Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer

Leo Stuhr was the son of Peter and Anna Stuhr, early settlers of Hall County. He studied chemistry at the University of Nebraska, sat in the state House in 1917 and 1918, became Nebraska's first secretary of agriculture in 1918, and was appointed to the Federal Farm Board in 1930. In 1961, the year he died, the Hall County Board of Supervisors created a museum board in his name, and a temporary museum opened downtown in May 1962.

The county hired Edward Durell Stone, the architect of the Kennedy Center, for the permanent building, and it was dedicated in July 1967 after a flood delayed the work. It is a square, two-story modernist pavilion with porticoes on all four sides and a pyramidal skylight over a central gallery with four square fountain pools, finished in Granulux, a plaster with marble chips, and set on a round island in a man-made lake. It holds art and history galleries.

Beyond it, on 208 acres of prairie, Railroad Town gathers original buildings moved from around the region into an 1890s prairie village: shops, a school, a church, a farmstead and houses, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905. From spring through fall, costumed interpreters work the buildings and talk with visitors about how a town like this kept itself going; in winter the streets are open to walk, and the buildings open only for programs. The museum also has a replica Pawnee earth lodge and has been widening its telling of the Pawnee, on whose homeland it stands.