The Union Pacific's old passenger depot had been empty ever since a new depot opened in April 1918. The railroad allowed the old depot to be used as a canteen, and the Red Cross welcomed its first soldiers with small care packages on August 12. Nine units of ten workers were scheduled to stand ready to serve troops from 8:30 am unitl 10:05 pm daily. The canteen served troops as they headed to war in Europe and as they returned home after the war. According to the final report on August 8, 1919, the Grand Island canteen had served 57,890 service men at a cost of $3,429,37 to the local Red Cross chapter.
]]>The name Dana is a poetic reference to Denmark, homeland of the immigrants who founded the college. The institutions worked together until Trinity ultimately merged with Wartburg Seminary in Iowa. Dana served as a four-year liberal arts college affiliated with the Lutheran Church for over 125 years. At its peak, Dana College enrolled over 1,000 students from across the United States and across the globe. Its rich academic and cultural heritage made a significant impact on the region, yet fiscal challenges at the turn of the 21st Century led to its closing in 2010.
]]>Due to financial hardships, the former 80-acre Hall County fairground was sold in 1932. In April 1953 area farmers, ranchers, and civic leaders founded two organizations to establish a new permanent home for the Hall County Fair and to build a Thoroughbred horse racetrack in Central Nebraska.
The Hall County Agricultural Society included representatives from every district in the county, providing leadership and structure for fair operations. The Hall County Livestock Improvement Association was incorporated by thirty businessmen and farmers, who secured 80 acres of land from Gus and Emma Fonner and began raising funds to construct a 5/8-mile horse racetrack, paddock, grandstand, barns, and livestock exhibition building. Fonner Park's first agricultural cultural show, the Old Reliable Hereford Show, was held on February 2, 1954.
Since April 29, 1954, Fonner Park has been home to Central Nebraska's only Thoroughbred racetrack and the Hall County Fair. In 2010, Fonner Park became the new permanent home of the Nebraska State Fair.
]]>Grand Island's "Lucky Ten" families were announced in April 1935. The 20 adults and 34 children shared communal buildings including showers, restrooms, laundry, a canning house, and a roadside market to sell produce grown on the 160-acre site. Each family received a four-room cottage, small barn, chicken house, 7-acre tract, 2 cows, 100 hens, 300 chicks, and seed. Individual farmsteads, valued at $2,500, had 15-year payment plans. Unique to Grand Island was a 1936 Nebraska Supreme Court ruling that District 28 school could not refuse the admit the 24 school-age farmstead children. The Grand Island Farmstead Cooperative Association was dissolved in March 1939.
]]>Prior to this realignment, the Lincoln Highway entered Wood River from the north on 130th Road and passed through town on 9th Street before turning south at 140th Road and crossing the railroad tracks. The plan drafted by the State called for the highway to pass through Wood River on 11th Street, but local business leaders objected. Instead, the new highway ran one block south of 9th Street parallel to the Union Pacific tracks.
]]>Born in Iowa, Johnny Carson (1925-2005) grew up in Norfolk at 306 S. 13th St. A performer from an early age, he graduated from Norfolk High School in 1943, served in the navy, graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before launching his broadcasting career at WOW in Omaha. Carson became the "King of Late Night," hosting NBC's Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992. He supported the arts in Nebraska with donations toward arts projects, including a theater at Norfolk High School.
]]>In 1884 Congress first proposed the Burt County Missouri River Bridge. In 1946 the Corps of Engineers approved the construction of a traffic bridge at Decatur to be placed over the uncompleted navigation channel. The 2 million dollar privately financed bridge was completed in 1951 as designed by Kirkham, Michael & Associates of Omaha, Nebraska. To save money, it was built over dry land by William J. Howard of Chicago and is 1,956 feet long, 23 feet wide, and has five spans. It sat unused for five years and received significant national attention as Decatur's "Dry Land Bridge" or the "Bridge to Nowhere," implying government incompetence. In 1955, Congress approved $11 million dollars to complete the work by rechanneling the Missouri River to flow under the bridge. The project's completion represented a feat in engineering at the time. The bridge has remained open since 1956 except for 2011, when it was closed for repairs after being damaged by floodwaters. In 2013, Nebraska and Iowa acquired the bridge and it became toll free.
]]>Owners and tenants were given 30 days to vacate their property by April 25, 1942. The government retained barns and outbuildings for tool buildings, machine sheds, and warehouses. Property owners could move their houses with government approval.
The evacuation order affected both homes and livelihoods. While some farmers found land elsewhere to rent or buy, others felt they had no choice but to sell all their livestock and equipment. Two weeks after being served, one farmer advertised a "Hit by a Bomb Plant" farm sale.
]]>In 1942 flood waters washed out the dam, draining the lake. One of the final community celebrations on the lake that year was a two-day July 4th event with boating, fishing, picnicking, dancing, fireworks, speeches from military and government officials, and vaudeville acts from Chicago. Sand Krog was razed in 1959 to make room for U.S. Highway 281. In 1968 Hall County assumed ownership of the property and created a county park with a paved road that winds along the rim of the former lake.
]]>Hall County Sheriff Wedgwood received a telegram from W.J. Burger of Doniphan on November 27, 1887, informing him that half the town was in ashes. The previous evening residents of Doniphan reported hearing a small explosion. Upon investigation, they found nothing amiss and returned to their homes. A second, larger explosion 45 minutes later brought out residents who found the post office engulfed in flames. Without a local fire department, residents were powerless as the fire spread throughout the business district destroying the post office, bank, grocery store, millinery shop, butcher shop, and general store.
The sheriff found evidence of a botched robbery. Thieves had used explosives to access the post office safe, which held $200 in currency. $200-$300 in postage stamps, and registered letters. When the first charge failed to open the safe door, they used a larger charge. This blew the door over 15 feet and ignited the contents of the safe, leaving the thieves empty-handed. No one was arrested for the crime that caused $5,000 in damages. Doniphan's business district was rebuilt on the same site.
]]>Cairo (pronounced 'Care-Oh') began as a railroad town along the Burlington line. Agents of the Lincoln Land Company, a Burlington subsidiary, purchased the Hall County farmsteads of George and Henry Bussell in January and April 1886. Located 14 miles northwest of Grand Island, the Bussell land lay along the proposed route of the Grand Island and Wyoming Central Railroad. The land company began planting the new town in the spring of 1886. Several houses and businesses were built by the time the tracks were laid in June.
When the Hall County Clerk received the town's plat map in July, he noticed unusual names for both the town and its streets. Located on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, the town was named for the Egyptian city of Cairo. The streets had names from the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, including Egypt, Berber, Thebe, Alexandria, Medina, Mecca, and Nile. Although the name suggests a desert, Cairo was promoted to prospective residents as a "beautiful little town...in one of the most fertile farming districts in the state."
]]>Japanese Hall was moved to the Legacy of the Plains Museum in 2019 from 1705 Avenue C, in Scottsbluff. Built by Japanese immigrants in 1928, the building served as a social hall, worship space, school, entertainment venue, and hub for the Japanese and Japanese American community for 90 years. Scottsbluff's downtown and surrounding blocks had Japanese-owned restaurants, a billiard hall, a Japanese mercantile, and a weekly Japanese newspaper. This marker commemorates the place, and the Japanese Immigrants of Nebraska and the High Plains.
]]>Softball gained popularity in Nebraska during the Great Depression and World War II as an athletic opportunity for girls and women. It continued to be a source of underappreciated community entertainment for decades after the war. Glenys Kay Figgins Cover (1939-1987) established Red Cloud's first Women and Girls Fast-Pitch Softball Program in 1973 with little to no funding and minimal coaching experience. They achieved a 68-game winning streak. Kay created athletic opportunities for women and girls in her community with the rallying cry "Let her fly!"
]]>The U.S. Indian Industrial School in Genoa was in operation from 1884 to 1934. Built on land that was formerly part of the Pawnee reservation, it is the only federal Indian boarding school in Nebraska with remaining structures. Over 4,000 indigenous youth from more than forty tribal nations attended the school. The goal of these boarding schools was to break the bonds indigenous children had to their families, tribes, and homelands in an effort to assimilate them into mainstream Euro-American culture.
]]>Many explorers and traders visited this spot before 1800. Nearby, in 1795, trader James Mackay built a short-lived trading post for Spanish St. Louis traders, naming it Fort Charles in honor of the king of Spain.
The Lewis and Clark expedition visited the village August 13, 1804, but the Omaha people were away on an extended buffalo hunt. The explorers stayed near the site for a week and held a conference with three chiefs of the Oto tribe who had come to make peace with the absent Omaha. By then the village was in decline. In 1800, smallpox killed an estimated 400 residents, including the famous Chief Blackbird. Afterward the village played a diminished role in the struggle for control of the Missouri Valley and the Plains beyond. It was abandoned in 1845.
]]>Near this location, on September 26, 1907, 18-month old Gladys Dixon followed her elder sisters as they left for school. Their home being near the A. & N. track, the children usually took this route to town. A Burlington train was turning a sharp curve between the whistling post and the City Mills, coming from Milford.
Locomotive fireman, Marion Lux, looked up from the engine and saw the child on the track ahead. With no possibility to stop the train, he crawled out over the footboard to as near the front as he could, and just before the engine reached the child, threw himself forward, grasping the toddler and rolling down the embankment with the child in his arms.
In the leap from the train, Lux’s shirt was torn from his body and his back scalded from the engine steam. He carried the uninjured child to her mother and continued on his run to Lincoln. For his act of selfless courage, Marion Lux of Ravenna became Nebraska’s first recipient of a Silver Carnegie Hero Medal.
]]>The “Petty Officer 1st Class Charles Jackson French Post Office” is named in honor of an Omaha sailor. Born in Arkansas, French moved to Omaha to live with his older sister after his parents died. He enlisted in the Navy in 1937, serving as a mess attendant and returning home after fulfilling his four-year commitment. As an African American man, French served at a time when prejudice and discrimination were ever-present in the military. He proudly reenlisted four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
During the Battle of Guadalcanal, Japanese destroyers sank the USS Gregory on September 4, 1942. With 15 of his injured shipmates adrift in a raft, French tied the line to himself and swam more than six hours in shark-infested waters towing his shipmates to safety.
Heralded as the “Hero of the Solomon Islands,” French was posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal on May 21, 2022. Risking death so that others might live, French demonstrated the courage to defend American freedom, so that democracy may continue to grow and prosper for generations to come.
]]>Present-day Ponca, Nebraska, is near the first village built by the Ponca in the early 1600s after they separated from the Omaha and became their own tribe. Like the Omaha, they lived in semi-permanent earth lodge villages, planted corn, and hunted bison part of the year. Oral tradition states that the Ponca created a buffalo effigy mound in the vicinity of the village, using it for ceremonial purposes to ensure a bountiful hunt. The Ponca eventually abandoned the village due to the deaths of many children and youth from epidemic diseases. The tribe began calling it the Tiny (or Narrow) Graves Village. The Ponca moved to the Black Hills before settling in the Niobrara River Valley. They returned periodically to the old village, giving it other names such as “Where the Ioway Farmed.” It is said that the tribe continued to stop at the village on their way to the buffalo hunt and continued practicing their ceremonies at the buffalo effigy. This long history of tribal connections makes this area a valuable historical and cultural landscape for the Ponca people.
]]>Father Kano (1899-1988) was the son of a prominent family in Japan. He studied agriculture at the Imperial University in Tokyo. Kano’s family hosted William Jennings Bryan, who convinced Hiram to continue his education at the University of Nebraska. He graduated with a master’s degree in agricultural economics in 1918 and farmed near Litchfield, Nebraska, for six years.
Kano served as president of the Japanese Americanization Society in Nebraska. He strived for racial justice, fairness, and equality, testifying before committees of the 1919-1920 Nebraska Constitutional Convention and the 1921 Nebraska Legislature when efforts were made to prevent Japanese from owning land. Kano served as counselor, minister, teacher, translator, and agricultural advisor to the Japanese.
Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Father Kano was arrested and held in internment camps until 1944. While in the camps, he assisted in education and morale efforts to improve the lives of the imprisoned. After the war, Kano returned to Nebraska. He and his wife taught citizenship classes, enabling 24 Japanese immigrants in Lincoln County to become U.S. citizens on September 8, 1953.
]]>When Burwell residents put on a local rodeo in 1921, the event was so successful that they made it an annual affair and built a permanent facility.
Nebraska’s Big Rodeo (NBR), its official name since 1925, was soon drawing crowds of 20,000 people a day. The rodeo persevered through severe drought and economic depression in the 1930s, and became an important stop on the national circuit.
No official rodeo was held 1943-45 due to World War II, but the Dearmont Ranch south of Burwell hosted rodeos during this time. In 1946 NBR enjoyed the largest crowds in its history. It expanded to a four-day event in 1948. Legendary champions such as Jim Shoulders and Casey Tibbs were regular competitors.
By the 1950s NBR added trick riders, chuckwagon races, and horse racing. As in the rodeo’s early days, Lakota performers shared their culture through music and dancing.
NBR and the Garfield County Fair are still held on the original 40 acres. The grounds include one of the world’s largest outdoor rodeo arenas, a 3/4-mile track, and the original wood-covered grandstands.
]]>In 1927, Papillion Troop 1 was renumbered to Troop 60 and sponsored by the Brotherhood of St. Paul. In 1934, sponsorship was assumed by the Papillion American Legion Post 32, which continues today. The Boy Scouts’ Cabin has been in continuous use since 1922, still serving a role in Troop 60’s operations. The cabin is a beloved local landmark celebrating the community’s pride in both scouting and the City of Papillion.
]]>(later Bishop) and John Blowick for missionary work in China. Recognized by the Vatican in 1918, the society is named for St. Columban, a sixth-century Irish missionary monk. Anxious to have a strong presence in the U.S., Fathers Galvin and E.J. McCarthy established the Omaha office in 1918 and constructed a seminary in Bellevue in 1921. Today, Columban priests and lay missionaries serve in countries in Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.
]]>Alkali Station played several important roles as a stopping place on the Overland Trail between 1859 and 1867. Established as a stagecoach relay station, it served as a Pony Express station in 1860-61, then as a base station along the transcontinental telegraph line. Alkali marked a point where the trail network fanned out toward various points to the west. As a large a road ranche through the 1860s, it provided travelers with supplies, rested stock, and repair facilities. Alkali Station became a fortified army post during the Civil War. It housed cavalry units charged with maintaining the western flow of people and goods. Fighting occurred at the station, and troops based there took part in combat against Northern Plains tribes. Alkali Station fell into disuse with completion of the transcontinental railway system. Sod structures and other facilities at the site were abandoned and allowed to decay. Never cultivated, it preserves evidence of its contribution to the development of the country’s transportation system. Efforts by land owners and their neighbors have recognized and preserved the site.
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