Harvard Jail

The jail's wartime buyer was already a radio star. Charlie McCarthy was built for Edgar Bergen by the carpenter and dummy maker Theodore Mack and later rebuilt by Frank Marshall, and the present Charlie was sold to Bergen for $35 in 1923. The pair debuted on NBC's The Royal Gelatin Hour in 1936 and the next year took a starring role on The Chase and Sanborn Hour, renamed The Charlie McCarthy Show in 1947. One of the original Charlie dummies is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

What the plaque says

Harvard Jail The jail was inadvertently sold to Robert Pinckney, 16, in a delinquent tax sale in 1943. When the city refused to buy back the jail, sparking a legal battle that earned national publicity, Pinckney put the jail up for auction at a West Coast war bond drive. Charlie McCarthy, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's puppet, "bought" the jail for $10,000 in war bonds and deeded it back to Harvard. Estimated to be over 130 years old, the jail was refurbished in 2008-10. Harvard Community Foundation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer — 23 mi
  Edward Durell Stone's island pavilion in Grand Island and an 1890s railroad town of moved buildings, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905.

More markers nearby

• Harvard Army Air Field — steps away
• Midair Collision of B-17 Bombers — steps away
• Harvard's 1915 Carnegie Library — steps away
• St. John's Episcopal Church - Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska — 0.2 mi