Nebraska City Historical Society Podcast

Nebraska City was founded in 1854, just as Victorian-era building styles were spreading west from the East Coast, and the town still has a remarkable collection of homes and buildings from that period. Kathy McKillip and fellow Nebraska City Historical Society board member Lucille Sharp walk through the Society's booklet on the town's Victorian architecture, giving addresses and history so listeners can follow along in the car.

The tour begins with the earliest structures, Old Fort Kearney and the Mayhew Cabin, and moves on to Arbor Lodge, where the Mortons' simple four-room frame house grew over the years into a neocolonial mansion. Along the way they describe examples of Greek Revival, Italianate, Gothic, Eastlake, and Queen Anne design. These include the Taylor Wessel Bickle Nelson House, called the finest example of Greek Revival in the state, and the freighting company homes in the old Prairie City area. Lucille also explains why so many early houses were built of soft local brick and how frame construction became common once lumber was easier to get.

The tour also covers commercial and civic landmarks such as the Sloan Drugstore building, the Morton James Public Library, the First Baptist Church, and the Civil War Museum. Several of the buildings mentioned have since been lost, and most of those still standing are private residences, so listeners are asked to admire them from the street. The booklet is available at the Taylor Wessel Bickle Nelson House and the Old Freighters Museum.

Before it was part of Nebraska City, the area east of downtown was called Prairie City, where the freighting companies kept their oxen, wagons, and supplies. Kathy McKillip and Nebraska City Historical Society board member Lucille Sharp take listeners through a new edition of the Society's Victorian architecture tour, covering the neighborhood from 11th to 17th Street and from Central Avenue north to Fourth Avenue. The printed booklet is still being revised, so this episode is the only way to get the tour for now.

They start with some background on how Nebraska City grew from several small communities into one city. It was platted in 1854 as the state's first chartered city, with early residents like John Boulware, who ran the first ferry and handled the first mail. Prairie City was added in the early 1860s, built up around the buildings Fort Kearney left behind and the Russell, Majors and Waddell freighting operation.

The tour then goes house by house, mostly along First, Second, and Third Avenues. Along the way they point out homes tied to local figures and industries, including the Cragel windmill company, a plow factory, a granite and marble works, and a farmer who struck it rich on Colorado silver mines. Other stops include the Old Freighters Museum, built for the Army's quartermaster and later used by the freighting firm, and the Russell, Majors and Waddell homes, one of which still carries the Whiton name. One house, the "Castle on the Hill," was the first private residence in Nebraska City with electricity in 1889. Another belonged to Isaac and Sarah Coe, who ran real estate businesses together while he was away freighting.

They close by saying the neighborhood's real appeal is the mix of styles that local carpenters pieced together from pattern books and leftover materials. The homes are private residences, so listeners are asked to admire them from the street.

The Nebraska City Historical Society's house museum  has four names attached to it, and each one tells a different part of the town's story. Kathy McKillip and board member Lucille Sharp trace the house from its construction in 1857 through its owners, with a focus on the Bickle family, who owned it the longest.

The house was built by bricklayer John Lowe for attorney and land agent William Taylor. It was later bought by merchant Lewis Wessel, who added four front rooms and the Greek Revival portico in 1870. His dry goods store moved up Main Street over the decades and became the oldest family-run business in Nebraska before a fire destroyed it in 1964. Lucille describes its overhead cash system, in which payments were sent up a wire in a little cup to a single bookkeeper in the loft.

The episode then turns to Minnie Bickle, who bought the house in 1910. Her husband John came from a family of brickmakers whose yard was one of three major ones in town, together turning out around 40,000 bricks a day. John Bickle's last project was raising the second story of the family's own brick house, and Minnie later ran it and this house as boarding houses. The stories include coin-operated stove burners and Minnie meeting arriving trains to find new boarders.

The house stayed in the family until 1976, when Carl and Peg Nelson bought it as a memorial to Peg's mother and had it carefully restored. They donated it to the Historical Society in 1996. Today it is furnished to its original period and displays portraits of early Nebraska figures and original pen-and-ink works by local artist Frank Zimmerer. The house is open to the public.

Many people in Nebraska City know the name Hayward from the elementary school and the park, but few know the man behind it. Kathy McKillip talks with author Tammy Partsch about Colonel William Hayward, who was born in Nebraska City in 1877 and went on to command the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, in World War I.

The episode follows his path from Nebraska City High School and the University of Nebraska, where he served in Pershing's cadet corps, through the Spanish-American War, a law practice, and a failed run for Congress. Voters reportedly disliked his fancy car because it scared their horses. It then follows him to New York, where he worked in law and politics and was asked to lead a new all-Black National Guard regiment that had struggled to find a commander.

They cover how the regiment recruited in a Harlem theater and drilled with broomsticks, how it was loaned to the French army when white American units refused to fight alongside it, and how it earned a reputation as one of the war's most decorated units. They also discuss the racism the soldiers faced at home, including the Army's treatment of Colonel Charles Young, and the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to the regiment in 2021.

The conversation also touches on Hayward's later life, his connections to Broadway and Hollywood through his son, talent agent Leland Hayward, and his marriage into Gilded Age New York society. It's a story of how far one Nebraska City native traveled, and of an overlooked chapter in American history.

Applejack is now the fall festival Nebraska City is best known for, but its roots go back about a hundred years. Kathy McKillip talks with author Tammy Partsch about how it grew from small orchard fairs in the 1920s into the Apple Harvest Festival of the 1930s and 40s. Early editions featured a horseshoe-pitching champion, a festival agenda mailed to radio stations around the state, regional queen pageants, high school band competitions, and six-man football's Apple Bowl.

The festival then lapsed for years, until a small group of local men revived it in 1969 and, according to legend, gave it the name Applejack. From there the episode follows how it grew. Early additions like water barrel fights and big wheel races came and went, attendance rose from about 6,000 in 1988 to an estimated 90,000 today, and the 2020 festival was spread over four weekends. They explain why the town settled on two weekends since then, and how the city and the orchards each shape the event.

The conversation closes on the lessons of the festival's history: keep trying new things when old ones fail, and support the volunteers who make a community tradition possible.

On November 11, 1940, temperatures in southeast Nebraska plunged from the 60s to below zero in just a few hours, freezing the sap-filled trees and bursting them from the inside out. Kathy McKillip talks with author Tammy Partsch about how the storm destroyed roughly 75% of Nebraska City's commercial apple crop, why the area's soil made it such good orchard country, and how Grove Porter's marketing and lobbying helped orchards get through the aftermath. They also look at which orchards are still operating today, how the same storm became a deadly blizzard in the Upper Midwest, and why Armistice Day became Veterans Day in 1954. The episode is ultimately about perseverance, and Tammy's books on Nebraska history are mentioned at the close.

Dr. Sarah Crook joins Kathy McKillop to talk about her decades of work with Nebraska history organizations — from six years on the Nebraska State Historical Society board to her current role with the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, which helps fund tours, museum partnerships, and the "Wander Nebraska" program that gets travelers off I-80 and into the state's small-town museums and local businesses. The conversation then turns to one of Nebraska's best origin stories: the fight over where to put the state capital. Hear how the sleepy, riverless hamlet of Lancaster beat out Omaha and Fremont, how Omaha operatives allegedly hid every dictionary in the room to stall the spelling of "capital" vs. "capitol," how the new town got named Lincoln as part of a political trick that backfired, and how state records were smuggled out of Omaha under cover of darkness to make the move official. Along the way, Dr. Crook explains how Nebraska City — once a thriving Missouri River "jumping off point" — found its own growth slowed as the railroad reshaped the state around Lincoln and Omaha instead.

Dr. Sarah Crook returns to the Nebraska City Historical Society podcast with Kathy McKillop to explore how the region grew from frontier outpost to settled community. They trace Nebraska City's roots to old Fort Kearney (built in 1846, later relocated west, and famously misspelled), the pivotal 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, and why the town became a favored "jumping off point" for westward travelers along the Missouri River. The conversation turns to the waves of European immigrants — largely German Lutherans, alongside Irish, Polish, Czech, and Swedish settlers — who were drawn west by railroad recruiting campaigns and the Homestead Act, and how many small Nebraska towns still celebrate that heritage today through food and festivals. Along the way, Dr. Crook shares the sobering story of anti-German sentiment during World War I, when speaking German was criminalized and towns like Berlin, Nebraska renamed themselves overnight. A wide-ranging look at the people, policy, and geography that built Nebraska City and the state around it.

Dr. Sara Crook joins Kathy McKillip of the Nebraska City Historical Society to share the remarkable, often overlooked story of Barbara Mayhew — one of Nebraska City's earliest settlers and the sister of John Kagi, John Brown's right-hand man. Dr. Crook, who has portrayed Barbara in living-history performances for nearly two decades, traces how the Mayhew cabin (long known locally as "John Brown's Cave") became a stop on the Underground Railroad, the dangerous route abolitionists and freedom seekers traveled through Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa, and the high stakes — imprisonment, fines, even death — faced by those who helped. The conversation follows Barbara's brother John Kagi from the Shenandoah Valley to Bleeding Kansas to Harper's Ferry, where he was among the first killed, and reflects on what it meant for ordinary families like the Mayhews to risk everything for a cause that didn't directly benefit them. A moving look at territorial-era Nebraska, women's history, and the human side of the fight against slavery

In this episode, the Nebraska City Historical Society sits down with Doug Hansen of Hanson Wheel & Wagon Shop and historian Dr. Sarah Crook to explore the hand-forged craftsmanship behind the freighter's wagon — the workhorse vehicle that helped move 44 million pounds of freight out of Nebraska City in 1866 alone. Doug shares how a lifelong fascination with regional trails and historic vehicles turned into decades of self-taught, archaeologist-style research into wagon construction, from wheelwrighting and blacksmithing to the rigging systems that let teams of mules and oxen haul massive loads across the plains. The conversation covers the pre-industrial-revolution structure of Doug's shop, what makes the Concord stagecoach such a marvel of engineering, and why the unsung teamsters and bullwhackers who kept freight moving west deserve far more credit than they get. A must-listen for anyone curious about the real engineering and economic backbone of westward expansion.