Osco Cemetery and School

Osco was also a post office. The Kearney County history in Who's Who in Nebraska (1940) records it as established in 1875 on the southwest quarter of Section 8, Township 5, Range 13, then moved several times, its last postmaster Lewis T. Meyer. The same history names the Danish Baptist Church of Osco in the southeastern part of the county. The schoolhouse the association bought in 1949 still stood on Osco Road in September 2025, white clapboard, and a cast plate on its concrete foundation reads USA 1937 WPA.

What the plaque says

Osco Cemetery and School Pioneers settling in this area, including many Civil War veterans, bought five acres from the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad for $25 and established a school in 1875. Osco School District No. 6 deeded two acres for the Pleasant Prairie Graveyard in 1876, and the earliest known burials took place that year. More acreage was purchased in 1898, and the name was later changed to Osco Cemetery. It is the oldest organized cemetery in Kearney County. Two monuments honoring veterans are located in the cemetery, the newest one having been erected in 1995. On Memorial Day, formerly "Decoration Day," veterans' organizations from Campbell, Upland, Minden, and Heartwell have helped recognize the Osco veterans. Children from Osco School also took part. The cemetery never affiliated with a church, but kept its ties to the school. Volunteers have always seen to the upkeep of both. In 1949 the Osco School closed its doors and was purchased by the Osco Cemetery Association. Through the years the building was used for cemetery meetings, as a polling place, and for serving lunch on Memorial Day. Contributors to Osco Cemetery Association Nebraska State Historical Society, 2010

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rowe Sanctuary — 21 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.
• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 21 mi
  The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.
• National Willa Cather Center — 25 mi
  The restored Moon Block on Red Cloud's Webster Street, home of the Willa Cather Foundation, with the town she grew up in and wrote about laid out around it.
• Harlan County Lake — 31 mi
  Nebraska's second-largest lake, held behind an Army Corps dam on the Republican between Alma and Republican City, built after the flood of 1935 ran bluff to bluff.

More markers nearby

• Catherland — 16 mi
• Axtell, Nebraska — 18 mi
• Walker's Ranch — 18 mi
• The Oregon Trail — 19 mi