Harold Warp Pioneer Village
Nebraska
On the south side of Minden sits one of the most eccentric museums on the Great Plains: Harold Warp Pioneer Village, twenty-eight buildings on twenty acres holding more than fifty thousand objects. Harold Warp was born in a sod house near Minden, left for Chicago, and made a fortune manufacturing Flex-O-Glass plastic film. When he was fifty years old, he learned the one-room schoolhouse he had attended as a child was going up for auction. He bought it in nineteen fifty-three and placed it on future museum grounds as the seed of something larger.
Over the following decades Warp filled the complex with three hundred fifty antique automobiles, a hundred tractors, seventeen flying machines, wagons, steam engines, china, and historic buildings relocated from across the region. He wrote the descriptive labels himself. In nineteen eighty-three he donated the entire enterprise to a nonprofit foundation. It bills itself as a Museum of Progress, tracing American life from eighteen thirty to the present.
