THIS IS AMERICA'S SMALLEST TOWN (meet the ONLY resident)

this is elsie she is the only resident in america's smallest town i'm not here because i have to be i could pack up go anywhere i wanted to but this is where i want to be karen nate after spending four years traveling the world and documenting our journey to 100 countries 2020 brought us back to the us where we bought a converted sprinter van to explore all 50 states after road tripping our way through oklahoma and finding the center of america in kansas i'm standing in the exact center of the united states of america yesterday we arrived in our 24th state of nebraska so normally when we start a video we have a plan and at least a general idea of how things are going to unfold but today's different while we're in nebraska our goal is to make a video about the smallest incorporated town in the united states of america the town of manaway is located in northern nebraska and it has one official resident her name is elsie and she's the town's mayor bartender and librarian we chatted with her the other day and explained that we wanted to interview her for a youtube video and possibly get a tour around the town she didn't exactly agree to either one of those things but she was nice enough to invite us to stop by the town and said if we came into the tavern that she runs she'd be happy to talk to us head south toward east douglas street so we are heading north to monowai and we genuinely have no idea what to expect i figure at worst we're driving three hours out of the way to lunch and at best we make friends with elsie and hear some interesting stories about being the only resident in america's smallest town [Music] we're about 30 minutes outside of monowai and we're surrounded by nothing but farmland on all sides and i'm pretty sure we've seen as many bald eagles as we have cars also every car that we have passed has waved in us which i just think is so cute show me the way it's a casual wave it's not like a super exciting thing i feel like it just shows how few people you pass on the road [Music] i guess we'll just uh park right in front it's crowded today [Music] if i'm being completely honest i'm uh a little nervous to meet the mayor i think this has a chance of being very uncomfortable but sometimes a good story requires getting uncomfortable people must have come from miles around for lunch there are one two three four five we're the only non-truck in the parking lot such a beautiful day this must be the tavern here we go [Music] but i think we've heard a lot about you everybody has i think i'll be back okay so this was very awkward the tavern was so quiet that between sporadic conversations from the local farmers you could have heard a pin drop everyone seemed to know each other and we stuck out like sore thumbs waltzing in in our skinny jeans and carrying our camera set up we were hoping elsie would see our camera and say something along the lines of oh you must be those people who called me about the video but uh she did not acknowledge it so we ordered lunch and awkwardly waited on our chance to talk with her about the video we wanted to be respectful and not interrupt her so we waited and waited wow and waited turns out she is an extremely busy lady she is the tavern's only employee and she single-handedly cooked everyone's lunch after two hours of stretching out lunch as long as we could we were about to throw in the towel and hit the road when the last lunch customer wandered out i'm going yep you guys take care finally giving us a chance to chat with elsie do you like being known as the only resident in the smallest town in america it doesn't impress me any i mean i don't see what the big deal is i say the only thing that i do appreciate is the fact that it opened up this area that people see there's something in nebraska besides i-80 going flat across the state you know see they realize that we've got hills and fields and farms and people up here in the northern part that part i like all right i'm gonna give you a full tour of the town all while standing in the exact same spot from what we can tell there are three functioning buildings left in this town this great building over here is the tavern where we had lunch this is a library that was built in honor of her husband and this is the only other inhabitable building in the town so my guess is that's elsie's house and from what we can see the other buildings around town be it houses or trailers or sheds they're all in some state of disrepair i was about a year and a half old when my folks moved to this farm just outside of town here and you went from first to eighth grade here in town then i went to high school in lynch did you ever leave well we went to kansas city and then we took some more training down in texas and ended up we worked for bran of airline in dallas texas what brought you back here is where we both want to be same reason i'm still there i'm that's what i tell people i'm not here because i have to be i can pack up go anywhere i wanted to but this is where i want to be elsie met her husband rudy when they were in elementary school in this town my husband and i we well his family moved here we first met and he was in the fourth grade and i was in the third grade then he went into the air force he was a great ahead of me and he spent three years in europe and then when he got back they let him go down to offutt air base here at omaha so when we were first married we lived down there too he got discharged then we came back to this area apparently her husband rhodey was a huge book lover and had thousands of books but unfortunately he passed away back in 2011 and when he did she gathered all of his books up and built this library in his honor so this is rudy's library [Music] this is amazing if only he could have seen this place do you think he read all of these so how long do you own the tavern it'll be 50 years in june congratulations wow you have a celebration planned everybody else is planning it i think i i made the mistake of one night telling a bunch of the locals you know i said that'll be 50 years if i just shut up they wouldn't have connected it up i said i think it's about time i just hung it up and oh boy did they howl how long did we have that cash register it came with the bar it doesn't work we just use the drawer and it's heavy as all get out we had a guy from national cash register look at it one time and he said it's of a german make and that type was made he said most of them before 1900 a guy brought me some pictures or brought them to my husband that when they were building some of the buildings here in town and they figure this one was built like 19 2 and 3 along in there and there's one interior picture and it looks just exactly like that same cash register sitting there on the back bar so i think it's been in here all that time you know how smells can transport you back to a place the smell of this library is one of the strongest moments of that i've ever experienced my grandfather has a pretty big library that's down in his basement and when i walked in here i was in the basement of my grandfather's house she has all of these newspapers from lynch which is the nearest down from the years 1940 to 1947 and they're still in such good condition this is from august 29th 1940. this was from 2007. it sure does look a lot older than that wow this is one from 1943. maybe it's just the smell of old national geographic magazines because my grandfather's basement is filled with these so what does it mean to be an incorporated town you pay any of your own bills you take care of your streets and that's basically what it means and you just handle your own business make out your paperwork with the state and so forth i heard you tax yourself is that true no i don't know what they think about me what they where that got to going i don't have any idea i said i just i pay taxes just like everybody else i don't know that is always popping up i don't know what they mean by it even [Music] this is the adventures of huckleberry finn it's copyright 1960 and here on the cover when it was sold new it cost a grand total of 50 cents so i also heard that you were the mayor of the town is that true i have there's paperwork that has to be signed by mayor i just signed whatever they want me to sign to make any difference to me i'm glad one of the rumors this trip yeah one of them said they read somewhere that when it come election time that i put out signs to vote for me and i said who in the world made that up anybody comes along and wants a job they can have a be called mayor i don't care you know i just said what are you talking about elsie told us that we were free to go explore some of these abandoned houses it really does feel like a ghost town out here it all uh it all just feels a little sad oh there's an upstairs this isn't very solid i'm in wow there's still an old jacket left here there are holes everywhere in this floor i don't think i'm gonna be getting across that i'm getting out of here before the floor falls through what's been the progression over the years that's led to you being the town's only resident we just don't have anything to hold our young people around here there's no industry if they're not on the farm or can go into the business a business that their folks happen to have well nowadays most of them go away to school and then they find other lives it used to be they just went away to find work we are inside the old church that currently looks like it's being used for storage it's filled with tires and old beehives at one time though you can just tell by the windows that this would have been a really pretty church [Music] also the floor over here is not not holding up well bit by bit our grocery stores were closing and it doesn't matter how well off your school is financially and all that they simply count 9th through 12th grade and you have to have a certain number of kids or you've got to start combining with somebody first they combined sports and then finally they had to combine schools we got just one from fifth through twelve all goes to one school i don't know it makes a lot of bus rides for those little youngsters i i hate to see all that this little red building kind of looks like it was an old shed and they have all these random things in here like bicycles tape players kids toys and a lot of mason jars what's a day in your life look like because you just you saw it somewhat although i don't know that was really routine today because some days are like that in some days now last thur friday saturday and sunday was just like it was today sunday was worse it was long about two o'clock i just said i don't want to work here anymore so somebody said well i'll tell your boss you want to raise but then there's a lot of times it's real slow and quiet and i come over and get the coffee ready because i've usually got a few coffee drinkers and some mornings yes and some mornings no and next thing you know it's evening and he got cleaning up to do and finishing off and go home get ready to start all over tomorrow you're open nine to nine six days a week by 9 30 10 o'clock i'm always home by then normally even then i i'd go to bed till about 11 and up a quarter to seven or so i don't know how i'm going to do with this time change so i'll be waking up at the wrong time so might be late getting it open a few mornings i don't know this little blue house seems the most intact and it is so cute is that the church looks more square they left a lot of stuff behind [Music] wow looks like somebody's just come through here and taken what they wanted and left what they didn't maybe they thought they were coming back so when we first learned that the smallest town in america had one resident who was an 87 year old woman my first thought was that you must be lonely but ever since we've been here don't get me wrong you haven't been alone once so that's what i that is another thing i get asked you know they'll say don't you get loans secondly is aren't you afraid now i said who's going to steal me i took i told a german lady there was a german lady she used to come something must have happened to her because she about every year she used to come and bug me but anyway in her talking to me i finally said no i'm not the least bit afraid i said when i was growing up my dad always told me well don't be afraid because if somebody takes you steals you they'll bring you back when it gets light and she put that into that in this german paper that was it you have plenty of friends around here that's why wow one two three four five six seven eight eleven cars plus the van the mono white tavern is the place to be on a tuesday night have you ever changed your prizes yeah when we first came in of course now that's almost 50 years ago there were 25 and 30 cents per beer wow you could buy three beers for a dollar i don't have the expenses and taxes and all of that kind of stuff this last couple of years i've put a lot more in i had to put new windows in the doors and the coke machine the coke company gave me when we did that commercial you want to put what where that there okay they came here and laid out a banner across the highway on that flat ground there what's it say and it was covered about five acres of ground we got another world of guinness book of records that they were here and did all their measuring in there all that and they they sent us a copy too that monolith i asked elsie where the restroom was and she said it's an outside one and i wasn't sure if she meant the restroom was just outside or if it was an actual outhouse it's an outhouse it's literally just a toilet seat that goes into a hole in the ground so when you left for several years and came back were you surprised at how much have changed no i don't know i or if i did i don't recall it i was particularly surprised so many people you know all the time they're moving away and different ones and so forth yeah thankfully we quickly made some local friends and dinner wasn't nearly as awkward as lunch even though he doesn't work there one of our new friends just walked straight into elsie's kitchen and started frying up one of the local delicacies thank you insisting that we try it they look great i'm not sure how i'm eating mountain oysters for the second time in one week but here we are these are them mm-hmm so i know these are testicles what kind of testicles i don't know if this is beef or pork oh so they might be a different kind talk about the probably beef unidentified testicles rocky before i uh bite in what animal did these come from beef i thought you said they were worse well nobody sounds confident they're part finger steaks but they're beef nuts but i didn't get them i didn't know nobody's got pigs anymore not too much they sound nice and crunchy they're actually really good does your name have anything to do with why they named them rocky mountain oysters [Laughter] all right my turn first time meeting mountain oysters oh yeah super tasty a little better than the skinny ones yeah he was not impressed with our oklahoma thinly sliced lamb fingers the breading has some like really nice flavor [Music] all right good night elsie thank you again well i wasn't expecting to make so many friends like i said they just add on and make it an interesting story or what they think is interesting this will be the real elsi story we should settle up with you though i think i've come out to 39 for us dollars not yet 30 years 39 dollars oh gosh you'd be dragging here's only two here's only two dollars you know you

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 1,844,462

Rating: 4.9418545 out of 5

Keywords: monowi, nebraska, america's smallest town, elsie eiler, great big story, united states, travel & adventure, ghost town, smallest town in america, ghost town vlog, abandoned town, abandoned places, abandoned and forgotten places, #vanlife, couple vlog, full time travel, kara and nate, kara and nate vlog, sprinter van, tiny home, tiny house, travel, travel couple, travel couple vlog, travel vlog, usa travel, van life, van life couple, van life usa, van life vlog, vanlife, vlog

Id: XTMpD_LTVS8

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/karl_manutzitsch]

I like how they were the only ones wearing masks sticking out like a sore thumb

[u/archaicanxiety]

I've been watching them for a while. My boyfriend (nebraska native) and I watched this video together and he really enjoyed it, and that they let her talk and clear out all of the urban legends that have surrounded her.

[u/artsy7fartsy]

That is the Nebraska wave. Definitely

[u/travelmonkeys]

They had me worried when they were in the bar and it was completely silent, but it turned out okay. Neat showcase of a place I had never heard of!

[u/jschmit78]

I enjoyed that. It’s fun watching people from outside our State experience our State. In Monowi, we are all outsiders!