Creighton University

The second brother on the plaque outlived the first by thirty-three years and spent much of it paying for this campus. John A. Creighton, born in Licking County, Ohio, in 1831, superintended construction on Edward's telegraph and went to Montana for gold before returning to Omaha in 1868, the year he married Sarah Emily Wareham, sister of Edward's wife. By his death on February 7, 1907, he was said to have given the university at least $2,000,000, including an observatory in 1888 and a medical school named for him. Pope Leo XIII made him a count in 1898.

What the plaque says

Creighton University This University is named for Edward and John A. Creighton--Ohio farm boys who gained immortality in the West. They helped to link our coasts by telegraph during the Civil War. They pioneered as cattlemen on the Laramie Plains, as merchants in the Montana gold fields, as financiers and devoted citizens of their adopted city. By stagecoach and muleback Edward surveyed the western telegraph route and was a prime builder for the line completed in 1861. The Creightons provided poles, surveyed, built, rebuilt or raised and collected subscriptions for a good portion of the lines extending west from Buffalo, N.Y., to San Francisco. In 1863 Edward became the initial president of the first national bank opened in Omaha. This civic leader gave freely of his time and substance to assure Omaha's position as eastern terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad. Thus, both major national projects of the last half of the nineteenth century owed much to these pioneers. Creighton University, a memorial to these men, opened its doors in 1878. It has grown to this complex institution with many academic divisions. The Creighton University Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Joslyn Art Museum — 0.3 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station) — 1.4 mi
  Omaha's 1931 Union Station, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific, closed to trains in 1971 and kept as a city museum with its waiting room intact.
• Malcolm X Birthsite — 2.0 mi
  The North Omaha lot where Malcolm Little was born in May 1925 and his family was driven out by the Klan, saved by Rowena Moore and now planned as a cultural center.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 4.9 mi
  The Latter-day Saint camp of 1846 to 1848 on Omaha land in what is now Florence, where hundreds died the first winter, and the cemetery and trail center beside it.

More markers nearby

• Before Creighton — 0.3 mi
• Capitol Hill — 0.4 mi
• Kountze Memorial Lutheran Church — 0.5 mi
• Duchesne Academy — 1.0 mi