Kobs Pioneer Cemetery, Dodge County
Near Omaha, Nebraska
The Kobs family cemetery near here holds the story of a German immigrant couple who built a farm from almost nothing on the Nebraska prairie. Albert Kobs emigrated from Germany in eighteen sixty-seven. His wife, Henrietta Labs, crossed the Atlantic three years later in eighteen seventy, and the two soon married.
In eighteen seventy-four they bought land here, and on that farm five of their eight children were born. Albert died in eighteen ninety-one; Henrietta had died nearly a decade earlier in eighteen eighty-two, at just thirty-four years old. Their story is quietly typical of the hundreds of thousands of German immigrants who poured into the Great Plains in the post-Civil War decades, drawn by the Homestead Act and the promise of cheap land.
Small family cemeteries like this one are often the last physical trace of that first generation's gamble.
