If you are looking for Tiny Town USA – this is it!
Americans seeking an idyllic small town to take a vacation in are in luck as a new study has named this Nebraska town as the best – with only local running the show.
Monowi, a small incorporated village in Boyd County ranked first on Far and Wide’s 2024 list of the best towns to visit or live in across the country.
The village first gained popularity after federal officials realized that the only inhabitant in the 0.21 square miles of area was 90-year-old Elsie Eiler.
Apart from being the sole resident, Eiler is also the mayor, librarian and bartender of the town.
She runs her very own Monowi Tavern, which she has owned since June 1971, and also grants her own license for the bar.
Eiler has also been filing and paying taxes to herself for over a decade.
In addition to this, the sole local maintains the five-thousand–volume Rudy’s Library, founded in memory of her late husband, Rudy Eiler.
Located between the Niobrara River and the larger Missouri River, this village once had a population of 150 back in the 1930s.
Monowi was established back in 1902 as a farming, ranching, and railroad town. During the 1930s, the village had all the trappings of a lively Great Plains village: grain elevators, schools, a post office, a church, even a jailhouse.
But with the modernization of farming and the closure of the railroad in 1978, Monowi feel into a decline, forcing residents to move elsewhere in search of work.
The jailhouse is now an empty rust-colored building marred by actual rust. The church’s last funeral service was in 1960, for Eiler’s father and it held its last Sunday service not long after.
Since Eiler’s story and the village’s peculiarity has gained popularity, people from all across the world have visited Monowi to hear her stories.