The North Bottoms

The neighborhood found its first scholar in Hattie Plum Williams, an Iowa-born graduate student at the University of Nebraska. Her 1909 master's thesis was a history of Lincoln's German-Russian colony, and she counted about 4,000 people in the city, beet-field workers included. In 1913 and 1914 she took a census of the German-Russian neighborhoods, which was published in 1969 with Jacob Stroh. Her 1916 doctorate, A Social Study of the Russian German, made her one of the early women sociologists at the university. She died in 1963 and is buried in Shelby, Iowa.

What the plaque says

The North Bottoms The North Bottoms neighborhood was settled by Germans from Russia beginning in the 1870s. During the preceding century they had colonized in Russia, attracted by offers of free land, military exemption, and political autonomy. In 1871, when the Czar revoked these privileges, a flood of German emigration to the Americas began. Immigrants were drawn to the Great Plains by land and jobs. Lincoln became a major destination. Here most took residence along the bottom lands of Salt Creek, where frequent flooding diminished land values and rail yards offered employment. Settlers from the same villages clustered together, creating a distinct neighborhood. The North Bottoms ethnic enclave developed its own businesses, social groups, churches, and schools. Small houses on long, narrow lots followed either Old World models or the new American styles. In the backyards, chicken coops, tiny barns, and summer kitchens recalled the old country agricultural community. Descendants have largely dispersed throughout Lincoln and the nation, but North Bottoms reminds us of the old "urban villages" immigrants built in a new land. Faith United Church of Christ City of Lincoln Nebraska State Historical Society Immanuel Church

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Nebraska State Capitol — 1.3 mi
  Bertram Goodhue's 400-foot tower on the prairie, built in four phases from 1922 to 1932 and paid off on completion, home of the only one-house legislature in the country.
• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Pershing Rifles — 0.4 mi
• The University of Nebraska — 0.5 mi
• The Lewis-Syford House — 0.6 mi
• Lincoln's Founding Block — 0.7 mi