Bethany Turns 100 This Year, and Havelock Took Twice as Long to Say Yes

Drive down Cotner Boulevard on a weekday afternoon and nothing about the low commercial strip and quiet cross streets tells you this used to be its own town. Drive across town to Havelock Avenue on the same afternoon and the opposite is true. Storefronts sit close to the sidewalk, the block still reads as a Main Street, and the whole stretch feels like it never got the memo that it joined Lincoln almost a century ago.

That difference isn't an accident of urban planning. It's the residue of two separate decisions, made four years apart, by two towns that no longer exist on any map. Bethany gave up its independence in 1926 because it had simply run out of ways to function without Lincoln. Havelock held out until 1930, and only lost because its own workers went on strike. This year marks 100 years since the first of those two towns disappeared into the city around it, and the shape of that disappearance is still legible on the ground.

Both towns were part of the same wave. Lincoln absorbed a string of independent satellite communities in a fairly tight window: Normal in 1919, Bethany in 1922 with the paperwork finalized in 1926, University Place in 1926, College View in 1929, and Havelock last, in 1930. Each of those towns had grown up around something specific, usually a college or a railroad shop, and each one eventually hit the same wall. What varies is how each town got there, and Bethany and Havelock sit at opposite ends of that range.

Bethany Ran Out of Services Before It Ran Out of Pride

Bethany started as a real estate idea before it was a real place. In 1886, a group of local businessmen marketed 300 acres east of Lincoln as free land for a college, betting that a school would raise the value of the land around it. The Nebraska Christian Missionary Alliance took the offer two years later and founded Nebraska Christian University in 1889. A year later the school was renamed Cotner College after a major donor, and the town that grew up around it incorporated as Bethany Heights in 1890.

The town never got big enough to stand on its own. By 1920, Bethany Heights had a population of 1,078, and residents depended on Lincoln for hospitals, hotels, dry goods, and even train depots. There was no dramatic fight. Citizens voted to accept annexation in 1922, though the change didn't take legal effect until 1926, once Lincoln finished annexing the neighboring town of University Place first to make the boundaries connect.

That 1926 date is the one worth sitting with, because it lands on a round number this year. A hundred years after Bethany's annexation became official, Cotner College itself is long gone. Its main building was torn down in the early 1950s and the land was cut into residential lots. What survives from the original town are two buildings the Bethany Neighborhood Association still points to directly: the Beattie House and the neighborhood's former bank building, both still standing along the commercial spine near Cotner Boulevard.

Havelock Said No for Eight Years

Havelock's founding runs almost exactly parallel to Bethany's, and its ending could not have looked more different. The town formed in 1890 along the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad and incorporated in 1893. By 1900 it had 1,500 residents working around the Burlington Shops, the railroad's repair complex, and by 1920 that number had grown to 3,602, more than three times Bethany's population in the same year.

Havelock residents actively fought annexation through the 1920s, and they had the numbers to make that fight credible. What finally broke the standoff wasn't Lincoln's persistence. It was a labor dispute. Havelock Shops workers went on strike in 1922 over post-World War I pay cuts, and the strike dragged on for years without resolution, hollowing out the town's economic base from the inside. By 1930 the town's population had gone essentially flat, still sitting around 3,653, and voters finally approved annexation by a two-to-one margin. Havelock joined Lincoln not because it agreed the town was better off inside the city, but because an eight-year strike left it with little else to hold onto.

What Still Marks Each One

The two neighborhoods carry their histories differently today. Bethany's old town center survives mostly as fragments: the Beattie House, the former bank building, and a commercial stretch along Cotner Boulevard that the Bethany Neighborhood Association still refers to as an echo of the original layout. Today the broader Bethany neighborhood, stretching from 63rd to 84th Streets and Adams to Holdrege, counts more than 9,000 residents and around 200 businesses, a modern footprint that has nothing to do with the scale of the town that got annexed in 1926.

Havelock kept more of its original texture. The block around 6100-6300 Havelock Avenue still functions like a small-town main street, anchored by places like the Joyo Theatre, a single-screen movie house that has hosted the neighborhood for close to a century and now draws crowds for its midnight showings. A Street Antiques and Piqued Curiosities, which opened in May 2023, sit within a few doors of the Engine House Café, a restaurant built inside a former fire station, and Wolfe Ace Hardware, a family-owned shop that has held its ground against the larger chains. A seasonal farmers market still sets up behind the historic business district each year, run by local growers rather than folded into one of Lincoln's larger citywide markets.

One town let go quietly because it had run out of services to offer. The other held on until the fight itself ran out of money.

Why the Difference Still Shows

None of this changes what a house costs on either side of town or what's for sale this month. But it does explain something residents of North Lincoln often notice without being able to name: why a five-minute drive between Bethany and Havelock can feel like crossing between two different kinds of neighborhoods, even though both have been part of Lincoln for a century. Bethany's absorption was administrative and nearly invisible, a town accepting that it could no longer function alone. Havelock's was contested to the last vote, and the neighborhood still carries itself like a place that negotiated its own terms.

A hundred years is long enough for annexation paperwork to be forgotten and short enough for a commercial district to still be standing. Cotner Boulevard and Havelock Avenue are both proof of that, just in opposite directions.

If the history behind your block ever turns into a real conversation about buying, selling, or staging a home anywhere in North Lincoln, Amy Birkholz and the Home Design Real Estate Group know this corridor street by street, from Bethany's quiet residential grid to Havelock's working commercial spine. Reach out to schedule a staging and listing strategy consult whenever you're ready to talk specifics.