater who worked for him," Doris said.

The foundation of the Nelms building was exposed recently when workers for BSB Construction of Curtis scraped off the deteriorating asphalt surface of the parking lot, preparing to pur concrete. Under a thin layer of soil lay the outline in red-tile blocks of the building's basement and its arched brick doorway.