Trip to Boise: Lone Jack to Minden

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Entrance to the Harold Warp Pioneer Museum

Yesterday was a little rainy - the coolest day we have seen in quite a while.  We left Lake Paradise Resort in Lone Jack, Missouri, at 11 AM and arrived in Minden, Nebraska, about 6:30 last night.   We came to Minden to visit the
Harold Warp Pioneer Village.  The entrance isn't very impressive, but the place is INCREDIBLE.

Harold Warp was born in a sod house near present-day Minden in 1903, the child of Norwegian immigrants.  He moved to Chicago in 1924 and turned a plastic window material he developed into a fortune. Warp Bros. is still doing business and has a presence on the internet.

When Harold Warp heard that the school he had attended as a child was to be destroyed, he bought it and began creating his Pioneer Village.  There are 25 buildings spread over several acres housing over 50,000 items showing the progress of life in the United States from pioneer days to the present.  Included are a frontier fort/log cabin, a sod house, the schoolhouse mentioned above, a general store, a train depot with two locomotives, a church, a livery stable, a fire house, a land office (the one where Harold's father filed his homesteading claim),  a firehouse, a Pony Express barn, a Pony Express station, a blacksmith shop, and many large warehouse type buildings housing a couple of Conestoga wagons, multiple horseless carriages, over 350 antique cars, several airplanes, hundreds of examples of farm machinery, horseless carriages, and many other thousands of historical items.

We wandered around in the village for about four hours and saw only a fraction of it.  A few of my pictures are included below.  For some better shots, click here.