Cuming City Cemetery and Nature Preserve

The town took its name from Thomas Barney Cuming, the territory's acting governor. Born in Genesee County, New York, on Christmas Day 1827, he edited the Keokuk Dispatch before he was named territorial secretary and reached Nebraska on October 8, 1854. Governor Francis Burt died ten days later. Cuming put the capital at Omaha rather than Bellevue and gave most legislative seats to the northern counties, though 1,818 of the census's 2,732 people lived south of the Platte. He was accused of fraud and bribery and died in Omaha on March 12, 1858, aged 30.

What the plaque says

Cuming City Cemetery and Nature Preserve Traditionally known as the Cuming City Cemetery, this eleven-acre tract of land was set aside in 1976 primarily as a preserve for native vegetation. Never plowed, this prairie looks much like it did to the Indians and to the first white men who settled Nebraska in the 1850's.. Grasses such as big and little bluestem, Indian grass, and side-oats grama still grow here. Now owned by Dana College, the site was acquired with the assistance of The Nature Conservancy and the Cuming City Cemetery Association. Part of this plot is reserved as a burial ground for the descendants of Lewis M. Kline, pioneer news- paperman who helped found Cuming City in 1855. By 1857 the town boasted 53 homes, 3 stores, and 3 hotels. It disappeared in the 1870's, when most of its citizens moved to Blair on the new railroad. The main north-south street of the old town site of Cuming City is now U.S. Highway 73, 1 1/4 miles southeast of here. The Kline family, which had its first burial here in 1857, donated this acreage to Cuming City for a cemetery. Many of those buried here were later removed to the Blair Cemetery where maintenance is provided. Cuming City Cemetery Association Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Atkinson State Historical Park — 12 mi
  The first U.S. Army post west of the Missouri, a garrison town of more than a thousand people on Council Bluff from 1820 to 1827, rebuilt on its own foundations.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 21 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.
• Malcolm X Birthsite — 23 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.
• Joslyn Art Museum — 26 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.

More markers nearby

• Congregational Church of Blair — 3.8 mi
• Lewis and Clark Campsites: August 3 and 4, 1804 — 4.3 mi
• Brewster Cemetery — 5.7 mi
• DeSoto Townsite — 7.1 mi