Springfield Community Hall

Springfield voted for the hall on June 21, 1938, 145 of 179 ballots in favor, after the Springfield Monitor promised a $12,000 building for $4,000 to $5,000 with WPA labor. Omaha architect Floyd Henzie drew the plans. The town's old frame opera house was bought and torn down for salvage, and the cornerstone was laid on April 25, 1939, to music from a WPA band from Omaha. The front wall has stones set at random that show fossil leaves. Until 1960 the 51-by-109-foot hall was the town's basketball court and graduation stage.

What the plaque says

Springfield Community Hall The Springfield Community Hall was constructed between 1938 and 1940 by the Works Progress Administration, a national relief program during the Great Depression. Construction of the hall, using sandstone quarried a few miles west of town, bolstered the local economy by employing area men. Since its completion, the building has provided Springfield with a public facility which has been used for educational, recreational, and political events. In 1998 the structure was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. City of Springfield Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 11 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 — 16 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) — 16 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 — 17 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

• New Pennsylvania Cemetery — 6.9 mi
• Papillion Boy Scouts' Cabin — 6.9 mi
• Original Union Pacific Main Line through Papillion — 7.1 mi
• Gretna Fish Hatchery — 7.3 mi