This week in Spencer
About Spencer
Spencer started as a paper town: a county committee picked a spot where the Little Sioux and Ocheyedan rivers meet in 1859, but nobody lived there until Union veterans homesteading under the Homestead Act settled "Spencer Grove" in 1866. Two years later the post office asked them to shorten the name, and in 1871 the new town's plat was filed and Clay County's seat moved here from Peterson, with residents pooling money to put up a first courthouse on Main Street. The railroad arrived in 1878 and made Spencer the trading center for a farming county, and today's red stone courthouse, with its clock and bronze dome, went up in 1901. After a 1931 fire started by a dropped sparkler burned more than 100 buildings, the town rebuilt, and the Grand Avenue storefronts are now a National Register historic district and a state-certified cultural district. Spencer is also the home of the Clay County Fair, which draws crowds of more than 300,000 each September, and of Dewey Readmore Books, the library cat whose story traveled around the world.