Gretna Fish Hatchery

The spring the plaque credits still runs, and the site has been rebuilt around it. Fish were hatched here for about a hundred years, until the 1970s, and the 1914 hatch house is the third on the grounds. With money from the Nebraska Environmental Trust and private donors, Game and Parks has remade the old canyon ponds into a wading stream that feeds a trout pond, where trout can be seen all year and a quarter buys fish food. A treehouse classroom opened in the woods in May 2025, open weekends and Mondays.

What the plaque says

Gretna Fish Hatchery In 1879, the State Legislature created the Board of Fish Commissioners, the forerunner of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. That board contracted with a privately owned firm known as the Santee Hatchery. The owners, Mr. Romine and Mr. Decker, attended to early fish propagation in the original building on this site. Three years later the board purchased the hatchery and 54 acres for $1,200. The site was chosen because of an ample supply of spring water, which still supplies the canyon ponds above this site. The fish commission replaced the original hatch house in 1889, and in 1914, when that frame structure proved inadequate, it was replaced by this structure at a cost of $4,000. Today the old hatch house serves as a museum devoted to fish culture and related activities. The original 54-acre tract has been adjoined with 277 acres donated by the late E. F. "Pop" Schramm, Professor of Geology at the University of Nebraska. Nebraska Game and Parks Commission Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 3.8 mi
  Two hangar-sized halls beside I-80 near Ashland holding the bombers and reconnaissance planes of the command that ran America's nuclear force from Offutt, south of Omaha, from 1948 to 1992.
• Joslyn Art Museum — 23 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) — 23 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 — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Prehistoric Burial Site — 3.5 mi
• The Ox-Bow Trail — 5.8 mi
• St. Patrick's Cemetery — 7.1 mi
• Springfield Community Hall — 7.3 mi