Nemaha River Falls

Falls City began as a free-state base. After pro-slavery men blockading the Missouri turned back 78 emigrants on June 20, 1856, a Kansas free-state committee laid out an overland route from the Nebraska line to Topeka that July, and James Lane led about 200 men across Iowa to Nebraska City. Lane, taken with the Nemaha valley and the power of the falls, pictured a city by the falls, and the town founded in 1857 became the Lane Trail's Nebraska base. Its first home builders, Dave and Anne Dorrington, were abolitionists from New York.

What the plaque says

Nemaha River Falls In 1850, a group of pioneers from Maryland founded a small community on the banks of the swift-moving Nemaha River. Known as Falls Mills, the settlement was near the junction with the Missouri River and considered an ideal spot for a grinding mill. Heavy spring rains sent the river out of its banks, forcing settlers to seek higher ground a few miles north. The new location, incorporated in 1857, came to be known as Falls City. Richardson Foundation, Inc. City of Falls City History Nebraska, 2020

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Indian Cave State Park — 13 mi
  Wooded Missouri River bluffs in the old Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation, with carvings of animals cut into a sandstone shelter, the ghost town of St. Deroin and miles of trail.
• Brownville — 22 mi
  A Missouri River town of 1854 that bet on a railroad and lost, kept its arts through the decline, and now has Nebraska's oldest repertory theatre and a 1932 steam dredge on the bank.
• Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum — 25 mi
  The surviving part of an 1846 Presbyterian mission school near Highland, built largely with the tribes' own annuity money and returned to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska in 2021. Closed during remodeling.

More markers nearby

• First Oil Well — 3.7 mi
• Missouri River — 9.5 mi
• Lewis and Clark Camp Site: July 13, 1804 — 9.5 mi
• The Lane Trail — 14 mi