August 7, 2016: This photo encompasses a significant portion of the buildings of the new Nebraska State Fairgrounds, relocated from Lincoln to Grand Island in 2010 because of poor attendance. I better stop here before I say something about the best state fair in OUR state.
Onawa, Iowa, August 7 — For a day that didn’t really have a travel portion until 3 PM, it wasn’t a shabby trip at all. In fact, today had a little something from nearly every decade of the past 150 years.
I had no idea how much time I would spend at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer, but I couldn’t do anything until it opened at noon. That gave me time to check out the Seedling Mile and, get this, read the Sunday Omaha World-Herald in the city park.
Weed-strewn original concrete from the Lincoln Highway Seedling Mile on the east side of Grand Island, 100 years and nine months after it opened and 85 years after US 30 bypassed it.
By the time the museum opened, it was a beautiful day. The museum itself took about an hour, with a downstairs temporary exhibit about the 150th anniversary of the Union Pacific and an upstairs collection of everyday life in the 1920s-30s. Then I found myself in an anachronistic situation — classic cars lining the streets of an 1890s pioneer village!
Cherry, apple, cinnamon, and other flavors at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer.
Then I walked, or slightly rushed, through the Antique Auto and Farm Machinery exhibit building. If you have a child who loves tractors, or if you’re an adult who feels like a child when seeing lots of old tractors, this is a place you need to go. There’s even a Waterloo Boy among the machinery.
Route: US 30, US 281, US 34, US 81, US 275, NE 51, IA 175
I was farther along than I had budgeted for the trip, and still had a day to go, so I used the late afternoon/early evening to close a gap on US 81. That included passing through Columbus and seeing a place originally set aside to honor the native-son creator of the Higgins Boat that has expanded to become a park/memorial for all veterans. (The Higgins Boat, too, figures prominently in the waiting room of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.)
Higgins Boat at the veterans memorial in Columbus, Nebraska (hence the 1492 designation), where US 81 meets the Loup River.
By getting to Onawa, I set myself up for a super-productive day, at least as far as my Iowa travels are concerned.
While doing research for this leg of the trip, through an application for the Lincoln Highway in Nebraska on the National Register of Historic Places (large PDF), I learned something for my Council Bluffs Highway Chronology page. The first four-lane divided highway in Nebraska was a 6-mile stretch of US 73/75 to Fort Crook, later Offutt Air Force Base. It opened on Monday, December 8, 1941.