William Shaw Hadfield, the first white settler in Logan County, arrived in Colorado in 1871 and acquired 160 acres of land from the Homestead Act of 1862. He built a sod house on an island he named “Sarinda” in the South Platte River, roughly six miles south of Sterling. In 1878 he married his wife, Charity, at the Presbyterian Church in Sterling. The couple later moved to Sterling where William served as the postmaster among other notable positions on the Board of Commissioners and the Logan County National Bank. Though Sarinda no longer exists, you can visit the place where Pawnee Creek and the South Platte River converge and imagine what it might have been like.