Czech Immigrants and the Wilber Colony

The town of Wilber sits on the Blue River in Saline County, roughly thirty miles southwest of Lincoln, and it calls itself the Czech Capital of the United States of America. The claim is not merely promotional. It reflects a history of settlement that reshaped the entire southeastern corner of Nebraska.

Czech immigrants began arriving in Nebraska in the eighteen sixties and seventies, most of them leaving Bohemia and Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in search of land they could own and a government that would not conscript their sons. The Burlington and Missouri River Railroad was offering cheap passage and subsidized land along its right-of-way. Saline County, with its dark glacial soils and gently rolling terrain, looked enough like the Bohemian countryside that word spread back to the old country. By eighteen eighty, Czech immigrants were among the largest ethnic groups in Saline County.

The settlers planted wheat and rye, built brick churches, and established Sokol halls for gymnastics and community gatherings. The Wilber Czech Museum holds documents, folk costumes, and household goods from the immigrant generations. The Czech language was taught in some local schools for years.

Wilber holds a Czech Festival every August, drawing thousands of visitors to a town of fewer than two thousand people. Kolache pastry, Czech polka bands, and traditional embroidered dress fill the streets of a community that has maintained its cultural identity for a hundred and fifty years on the Nebraska prairie, in a landscape that would have been entirely foreign to its founders and yet reminded them, somehow, of home.