1776 Bicentennial Prairie Marker 1976

Lancaster County keeps at least one other unplowed remnant. Nine Mile Prairie, about 230 acres five miles west and four miles north of downtown Lincoln, has never been plowed apart from a small piece farmed into the 1950s. Botany professor John Ernst Weaver studied it from the late 1910s or 1920s, digging trenches to trace prairie roots. It survived partly as the fenced buffer around a World War II bomb storage depot that closed in the early 1960s. The University of Nebraska Foundation bought it in 1983, and observers have recorded 392 vascular plants and 80 bird species there.

What the plaque says

1776 Bicentennial Prairie Marker 1976 You are overlooking original prairie never broken by a plow. Nebraska looked much like this 200 years ago before the white man came: Grasses on which buffalo, elk, deer and antelope fed; ground cover for homes for quail, grouse, and prairie chickens; pure spring- fed streams where thirsty animals and birds could drink and where fish spawned; areas where wild strawberries, grapes, plum and chokecherry bushes bore fruit; walnut, cottonwood, and willow trees provided shade; where colorful flowers bloomed -- wild indigo, purple coneflower, goldenrod, daisy fleabane, ground plum, dogtooth, and crowsfoot violets. A trail once used by the Pawnee Indians is now U.S. Highway 77. The area was shared with the Oto tribe. To the east in 1856 John Prey, A. J. and Richard Wallingford, and others became some of Lancaster County's first settlers. A few miles to the north, the Fort Kearny Cut-off carried wagon trains westward during the 1850's and 1860's. Sod like you see was cut and used by settlers to build homes. This marker rests on railroad land purchased by William Mitchell in the early 1880's and has been preserved by his descendants including his grandson, Charlton Mitchell. Elinor L. Brown Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Nebraska State Capitol — 13 mi
  Bertram Goodhue's 400-foot tower on the prairie, built in four phases from 1922 to 1932 and paid off on completion, home of the only one-house legislature in the country.
• Homestead National Historical Park — 24 mi
  Daniel Freeman's claim on Cub Creek near Beatrice, one of the first filed under the Homestead Act, with a one-room school, a homesteader's cabin, restored prairie and the land's earlier owners.

More markers nearby

• Rock Island Wreck Site, 1894 — 8.2 mi
• Nebraska City-Fort Kearny Cutoff — 9.3 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Co. 2738 — 11 mi
• The Lincoln Regional Center — 11 mi