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WE CLIMB TOWARD the pinnacle of a 50-foot-high tree house, and I quickly find myself left behind by 16 energetic first-graders from Nebraska City’s Lourdes Central Catholic School.
When I finally catch up, slightly out of breath, the field-trip kids are surveying the woods around us, looking down on the surrounding trees at Arbor Day Farm’s Tree Adventure. There is life in this canopy; the sharp eyes of the children notice movement among the branches and point excitedly. A black squirrel, in the habit of looking down on humanity, stares up at us with curiosity.
Our spirited tour guide, Heather Austin, easily keeps pace with the children and tells us, “It’s good luck to see a black squirrel,” an odd-colored variant of the usually reddish fox squirrel.
But our presence is bad luck, or at least a distraction for the rodent – it loses its grip on an acorn, which then falls to the forest floor. The animal scurries down the tree, into a hole and looks out as if embarrassed.
“The woods are the animal’s grocery store,” said Austin as the sound of giggling children echoed through the woods.
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During Nebraska Life’s recent trips to our state’s namesake community, we discovered that like the dropped acorn, that will eventually sprout roots, there’s a lot of growing going on in Nebraska City. And plenty of good luck to go around.
But it wasn’t always that way.
In 1860, a blaze erupted. The bucket brigade that was formed only four years earlier sprung to action and tried mightily to beat the growing inferno one gallon at a time. The nightmarish fire angrily swept away 41 buildings. With much of the city destroyed, many residents left.Underground cisterns with a capacity of 25,000 gallons were built around town to ensure the brigade, now Nebraska’s oldest fire department, could prevent similar disasters. With that improvement, the town began to grow again. Still, in 1901, the heat of bad luck was felt again when the fire station itself burned.
Tom Schreiner has battled blazes in Nebraska City for 51 years. A burning passion for firefighting history led him to help form the Nebraska City Museum of Firefighting, one of nine museums in this city of 7,000 residents. Museum number 10 is in the works (see “Visiting Historic Nebraska City” on page 86). Schreiner, known locally as “T,” may have been instrumental in the firefighting museum’s development, but he didn’t do it alone.
Brian Volkmer also has a nickname. He’s known affectionately as “Mr. Museum.” Volkmer is a Nebraska City native, and his experience working for museums in Texas, South Dakota and Ohio made him a good fit for the Nebraska City Museum Association. All they had to do was convince him.Volkmer came home in 2001 for a much-needed break. But instead of rest, Volkmer found a new labor of love as director of the association.
“Mr. Museum? Yeah right, you can’t print what we really call him,” Schreiner said as he and Volkmer laughed together at the zinger.
