The Oregon Trail

Judge W. R. Burton's 1916 history of Adams County follows the trail about seventy miles up the Little Blue, leaving the river near Leroy. By then the Oregon Trail Memorial Commission had set three markers in the county, one near the Clay County line and one on the grounds of School District 12, and Hastings's Niobrara Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution had placed another on the road south to Leroy. Clarence S. Paine of Lincoln, the commission's secretary, wrote that two or three more were needed, but no one would take on setting them.

What the plaque says

The Oregon Trail The most traveled of the overland routes passed this point on its way to the great Platte valley, highway to the west. The Oregon Trail started from Independence, followed the Kansas River west, and then the Little Blue north into Nebraska. It crossed this divide to reach the Platte near Fort Kearny. In the 1830's trappers and missionaries recognized the Platte valley as a natural roadway. The first wagon train followed the 2,000-mile trail to Oregon in 1841. An estimated quarter of a million travelers used this route in the twenty-five years after those first wagons. Moving slowly, only 10 to 20 miles a day on the three-month trip, thousands of hooves, shoes, and wheels pounded a wide trail into the prairie sod. Oregon was an early goal. The '49'ers went this way to California. Settlers, stage coaches, freighting wagons, Pony Express riders, and military expeditions all used this prairie highway. With completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869, this route fell into disuse, but the Oregon Trail had earned a permanent place in our history. Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rowe Sanctuary — 19 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.
• Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer — 24 mi
  Edward Durell Stone's island pavilion in Grand Island and an 1890s railroad town of moved buildings, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905.
• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Hastings Chautauqua Pavilion — 7.8 mi
• Hastings Brickyard Park — 7.9 mi
• Central Hastings Historic District — 8.9 mi
• Heartwell Park Historic District — 9.7 mi