Stuhr Museum, Grand Island

Just off US Thirty in Grand Island stands one of the most unusual museums on the Great Plains. The Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer was designed by the celebrated architect Edward Durell Stone, who surrounded the main building with water on all sides, making the structure appear to float on the prairie. Stone completed the building in nineteen sixty-seven.

Inside and across two hundred acres, the museum preserves Railroad Town, a living history village of original eighteen nineties-era structures moved here from across central Nebraska. One of those buildings holds a quiet distinction: a modest rental cottage where a boy named Henry Fonda was born in nineteen oh five. He lived there for less than a year before his family moved to Omaha, but in nineteen sixty-six Fonda returned in person to help relocate and restore his birthplace here on the grounds.