|
You're driving along Interstate
80 smack dab in the middle of the country and
all of a sudden there's this sort of log cabiny,
pioneer-styled covered bridge-like building spanning
the highway ahead of you. No, you're not hallucinating
after seeing miles of sorghum and sunflowers. It's
not road fatigue finally getting to you. It's the
Great Platte River Road Archway Monument at Kearney,
Nebraska.
By the way, it's CAR-knee - that's how the locals
pronounce the name of their city - and it is, indeed,
smack dab in the middle between Boston on the East
Coast and San Francisco on the West.
So you leave the Interstate at Exit 272 and follow
signs that wind you along the highway's northern
frontage, past motels and restaurants and a few houses,
and you park and pay your $10 admission and step
onto the long escalator that carries you up over
the highway and back in time.
The Archway Monument honors the nation's westward
movement. Not only is Kearney midway between the
coasts, but the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails
each brought folks through town, or at least through
old Fort Kearney and the village around it.
Kearney also was a stop for the Pony Express and
the Overland Stagecoach, as well as for the Transcontinental
Telegraph and the Transcontinental Railroad that
made those earlier means of communications and travel
even more extinct than the buffalo that used to roam
across the Plains on either side of the banks of
the Platte River.
Then came the Lincoln Highway, the first cross-country
road for cars, and finally, the Interstate.
And all of them - from covered wagons to drive-in
movie theaters - are included in the interesting
- educational and yet entertaining - displays within
the span of the Archway Monument.
Those displays include several cars - as part of
the Lincoln Highway and Interstate exhibits - and
for those who want to see even more cars, Pioneer
Village, just a few miles away (12 miles south of
Interstate 80 Exit 279), has a collection of some
350 antique and classic vehicles (www.pioneervillage.org).
For those whose automotive interests are a little
more, well, unusual, there's the annual Nebraska
Art Car Tour that travels across the state on Route
6 just south of Kearney (www.route6nebraska.com).
The Archway (www.archway.org)
was the conceived by former Nebraska governor Frank
Morrison, who served three terms in the 1960s. Morrison
was always a proponent of improving education. He
was in his early 90s when he decided his state needed
a showplace to make sure that future generations
would know about the role Nebraska played in the
country's westward migration.
Working with then-governor E. Benjamin Nelson, Morrison
not only found sources for the $60 million needed
to build and equip the Archway, but convinced state
and federal government officials that the ideal location
would involve spanning the major east/west highway
- and that it could be done without a major disruption
to traffic.
To achieve that end, the Archway, which spans a
distance a little longer than a football field, was
built on land next to the highway and then hauled
and lifted into place on towers built on either side
of the road, which had to be closed for only 12 hours.
I found three of the displays particularly poignant.
Those were the Lincoln Highway exhibit with its campground-style
setting, quite a contrast to today's modern Interstate
and motels with wi-fi Internet access and free breakfast;
the Mormon Handcart expeditions and Memorials of
Passage.
I did my drive to the Archway Monument in the comfort
of a modern automobile (well, a modern pickup truck),
but in 1856, I learned from the Mormon Handcart expeditions
display, that 1,076 people who couldn't afford covered
wagons headed west from Illinois to Salt Lake City
- a 1400-mile trip - pulling handcarts across the
prairie - in the winter!
Only 800 made it as far as Wyoming, where they were
saved by Brigham Young and others who had headed
east from Salt Lake City on a rescue mission.
But not all of those who traveled west were even
that fortunate. The Memorials of Passage exhibit
remembers those who didn't survive the trip west.
It shows what remains of a family, standing together
around a gravesite.
In the spring of 1867, a 50-year-old Civil War veteran,
Robert George Edsall, his wife, Naomi Jane (Burns),
and his four sons left northern Indiana to go west.
Naomi Jane made it only as far as Topeka, Kansas,
where she died. Robert George and his sons went back
home, though the two oldest boys stayed in Missouri
while Robert George and the two youngest boys returned
to northern Indiana. The youngest of those boys,
then 8-year-old James Edward, would grow up to become
my grandfather.
Thus it was an emotional moment as I stood inside
the Archway Monument and saw the life-size painting
of a pioneer family mourning one of its loved ones
who died on the trail.
But then that's the point of the Archway Monument:
to remind us, to honor the memory of those who blazed
the trails.
|