Nebraska City

Nebraska City sits on a high bluff above the Missouri River, a spot Lewis and Clark camped near on their way upstream, and it might have stayed just another quiet river town if not for a transplanted newspaperman named J. Sterling Morton, who arrived on the treeless prairie in the 1850s and became so obsessed with planting that he eventually founded Arbor Day. Lia and I drove in on a crisp fall morning, orchard signs multiplying along the highway, and it was obvious within a mile that Morton’s obsession had taken root well beyond his own front yard.

Arbor Lodge and the roots of Arbor Day

We spent a long morning at Arbor Lodge, Morton’s home turned state historical park, a fifty-two-room mansion swallowed in a landscaped arboretum of oaks, black walnuts, and conifers he and his family planted by hand over five decades. A park guide walked us past a towering bur oak said to date to Morton’s earliest years there, explaining how his campaign, launched in 1872, led over a million trees to be planted across Nebraska on that first Arbor Day alone. Standing under that canopy on what had once been open, wind-scoured prairie, the scale of the idea finally landed for both of us — an entire modern American holiday started because one stubborn man refused to accept a landscape without shade.

Orchards and the river bluffs

Nebraska City has leaned fully into its founder’s legacy, and the hills around town are now ringed with apple orchards that draw families out every autumn for cider, pie, and pick-your-own afternoons. We filled a bag at one orchard until the paper gave out at the bottom, apples rolling across the gravel while the owner laughed and waved off any charge for the loss. Afterward we drove down to the river bluffs at Riverview Park, where the Missouri curls wide and brown below a sculpture trail honoring Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, the same water they navigated upstream more than two centuries ago, still doing exactly what it always has.

Getting There

Nebraska City is about forty-five minutes south of downtown Omaha via Highway 75, making it an easy day trip and the closest major airport gateway through Eppley Airfield in Omaha. It also sits roughly thirty minutes from Lincoln, on the opposite side of the river from southwest Iowa. There’s no public transit into town, so a car is necessary, both for the drive in and for reaching the orchards and river parks scattered around its edges.