We started out with stop at the Nebraska Prairie Museum in Holdredge NB. A very expanded county museum with so much in it, we were awestruck. The cashier said it is Nebraska's best kept secret. They were just putting things back in order after the Swedish festival this weekend. They were the immigrants who settled this area and currently the group is very elderly. Jack spoke to one of the former Board of Directors of the museum while smoking his cigar. The guy is 90 driving this pristine, top of the line station wagon from the 70s I think.
The museum includes 65,000 sq ft of really good stuff. Some of it is collections that people have donated like arrowheads and barbed wire and Norman Rockwell fidgy midgies. Other collectionss are cars and farm equipment. They must have 100 dresses from the late 1800s. All of this is displayed so well and some of it in old department store showcases. In another part of the museum they have it set up like you are walking the streets of a town for a hundred years. All of these great little "shops" with collections of stuff from TVs to typewriters in a print shop to old beauty shop stuff.
It was so great, only to be topped off by their latest addition devoted to the WWII POW camp for Germans that was nearby. Camp Atlantic. Apparently the fact that the US had 340,000 POWs in several camps was very hush, hush. 100,000 were in this camp alone. There is an interview of the artist who painted as he served as interpreter in the camp. He was German born. Paintings are great and his telling the story in a video was wonderful. The prisoners worked for 80 cents/day and were paid in vouchers they could spend at the PX. They worked the local farms, and as carpenters etc depending on their trades before the war. Because all the men had been drafted, the locals were glad to have them. They were then "re-indoctrinated" before they were sent back to Germany after the war. As he tells it very few were hard-core Nazis. The rest were happy to have a place so they could work and eat because things were so horrible in Europe. Interpreter must have been fun job but he got a lot of painting done.
We then went on to Kearney (pronounced Car knee) to see the Great Platte River Road Archway. It is essentially a tourist attraction they built across I-80. Very Disney like. Huge escalator that leads up to this "museum" you walk through. You wear headphones and they give info as you walk along. Essentially, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the California Trail during the gold rush and the Pony Express all used the same route. It then became part of the Lincoln road which was the first transcontinental highway that evolved into I-80 when Ike created the interstate system. So that all makes it very interesting but it was all fake stuff so not really a museum. A huge let down after the museum earlier in the day. I tell you business is very bad every where. The place was empty and a skeleton crew.
We left there and decided not to go into Lincoln NB because not much of interest to us there it seemed. So headed south to Beatrice. Staying in a city park - Chataqua Park. Really, really nice but so, so, so hot. Sign at the bank said 100 degrees. Lots of driving past corn, more corn, and yet more corn. What do that do with it all?!?! Came here for another museum and more on that tomorrow. Pictures are of some of the things I liked today. The buffalo is made of barbed wire.
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