One November day, ditch diggers in Miller Park struck steel.
Steel, and a lot of it.
Their find in 1933 was a 60-foot bridge, one of two repurposed from the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition, that had crossed the long-gone Fort Omaha Creek gully.
Why was it still there, north of Minne Lusa Boulevard and Redick Avenue, and underground?
Cost. Cheaper to dump dirt on it than to move it.
“We laid a sewer in there,” former Park Commissioner Joe Hummel said, “and filled the gully in. The bridge wasn’t needed any more, so we buried it.”
Miller Park dates to 1893.
It could have been home to some of the city’s well-known attractions, past and present. The Nebraska State Fair and the exposition. The zoo. Ak-Sar-Ben. UNO. A junior high school.
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All went elsewhere.
Miller Park is named for Dr. George L. Miller, the physician who started the Omaha Herald, one of this newspaper’s forerunners.
Had it been up to him, the father of the city’s park system, the 80 acres bought for $75,000 from William F. Parker would have a different name.
Cuming, for Thomas Cuming, a territorial governor for whom Cuming Street is named. Curtis, for Gen. Samuel Curtis, who as a U.S. congressman had helped secure Omaha as the eastern starting point for the transcontinental railroad.
But Miller Park it became. In gratitude, Dr. Miller donated large trees from his Seymour Park estate (today’s Ralston) for transplanting in Miller and Fontenelle Parks.
First-year improvements included grading of the cornfield, with a few ravines, for two miles of drives, 1½ miles of walks, one temporary bridge and 5,500 trees planted in nursery rows. The park gained a lake the next year.
This was a period of depression and drought, which led to poor park maintenance.
The Omaha Bee in December 1894 saw better uses for the parkland:
“The fact is Miller Park is not much better than as ordinary corn field today, and no matter how much money the commission squanders upon it 20 years must lapse before it can become a well-shaded and attractive park ground.
“On the other hand, if used for exposition, zoological garden and driving park the city will get its money’s worth and the ground will be utilized, whereas the location of the fairgrounds and driving park on another tract will leave Miller Park dreary and unattractive for years.”
The state fair and driving park went to 63rd and Shirley Streets, the future site of Ak-Sar-Ben. The zoo, to Riverview Park (and now Henry Doorly Zoo). The Trans-Mississippi, to southwest of 16th Street and Ames Avenue.
Before Miller Park had its first lake, it had a water tragedy. On Jan. 2, 1894, 10-year-old Robert Nelson, son of a well-known attorney, fell through thin ice in the creek while trying out his Christmas-gift skates and drowned in 6 feet of water.
The seven-acre lake, formed by dredging and damming the creek, by 1896 had become a mecca for skinny-dipping. Numerous complaints, the Bee reported, claimed that individuals were bathing in it “without regarding the propriety of bathing suits and the board proposes to prosecute all such offenders in the future.”
The city put a pest house — temporary quarters for epidemic patients — in the park in 1899. The frame cottage, leased by the city, burned to the ground 10 days after the North Omaha Improvement Club filed suit against the pest house’s existence.
Miller Park gained its exposition-surplus bridges in 1901-02. When the first bridge was moved, a 12-foot center section of the bridge floor was removed to lighten the load. Lesson learned, the concrete floor of the second bridge was dug out and discarded before its move up Florence Boulevard.
Significant changes in the park in 1905-06 were the first city-owned golf course and a reconstructed lake.
The old lake silted in, as city engineers had predicted, from storm water. The new excavation was protected from a repeat and was fed from city water mains and the springs found in the area.
The nine holes of golf, which opened in May 1906, were between 24th Street and the lake.
By 1914, Miller Park had facilities the equal of any city park. Besides the course and the lake, it had two tennis courts, a baseball diamond, cricket grounds and football field. A $10,000 public pavilion, opened in 1909, included a kitchen, showers for men and women, 75 lockers, a check room for parcels and a lunch room that sold meals, soft drinks, candy and cigars.
Large users of the golf course were the 350 members of the Prettiest Mile Golf Club. Prettiest Mile was the name bestowed on Florence Boulevard between the park and Ames Avenue.
In August 1917 the club opened a $25,000 clubhouse across Redick Avenue from the park at Minne Lusa Boulevard. The two stories and basement housed a large ballroom, billiard rooms, bowling lanes, private lockers, showers, children’s playroom, women’s parlor, card rooms and library.
Its board was comprised solely of women.
“Our husbands were too busy to do the project justice,” said Mrs. Fred M. Crane, president of the board. “We told them to give us sufficient authority and we would see that the building was put up.”
Because of a foreclosure, the club was reorganized in 1930 as the Birchwood Club. It became Hayden House in 1973, then turned into the Viking Ship indoor youth sports facility in 1978. The current occupant is Nova Gymnastics and Boxing.
Miller Park was among the sites considered for the Municipal University of Omaha when it outgrew its 24th and Pratt Street campus in the 1930s.
Twenty years later, the Omaha Public Schools contemplated placing a junior high school in the northeast corner of the park. Instead, McMillan Junior High (now a middle school) opened in 1958 a half-mile west of the park on Redick Avenue.
A swimming pool for Miller, with bathing suits required, and six tennis courts opened in 1950. A water park in 1999 replaced the pool.
The golf course was remade in 1981 to nine par-3 holes, closing three holes near the swimming, tennis and playground areas and building three holes in the northeast portion of the park.
In 2009, the course was named for Steve Hogan, the first Black member of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America’s Nebraska Section. He managed the course from 1990 until his death in 2008 from colon cancer and started Hogan’s Junior Golf Heroes that became a nationally recognized youth program.
The latest transformation of the park, over five years concluding in 2022 for about $8.4 million in improvements, included refurbishing of the 1909 pavilion, new amphitheater, walking trail, dog park, sports courts and Kerrie Orozco Memorial Ballfield. Except for the ballfield, which was funded separately, the Lozier Foundation provided most of the upgrades.
If only those Trans-Mississippi bridges could have been available as architectural decoration.
One did go to a good cause.
It went into the statewide World War II scrap drive in 1942, for which The World-Herald received the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Stories of Omaha's history by Stu Pospisil
That idea to move traffic from 30th Street has been bandied about since the 1930s.
Many Omahans of a certain age remember visiting Santa at Toyland in the Brandeis department store. The tradition dated to the 1900s when J.L. Brandeis and Sons were the proprietors of the Boston Store.
The Benson and the Hanscom are only two of the more than 70 theaters that sprung up outside downtown Omaha during the first half of the 20th century. The majority opened — and closed — during the era of silent films.
Omaha’s first auto club, formed in 1902, included 20 of the city’s 25 auto owners. Their first activity was a road rally to Blair and back.
Take a look back at the history of the Chermot Ballroom and some of the big names that played there.
The New Tower’s front lobby had a Normandy castle motif with great stone walls, heraldic crests and wood-burning fireplace. The massive beams and lofty ceilings carried over into the Crest Dining Room.
A generation of Omahans — and newcomers to the city — likely are unaware that Peony Park, the major amusement spot from the 1930s through 1994, was at 78th and Cass Streets.
Pardon the pun, but another of my deep digs has turned up forgotten burial grounds across Douglas County.
The fame of Curo Springs was so far-reaching that in pioneer days — every fall and spring — people from 100 miles away (some crossing the Missouri in crude boats) would come to load up with the water.
Here are some books relating to Omaha and Nebraska history, many by local authors, to check out.
They were the twin banes in Omaha’s pioneer years. One of them came back to life during the nighttime deluge that hit the area last weekend.
The Omaha Chamber of Commerce was prepared to remove its $35,000 hangar — built in modular sections — until the city was ready to build a municipal airport. Then came back-to-back windstorms.
Research has turned up a juicy nugget — the whereabouts of the burial site of Omaha, the Triple Crown horse in 1935. Hint: there are people resting every night on top of it.
Keystone has become the name applied to the area bounded by 72nd and 90th Streets, Maple Street, Military Avenue and Fort Street. It has expanded since Keystone Park was platted in 1907.
Ezra Meeker’s crusade is credited for reawakening awareness of the Oregon Trail in the early 20th century. In the process, he erroneously linked Omaha to the trail and others took his word for it.
An Omaha real estate firm had the idea in the heyday of the '20s that it could sell 1,500 cottage lots platted away from the lakes and the Platte River. So what happened?
Check out a glimpse of Omaha’s Black history before 1880.
The Dan Parmelee-Tom Keeler feud, which included an Old West shootout on the outskirts of old Elkhorn in December 1874, left Keeler dead and made news nationwide.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Omahans had their pick of drive-in movie theaters. Cars with families and cars with teens -- some watching the film and others, well, you know -- side by side, wired speakers hanging inside a car door.
Clontarf never was incorporated as a village, but functioned like one and wielded political clout larger than its 47 acres. There was a lawless element, too.
'Mascotte was a big joke but it looked good while it lasted.' The village had a factory, railroad depot, hotel, general store, school and about 40 cottages. By 1915, it was all gone.
West Dodge Road has been rebuilt over and over. And along the way, the Old Mill area has lost its mill, its hazardous Dead Man’s Curve and the most beautiful bridge in the county.