12 Jul 2023 - Several Museums; Buffalo Bill State Hist. Park; Canteen Monument; Runza

 

Doreen at the controls!

We had a very busy day starting at the Cody Park Railroad Museum.  If you have not figured it out by now, the railroad had and continues to have a huge impact on North Platte.  This museum is also free of charge and features a massive Challenger Steam Locomotive which saw service from 1943 until  1961.  Also featured is a Union Pacific Centennial locomotive.  

  

Other rail cars include a mail car, a baggage car, a Pacific Fruit Express boxcar, and a caboose. Inside each of the cars are artifacts and memorabilia.

The mail car.  

How the passing train catches the mail bag

We then visited the Challenger locomotive and were amazed at the controls.  Doreen is pictured above at the helm!  

In addition to the train cars there is an actual depot station from Hershey NE, just west of here.  It looks like they just locked the doors and walked away from it!  

From here we drove a couple miles to the Lincoln County Historical Museum.  

This museum opened on July 4, 1976, and encompasses approximately eight acres that includes the main museum building and an entire village made up of primarily historic structures from the Lincoln County area. Their focus is the native culture and history of this region of the Great Plains.

Inside we found a great displays on railroads, the Canteen from World War II, various rooms depicting furniture and items from the past, military related items, geological items from the area  - you name it and they have it!  Even a little telephone museum which I routinely seek out!!  Some pictures:

Railroad-related displays

A typical dining room

The telephone portion.  They had an old corded switchboard, old phones and tools of the trade, many of which I have used!!

There were many other historical areas covered but one of the most interesting was about the Canteen. Local women prepared food and as the trains stopped with service members on board headed west to serve in World War II, they would feed them and make sure they had coffee or other beverages.  One really cool fact is that if it were made known that any of the service members had a birthday, they would present them a cake complete with candles!  How awesome is that?!  We discussed this yesterday, but five doors of the old 1916 Union Pacific Depot in North Platte were removed when the building was razed, and they were relocated here and used as the front and back doors of this museum.  So, if you think about it, over 6 million service men and women passed through the doors on this building from when the canteen first started operating on December 25, 1941 until April 1, 1946!

The actual depot where the canteen operation took place was razed in 1973 but they have created a memorial in downtown North Platte and we will visit it later today.  In the mean time, we enjoyed the displays here.  

Outside the museum there is an entire village made up of primarily historic structures from the Lincoln County area.  Due to time we did not visit them all, but there is farm machinery, a schoolhouse, a kit house, a blacksmith shop, other village shops, cabins, barns, and many others.  

You could easily spend many hours here, but we had to move on to the next stop, the Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park.

This was originally a 4000-acre ranch and the home of the legendary scout, buffalo hunter, and showman, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and his family.  The facility is called "Scout's Rest and was built for Buffalo Bill in 1886 as a place to relax between show tours.  The house cost $3900 then and the rear addition was added in 1909.  

We toured the house which included many rooms and artifacts belonging to Buffalo Bill.  Some pictures:

Outside we passed a spring house, the cob house and the ice house.  There are many outbuildings on the premise, but one prominent one is the barn.  Inside there are many wagons, pictures, various exhibits and even play bills that Cody glued to the walls. 

 

The old play bills that were glued to the wall.

On our way back to the truck I captured this shot of the mansion through the trees.  This is such a beautiful and peaceful place.  They also have concerts here on certain nights, which might be nice to attend.  

Our last stop for the day was the Front Street Park Canteen Monument.  It was built to commemorate the Canteen operation at the site of the old train depot building, which is gone as explained before. 

 

There is an area of downtown called the "Historic Canteen District".

This is the monument, where the depot used to be.

It just would not be a stop in Nebraska without having a runza for lunch, so on our way back to the campground we stopped to pick up a couple.  Last year when we came through Alliance and Kearney we mentioned the runza sandwich.  Here in Nebraska, a runza sold by the Runza restaurant chain, is a yeast dough bread pocket with a filling consisting of ground beef, cabbage, onion and spice.  They are good and there are some variations available with mushrooms, swiss cheese, etc, but we just got the plain ones.

That's it for today.  Tomorrow is our last day here before we move on to Denver.  No big plans for tomorrow other than our normal 'day-before-we-depart' tasks such as laundry, dumping and fueling.