Old Town in Nebraska Show Its Building Again Because Lake Drived Up
I-fourscore'due south Exits To History In Nebraska
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July 22, 1990
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A lot of people drive beyond Nebraska; few linger. They get a bad case of lead foot as they barrel westward on Interstate fourscore trying to get the 450 miles of Nebraska behind them as quickly equally possible. This is a shame. Nebraska is a place of clear light and calming vistas, of architectural landmarks, both majestic and apprehensive, and many quirky little museums. Travelers tin soak upwards some of the land's luminosity past simply easing upward on the accelerator. A little cognition about the region's history will give the unfolding panorama an actress blush and might prompt a traveler to terminate and explore along the manner.
Driving west on I-80, and enjoying information technology, requires thinking of yourself equally office of an ongoing procession. The highway is the latest manifestation of an ancient route along the Platte River. Wide and apartment and unencumbered by major obstacles, the Platte Valley has served for thousands of years every bit a path of to the lowest degree resistance for travelers. It has been traversed by prehistoric and historic tribes of Indians; European trappers and fur traders; agrarian American settlers and westbound gilt seekers; people on lath the transcontinental railroad, and near recently Johnnies-come up-lately on I-80. Nebraska's Platte Valley is a living history museum to our restlessness.
Betwixt 1840 and 1866 an estimated 350,000 settlers pushed their way west forth the valley. Merrill J. Mattes's volume, ''The Peachy Platte River Road,'' contains countless diary entries of these migrants. It is a wonderful summary of the hardships and mundanities of the trip: ''Inez Parker remembered neither romance nor danger, but 'the wild wind in the wagons, the long slow marches, smoky campfires, and monotonous meals.' Perhaps the biggest trouble that Mary Warner faced was indisposition, acquired by the restless horse herd, chomping, snorting, and whinnying through the night to the accompaniment of coyotes' howling.''
The 1862 Homestead Act's promise of land prompted some migrants to settle in Nebraska. Against an assortment of obstacles - lonesome vistas, scant pelting, no trees, a chasm betwixt newcomer and established resident - the settlers changed the face of the identify. They deposed a nomadic Indian culture, establishing in its stead sedentary, agrarian patterns of life, and they turned the wild buffalo grasslands into the plains.
The near obvious marks of this transition seen along I-80 are the glistening white grain elevators notching the horizon and the huge mantis-like irrigation equipment sprawled in the fields of corn. The best architectural testimony to Nebraska's agrarian life is the Country Capitol in Lincoln. More than than any other American Land House, this soaring edifice - the Art Deco equivalent of a grain elevator - stands for the lives of its constituents.
Constructed betwixt 1922 and 1932, the Capitol was the last corking work by the East Declension architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. He described it as ''a Tower on the plains.'' The interior is emblazoned with Byzantine murals and mosaics (many done by Hildreth Meiere), and atop the domed building stands a beautiful bronze statue of a farmer with broad shoulders and bulging calves in midstride scattering grain. ''The Sower,'' by Lee Lawrie, is 1 of America's premier tributes to the common person.
If the traveler were to accept only 1 exit off the Interstate, the State House visit is the detour to take.
For people who take never given much thought to Nebraska, here are some other enticements along I-fourscore. The list begins on the eastern border at Omaha.
Omaha Omaha owes its existence to the Union Pacific Railroad, to smelting and the stockyards, and to its big High german, Irish and blackness communities. Omaha is headquarters to Father Flanagan'due south Boys Boondocks, a community for abandoned and handicapped boys and girls. It is birthplace of Malcolm X, who was born Malcolm Petty at 3448 Pinkney Street on May 19, 1925. Information technology is habitation every spring to the Higher World Series. If you want to spend a few hours or a couple of days in Omaha, here are seven places that will give you a feel for this old Missouri River boondocks.
The Joslyn Fine art Museum, perched on a Missouri River barefaced, was opened in 1931 and was established past Sarah Joslyn every bit a memorial to her husband George A. Joslyn, an Omahan who made a fortune in the patent medicine business and as president of a company that supplied printing equipment to small-town newspapers. The Joslyn is noted for its Western American art collection, which includes works past Alfred Jacob Miller, George Catlin and Frederic Remington. The focal signal is the work of the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose watercolors and drawings document his journey with Prince Maximilian of Bavaria through upper Missouri land in 1832-1834. The museum'due south aboriginal wing has a brandish of American Indian art. It also has sections devoted to Plains Indians and w expansion, Victoriana and 19th-century Omaha.
The edifice, an exquisite slice of art in itself, is constructed of pinkish marble, which almost hums in skilful evening calorie-free. A model of Art Deco way, it was designed by the prominent male parent and son Omaha architects, John and Alan McDonald.
The Western Heritage Museum is a repository of Omaha history housed in the beautiful, retired Union Passenger Final, a 1931 Art Deco edifice designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, a Los Angeles builder who planned this and several other terminals for Union Pacific.
Exhibits in the Marriage Pacific Museum deal with the history of the railroad and its role in westward expansion. Because Abraham Lincoln authorized the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the museum has a number of items associated with him, including a cutaway replica of his Presidential railroad car with its original furnishings.
Kenefick Park contains 2 Union Pacific locomotives that were the largest of their types ever built - the 1944 steam-powered Big Boy and the 1969 diesel-electric engine Centennial. The engines are open up for inspection, and an audio program explains their significance.
The Great Plains Black Museum chronicles the blackness feel during the settling of the Smashing Plains. It features exhibits on black women pioneers and on the buffalo soldiers, the black ground forces personnel who helped settle the frontier.
Fort Omaha was established in 1868 as one of the borderland outposts for guarding white settlers and subduing the Plains Indians. The fort was also Omaha's social hub. Several buildings from the 1878-79 construction phase remain on the grounds, including the handsome Italianate Gen. George Crook House.
The Wintertime Quarters and Mormon Pioneer Cemetery preserves the base army camp on the western bluffs of the Missouri River established in the fall of 1846 by Brigham Immature and the offset wave of Mormons heading due west from Nauvoo, Ill. With winter on their heels, they apace threw up 600 log houses and dugouts. The Mormons numbered almost three,500, but in that commencement winter malaria, typhoid, diphtheria and scurvy swept through the settlement, killing several hundred people. The Mormons remained over another wintertime, while Brigham Young searched for an appropriate Western destination, which he located in the Valley of the Bang-up Salt Lake.
The visitor center shows a film nigh Mormon history. There are reconstructions of a log cabin, covered wagon, the blazon of handcart that the Mormons pushed across the plains, but the most poignant part of the encampment is the Mormons' hilltop cemetery.
Lincoln Besides the State Capitol, the nigh venerable identify in Lincoln is the William Jennings Bryan Habitation, the gracious Victorian farmstead where the orator and Nebraska's most famous denizen lived for many years with his family. He was an advocate of the middle class, an avowed enemy of the rich, and three-time unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President. In 1903, Bryan and his wife began buying land for their country abode, which they completed in 1903. The house, perched on a knoll, is a rambling brick Queen Anne building containing flow effects and family unit memorabilia. Though the city of Lincoln has enveloped the subcontract, a visitor can all the same stand on this gentle hill and appreciate why the Bryans dubbed their land dwelling house Fairview.
Beatrice The Homestead National Monument, a site for people who tin depict meaning out of subtle landscapes, is an hour's drive off I-80 and there is not a great deal to run across. The park is on the quarter-section merits of Daniel Freeman, whom historians have singled out as the showtime applicant to file under the Homestead Human activity, by which 160-acre parcels of unoccupied state were distributed for nominal sums. None of the Freeman buildings remain, but the 1867 Palmer-Epard log cabin was relocated to the site from a nearby homestead.
A walking trail goes by Cub Creek, through the streamside forest and restored tall-grass prairie, and by various edifice sites and the family cemetery. Restoration work on the prairie began in 1939, i of the starting time such programs in the The states. Exhibits in the visitor center recount the history of the homestead move. The miraculous feat of the Homestead National Monument is that it captures the aura of absolute quiet and lonesomeness that confronted pioneers on the Great Plains in the 1860's, and that is the reason to visit. 1000 Island-Kearney area The Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in M Island is a modernist tribute to the pioneer, a sunny glass and rock box designed in the mid-1960's by the New York builder and chief of the International style Edward Durell Stone. The building displays an array of 19th-century clothing, tools, domestic implements and furnishings, clocks, musical instruments and documentary photographs of frontier life. Adjacent to the Stuhr is some other exhibit hall, the Fonner Rotunda, with its large collection of Great Plains Indian artifacts and memorabilia associated with the borderland cattle industry. As well on the museum compound is a re-created frontier railroad town (open up in summer only) that consists of more than than 50 accurate 19th-century buildings. These include a bank, general store, church, farmstead, and the cottage where Henry Fonda, a native of Grand Isle, was born.
From mid-March to early on Apr this stretch of I-80 betwixt K Island and Kearney presents one of the greatest wildlife glasses in America: some 500,000 migrating sandhill cranes. The birds are everywhere - flying in V formation, prancing amid the stubble in the cornfields - while they linger forth the river before moving on to their nesting grounds further north.
I of the best roads from which to watch the birds is Spur L-50A, a thirty-infinitesimal detour off I-80 just south of Kearney. There at sundown y'all tin watch phalanxes of cranes flying to the river silhouetted confronting a pinkish and majestic sky. The National Audubon Gild'south two,200-acre Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary lies along the Platte, and with advance reservations and for a small donation y'all can spend an unforgettable dawn in a blind watching the awakening of thousands of cranes.
On the frontier of the Great American Desert all roads led to Fort Kearny. Today the remnants of the fort are encompassed in Fort Kearny State Historical Park, and it is no longer the heart of the universe. Visiting this small park along the Platte requires a muscular jump of the imagination. If you tin work yourself into the proper appreciative state, however, Fort Kearny is well worth the visit if only to know you have stood on sod so steeped in history.
The fort, whose name is spelled differently from the town, was established in 1848 and was the commencement of a chain of military installations on the Oregon Trail.
It was built at a signal where the trail, coming from Independence, Mo., converged with the Mormon Trail, which ran parallel to the river from Omaha.
With the opening of the California goldfields, Fort Kearny was soon a bustling manner station. During an xviii-calendar month period in 1849-50, some 30,000 people passed by the fort leap for California, Oregon and the Great Salt Lake. One of the well-nigh harrowing periods at the fort was the summertime of 1864 when Sioux and Cheyenne raids on carriage trains along the Platte and Little Blueish Rivers reached a peak. The final task of Fort Kearny personnel was to protect Spousal relationship Pacific Railroad crews in 1866-67. The fort closed in 1871. None of the original frame or sod buildings remain, but several copies accept been built on the site. The visitor center has exhibits of artifacts and a slide-show presentation on the history of the fort.
Minden People who dear flea markets and garage sales will enjoy the Harold Warp Pioneer Village in Minden. Information technology has on display ane or more of every object associated with Americana. Several warehouse-size buildings contain antique automobiles, early planes, bicycles, motorcycles, agricultural machinery, household appliances and musical instruments. Also on the grounds are copies of some 25 pioneer buildings, including a sod house, erstwhile Pony Express station, steam-powered carousel and a state church and schoolhouse.
Maxwell Fort McPherson National Cemetery was established in 1873 on the grounds of Fort McPherson, an outpost that was active from 1863 to 1887. With the conclusion of the Indian wars, scores of forts across the Great Plains were closed, and the remains of military personnel from 27 of these abandoned outposts were reinterred at Fort McPherson. Their bleached white headstones stand as a reminder of the era of due west migration. The cemetery is notwithstanding in apply and contains over 5,000 graves.
North Platte Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park preserves a remnant of Scout'due south Rest Ranch, the four,000-acre spread of the frontier guide, buffalo hunter and showman William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody. From 1883 until the stop of the century, Cody's Wild West Bear witness attracted large audiences both in this country and Europe, and it made its dapper originator both rich and famous.
Cody lived off and on at Sentry's Residue Ranch, built in 1886, with his wife and various relatives until the turn of the century.
DETOURS FROM I-eighty ON A JOURNEY Across THE STATE
Omaha Sites worth a detour from Interstate lxxx include these:
Joslyn Fine art Museum (220 Dodge Street; telephone 402-342-3300) is open from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Tuesday through Saturday and from 1 to 5 P.One thousand. on Sunday. Admission is $ii; $1 for children and the elderly.
Western Heritage Museum (801 South 10th Street; 402-444-5071) is open from 10 A.M. to v P.Chiliad. Tuesday through Saturday and from 1 to 5 P.M. on Dominicus. Admission is $3; $2.50 for the elderly, and $2 for children.
Wedlock Pacific Museum (1416 Dodge Street; 402-271-3305) is open up from 9 A.K. to 5 P.Thousand. Monday through Friday and 9 A.Yard. to 1 P.M. on Saturday. Admission is free. Kenefick Park (6th Street and Abbott Drive) is open up during daylight hours. Visitors inspect the locomotives without charge.
Great Plains Blackness Museum (2213 Lake Street; 402-345-2212) is open from 9 A.Thousand. to 5 P.One thousand. Monday through Friday. Admission is $2.
Gen. George Crook Business firm at Fort Omaha (30th and Fort Streets; 402-455-9990) is open from ten A.M. to 4 P.One thousand. Monday through Friday and from one to 4 P.Thou. on Sunday. Access is $three; $1.50 for children. Wintertime Quarters and Mormon Pioneer Cemetery (3215 Land Street; 402-453-9372) are open daily from 8 A.Thou. until dark. Free.
Lincoln William Jennings Bryan Home (4900 Sumner Street; 402-471-4764) is open, from Memorial Mean solar day to Labor 24-hour interval, on Saturday and Sunday from 1:30 to 5 P.M. Admission: $1.
Homestead National Monument (402-223-3514), near Beatrice, is open daily from viii:xxx A.M. to 5 P.M. During the summer, hours are extended until 8 on Sabbatum and Sunday. Admission is free.
Grand Island Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (3133 West Highway 34; 308-381-5316). From May through September, the 2 museums and the Railroad Boondocks are open daily from 9 A.M. to 6 P.Grand. For the remainder of the year hours are from 9 to 5 Mon through Saturday and from 1 to v on Sun. May through October, the admission is $6 and $3.fifty for children; rest of year, $iii and $1.l for children.
To make reservations for visiting the National Audubon Society's blind on the Platte River to watch the spring staging of sandhill cranes between Grand Island and Kearney, write to the Rowe Sanctuary, Route ii, Box 112A, Gibbon, Neb. 68840.
Other Sites Fort Kearny State Historical Park (308-234-9513) near Kearney is open daily, Memorial Twenty-four hour period to Labor Day, from nine A.G. to 5 P.Chiliad. Admission is $two a vehicle.
Harold Warp Pioneer Village (308-832-1181, exterior Nebraska 800-445-4447) is in Minden, 12 miles south of I-fourscore on Highway x. It is open daily from viii A.M. to dusk. Admission is $4; $2 for children. Fort McPherson National Cemetery (308-582-4433) is two miles s of the town of Maxwell on Route N-56A. Buffalo Beak Ranch Country Historical Park (308-532-4795) is vi miles northwest of North Platte on Buffalo Bill Avenue. It is open daily from Memorial Day to Labor Day from 10 A.One thousand. to 8 P.Grand. In September, Oct and April hours are from 9 A.Yard. to noon and 1 to five P.Thousand. Monday through Friday, and from 1 to 5 Sabbatum and Sunday. Admission is $ii a vehicle. The park is closed from November through March.
Reading List Amid books that will animate a motorcar trip across Nebraska and mayhap convince travelers to linger longer:
''The Great Platte River Road'' past Merrill J. Mattes (University of Nebraska Printing, 1969) is hefty (583 pages) simply essential for edging modernistic-solar day travelers into the proper frame of mind for coming to understand and possibly cherish Nebraska and the Platte River.
''Neat Plains'' by Ian Frazier (Knopf, 1989) is a touching essay on a mystifying role of America that is also full of wonderful historical information. His business relationship of the murder of the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, at Fort Robinson in the northwestern corner of Nebraska, will make some people want to take the 230-mile detour off the Interstate to that celebrated site.
''Historic Places: The National Register for Nebraska'' (available for $8.50 by writing Nebraskaland Magazine, Nebraska State Historical Social club, Box 82554, Lincoln, Pecker. 68501) is a beautifully produced booklet with many color and black-and-white photographs and brief entries on the state's celebrated buildings.S. W.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/travel/i-80-s-exits-to-history-in-nebraska.html
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