Peru State College

Teacher training here meant real pupils. Peru Prep, a high school where student teachers taught, ran in the building now named for T. J. Majors until the late 1960s. The Little Red Schoolhouse beside this marker once stood at the corner of Highways 67 and 75 and was moved onto campus in the early 2000s. The football team plays in the Oak Bowl, completed in 1901, and the school calls itself the Campus of a Thousand Oaks. Peru has been part of the Nebraska State College System since its creation in 1978. It enrolled 1,492 students in fall 2024.

What the plaque says

Peru State College On June 20, 1867, at the urging of Civil War veteran and legislator Col. Thomas J. Majors, the state legislature established a teacher training school at Peru on the site of the former Mount Vernon Seminary. Called the Nebraska State Normal School, it was one of the first of its kind west of the Missouri River. The school's purpose was to train young men and women "in the arts of teaching, and in all the various branches that pertain to a good common school education." The curriculum would include instruction in the trades, agriculture, the law, and the rights and duties of citizenship. On October 24, 1867, when the first classes convened with thirty-two students, the campus consisted of sixty acres and a single building. During the next thirty-eight years, the school was the only teacher education institution in the state. As Nebraska's population increased and additional state normal schools were established, the legislature expanded normal education from two to four years. In 1949 the school's name was changed to Peru State Teachers College. It was renamed Peru State College in 1963. Peru State College Nebraska State Historical Society, 2015 Peru State College Phi Alpha Theta Honorary Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brownville — 6.6 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.
• Arbor Lodge State Historical Park — 16 mi
  J. Sterling Morton's estate in Nebraska City, a four-room house of 1855 grown to 52 rooms among the trees he planted, home of the man who proposed Arbor Day in 1872.
• Indian Cave State Park — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Muir House — 6.6 mi
• The Nebraska State Teachers' Association — 6.6 mi
• Brownville — 6.6 mi
• Lewis and Clark Campsite: July 15, 1804 — 7.0 mi