(light music) (upbeat music) -[Narrator] Coming up on "Nebraska Stories," two religions, and two altars in one tiny church, the mysteries of Loup City's, Jenner's Park, Nebraska's own Ellis Island, and carving a niche in Crane County.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) -(pews clicking and clanking) -(classical music) (classical music) (classical music) - [Narrator] A Catholic and a Protestant walk into a church.

Not the start of a joke, the start of a story about a unique place where both could have gone to services a century ago, a tiny building in a tiny village near giant Lake McConaughy.

(classical music) (classical music) (classical music) (birds chirping) - [Barbara] It is touted as the only one in the world.

- [Kathy] Most people are amazed at what's actually here.

That it's here and how special it is, and we think it's a real treasure.

(classical music) - [Barbara] It's just really a special place.

- [Narrator] Here's how it works.

There's a Catholic altar on one end, Protestant altar on the other.

In between, rows of pews on hinges that flip whatever direction is needed.

Same with kneelers, pulled out from either direction.

- [Barbara] That's the reason why Keystone was invented, because the ranchers didn't want to take their cattle across that river - Right.

- with the quicksand.

- [Narrator] Barbara, the Catholic, and Kathy, the Protestant, are two of the less than 100 folks who live in Keystone.

They keep The Little Church and its history from fading away.

- [Kathy] Dedication was Reverend Dean George Beecher of Omaha, and he was Episcopalian.

He wasn't any of the three (chuckles) - Really?

- that we know about.

- Well, that's interesting.

- I didn't know that either.

- [Narrator] It started long before Kathy and Barbara were around.

Keystone was founded in 1906 with a hotel, some businesses but no church.

(classical music) - [Kathy] The idea was brought by a group of teenage girls who were called the king's daughters, and they were under the direction of Mrs. Georgia Paxton.

Mr. Paxton, her husband, Bill Jr, they had a ranch just northeast of town here, and his father, Bill Sr was big in the Omaha stockyards and so they had bought land out here in ranch.

- [Barbara] So the girls decided we needed a church and they went about having sales, bazaars, an oyster supper at one time.

- [Narrator] The girls raised several hundred dollars to get things started.

The Paxton family kicked in the rest.

They hired noted Omaha architect Thomas Kimball to design the church.

Kind of a small job for the MIT and Paris educated designer whose credits include the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, Burlington Station, and St. Cecilia's Cathedral.

(train horn hooting) Trains brought lumber from Omaha and a letter from the Vatican.

- [Barbara] Had to get a dispensation from the pope to have a Catholic altar in one end and a Protestant altar in the other.

And they got that.

- [Kathy] The special dispensation was shipped from Rome to New York City and there it was handed over to church officials who brought it out here on the railroad.

(classical music) - [Narrator] And the idea for the two-way pews?

(pews clatter and click) - [Barbara] Mrs. Paxton was very well traveled and we believe she's the one that came up with the idea for the conversion of the backs.

Got the idea from the cable cars in the big cities that went one direction, couldn't turn around, so they flipped the seats and came back.

(pews flipping and clicking) (gentle music) - [Narrator] The Little Church opened in 1908 with a big dedication ceremony.

The unique concept occasionally got attention in other parts of the country.

One article called it "eminently sensible, neighborly and effective."

With visiting clergy, Catholics and Presbyterians alternated Sunday worship times here at first.

When the Presbyterians left in 1926, a Lutheran congregation moved in.

When the Catholics left in 1929, it was just a Lutheran church until closing two decades later.

(gentle music) - And Rex was the last baby baptized in this church during regular services - for the Lutherans.

- Oh really?

I didn't know that.

- 1949.

Yeah.

- [Narrator] Barbara and Kathy helped get it fixed up a few years ago and are preserving its history.

There are occasional special services, events, even weddings here.

(gentle music) Tour groups can see original bibles, hymnals, and journals showing how much each Sunday school kid put in the offertory.

It's a step back into early 1900s life in a small frontier town.

(gentle music) - [Barbara] The organ in the corner is original.

It's a pump organ.

You have to pump your brains out, but you can get music out of it.

(chuckles) ("Amazing Grace") To be able to have two different congregations hold services here spoke to the unity of the community and how they were able to work together and build something that was really beneficial to everybody.

("Amazing Grace") - [Kathy] I think it speaks well to the pioneer spirit.

We figure out what we need and we figure out a way to do it and we can usually get along while we're doing it.

And I think it's a simple solution to so many issues today if we could just all do this.

("Amazing Grace") (light guitar music) (light guitar music) (light guitar music) -[Donna] My name is Donna Trompke and I'm president of the Sherman County Historical Society in Loup City, Nebraska.

Jenner's Park, it was founded by these two gentlemen that came from England, Henry and Bob Jenner.

(lightguitar music) The park had different amusements, different games.

There was a mummy house, (light guitar music) the Dance Pavilion, (light guitar music) Lover's Lane.

(light guitar music) There would have been a bear, birds, owls.

(light guitar music) And then as they got older, they wanted to sell Jenner's Park.

The family was not interested in continuing on with all the care that it took for the animals and for the different amusements.

So the park ended up closing in 1940-something.

(light guitar music) Will Stoutamire, professor from University of Nebraska at Kearney, and his student, Logan, have been doing a lot of research on Jenner's Park.

They are going to be sharing the results of their studies with the Sherman County Historical Society.

- And so really for us, one of the things that we wanna be thinking about is how we can use the remnants of the park that are still here as evidence of where other things would've been.

As we're looking at the historic photographs, or we're looking at the tour guide from the 1920s, or we're looking at other accounts of the park from the time.

So right here we've got the original bear den or bear cage, which we've got this photograph of.

- [Logan] Yep.

- [Will] It lines up pretty nicely for us.

- [Logan] The park wouldn't really be open until about May-ish.

Kinda like how most summer attractions are right now.

You know, you open Memorial Day and go until Labor Day.

(whimsical music) - [Will] Towards the end of World War I going into the Great Depression, 1920s is really when the park is thriving.

It's driving in its highest number of visitors.

And the Jenner's are every year making some sort of an addition.

People from Kearney, and Grand Island, and Holdredge and Albion and, you know, any of the smaller communities in the Sandhills would come down for opening day, or 4th of July, or Harvest Fest.

Reports in the newspaper of crowds of, you know, three, four, 5,000 people, you have to take that with a grain of salt, but certainly a large number of people come into the park to experience what there was to experience on those days.

- [Logan] But opening day was really their big, or one of their big days where they would make a big hoopla about it.

They'd have fireworks, and food vendors out here, and, you know, all trains led to Loup City.

(Whimsical music) - [Will] And if I remember correctly, we've got a photograph of the, of the bear cage with one of the bridges leading over Lover's Lane, right?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So if we're looking at the bear cage, you can see the angora goats, you can see the peccaries.

- Yeah.

- So that all lines up if this is the Old Creek bed.

- Yeah.

- And I think from there that would put the ocean wave ride like right here.

- Pretty much.

And then, yeah.

(wind rustling) - Somewhere in here.

So that would've been the big- Yeah.

- The big amusement feature.

-The Ocean Wave.

-- The Ocean Wave.

So yeah, the ocean wave kind of was basically a giant amusement swing.

And they talked a lot about it having music.

Yeah, I think they claimed they could fit like 40 people on it.

(carnival music) (guitar string plucking sound) - [Logan] So some of the things we've discovered through this project is when we were first looking into the Jenners, they claimed they had graduated from Eaton and King's College.

And then we look into it, we email those colleges.

And they get back to us and say, "We have no record whatsoever of Henry or Robert Jenner going to these colleges."

And then, so then that got us thinking, it's like, "Okay, well if they're lying about that..." -- Right -- What else?

- There's much more in their biographies that they were sharing locally that we then had to investigate and see if those things could actually be viable and true.

They've claimed to have connections to There's a claim that the family was close friends with the Egyptologist at the British Museum.

And then there's a claim that the Egyptologist gave a Egyptian Scarab necklace to Henry Jenner that he then wore for the rest of his life.

The Jenner's weren't necessarily doing a lot of world traveling despite the fact that their collections come from across the globe.

But it gives you this impression that they're you know, going all around the world making these collections for their institution like larger professional museums in the time would've been doing.

And so it seems like what they're relying on more is when those larger professional museums go under, they go to the fire sale and buy some stuff and bring it out here.

- [Logan] They claimed to have actual Egyptian mummies from Egypt that they allegedly bought from The University of South Dakota.

There's a whole big story about how Henry Jenner drove to the University of South Dakota and purchased a mummy from the archeologist there, and then drove it back to Loup City in his convertible in the passenger seat.

(chuckling) What a wild sight that would've been.

- And certainly nobody in 1907, you know, Loup City is gonna be back checking their resume.

At the same time, you know, they claimed to be from a brewing family in South London, that turned out to be true.

They claimed to have come from some money, that turned out to be true.

So a lot of the parts of their biography did line up.

We've had them described to us by someone -as a showman.

-- [Logan] Yes, showman.

- [Will] And I think that's a fairly apt description.

- Yes.

- That they were willing to exaggerate here or there, (light music) but operating with a grain of truth underneath all of it at the same time.

(light music) - [Logan] You have these two wealthy British men that come to the United States and they try and recreate the British Museum.

And they have all of these wonderful pets and it's all well and good.

And then you look into it, and their stories of like the deer running down Henry Jenner, or Robert Jenner's, you know, allegedly, getting drunk and getting bitten by tarantulas.

And you've got people stealing stuff from the museum.

- [Will] The story of Jenner's Park is the story of the wild world of early museums.

That it's the story of, you know, two guys with a vision, and connections, and money being able to build a museum, and amusement park, and zoo in the central part of Nebraska in a small town, which is something you could only do in that time period with the connections that they had in that area of colonialism.

And so to me it's just the perfect story of a small museum in that era.

(light guitar music) It seems like a lot of Omaha's history involves city leaders trying to convince the rest of the nation that Omaha isn't a cow town.

Even though for much of its history it's been the ultimate cow town.

(wistful bluegrass music) (wistful bluegrass music) [Narrator] The cattle industry began planting its roots in Nebraska as early as the 1860s.

Texas ranchers were bringing their Longhorns to Omaha's Union Pacific Railroad to get them to Eastern markets.

As more livestock made their way through the state, locals figured out there was money to be made.

And in 1882 the process to create the South Omaha Stockyards began.

(wistful bluegrass music) [Gary] It started by Alexander Hamilton Swan.

it was his idea.

He was a cattle baron from Wyoming and all his main purpose was to bring cattle in there to feed.

[David] There wasn't really a lot of money to be made doing that.

And so it didn't take very long before the investors in the stock yards started trying to draw meat packing companies to South Omaha, and they started with smaller operations.

And by the 1890s they had major meat packing plants, and four of the biggest companies were operating at the stockyards.

[Narrator] The rapid growth of the industry in South Omaha meant the population was growing too.

[David] So you go from, in 1884, South Omaha doesn't exist.

By the time they incorporated the city, it was its own city.

At first, they had about 1,500 people.

By 1890, there were 8,000 people living in South Omaha.

[Gary] More and more people came here.

And so you had the Polish, the Irish who really built South Omaha.

You had the Bohemians, the Croatians the Serbians, the Hungarians, the Russians the African Americans, the Mexican Americans.

What people don't realize is it's just not the stockyards.

It's just not the packing house.

It's also transportation where they had their own train the communication, you know, banks; all the banks were Packers National Bank Livestock National Bank; the truck washes, the hide sellers, the rendering plants.

I mean, it's a giant industry.

(piano music) [Narrator] The Omaha Stockyards were the third largest of its kind by the year 1900.

(piano music) It only continued to get bigger and by the time the 1950s came around, it was the biggest in the country.

The size of the operation was unlike anything else.

[Gary] In the 1950s, in its heyday when it became the world's largest, it was at times pulling in $1.7 million a day from all the activity that was going on.

(jazz music) Sunday nights was when the cattle would start and sheep and hogs would start coming on the trucks and they would line up all the way, maybe to 84th Street to 72nd Street, and they'd be hauling their cattle in.

So it was almost like every Sunday we would have this mass integration of these people in, and that's where the money came too because all these people were coming in, you know putting their cattle in the stock yards and having the commission firm sell them for them.

[David] You had an enormous number of stock pens and that continued to grow into the 1950s.

It just became absolutely vast.

(jazz music) You had raised walkways that went over the pens and so you would see a network of these walkways.

And of course, they're moving the cattle in and out and not just cattle, but also hogs and sheep.

Among the stockyards were, of course, the meat packing plants that processed the meat.

There was the Livestock Exchange Building, which did banking, had restaurants, had other associated businesses, and the city of South Omaha where the workers lived grew up all around this.

And so without the stockyards, there's no South Omaha.

[Narrator] The stockyards really built the town of South Omaha.

However, the comradery made it a town like no other.

(old western music) [Gary] At one time South Omaha was in the Guinness Book of World Records; more taverns per capita than any place in the world.

As a young man with a father who was a bartender, which made him royalty in South Omaha.

And I remember I would bring him supper at night after he would work all day, make more money at the bars.

And you'd see guys with no fingers and those were people who were butchers.

And then you'd see people with all this arthritis who were in the cold storage, where you could only be in there 20 minutes and you had to come out, get warm, get back in, and haul that stuff.

(old western music) You saw the people with blood up to here.

They'd be on the kill floor.

You can imagine being on the top floor of the Swift packing house, which was 13 floors high in 101 degrees up there, standing in that, cutting these cattle open as they're going one after another after another; very dangerous jobs.

And then we became connoisseurs of poop.

By that I mean is that you knew when they walked into that bar, if they were a hog man, a sheep man, or a cattleman by the smell.

And we all knew that the hogs were the worst.

So it became kind of an interesting dark humor.

But the fascinating part was, that it was very segregated in the neighborhoods.

You know, you had your Polish area, your Bohemian area your African area, your Mexican area, your Croatian area you know, had all these different groups but around the packing houses where the bars were and everything else, no one was denied a drink because of the work.

You know, people became kind of like, we're in this together.

[Narrator] As the late 1960s came around the livestock industry was starting to change.

South Omaha followed.

(soft guitar music) [David] A company, Iowa Beef Packers, IBP, as they were later known, decided that it would be more cost effective to build smaller plants closer to where the cattle were being raised.

And they also figured out that it was really inefficient to ship whole sides of beef which don't fit very conveniently into rail cars but to cut it up on site and box it and, and ship it.

(soft guitar music) By the late sixties, a lot of people are being laid off at the plants in South Omaha.

At the same time that new plants are being opened in smaller towns around the Midwest.

(soft guitar music) [Narrator] The stockyards and meat packing plants may have left the town of South Omaha (piano music) but the diversity it brought into the community remains.

[David] The lasting impact; one is ethnicity.

With Polish last names, Irish names, Czech names, et cetera, in Nebraska trace their family's history through South Omaha.

That's also true of many Latino people today.

(piano music) [Gary] When the packing houses closed in the sixties and the seventies and people started moving out, it became a ghost town.

All these restaurants and stores and clothing stores and all that were closing and it became a ghost town.

(piano music) Thank God that we had these new entrepreneur people coming in from the south and from Africa and all that.

They were creating and reestablishing these stores and these venues and everything else.

(soft music) I really believe that it set South Omaha up as our Ellis Island.

(soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (upbeat guitar) (crane song) NARRATOR: Sandhill cranes paint the sky and cover the water along the Platte river in Central Nebraska every spring.

GENE GUSTAFSON: Oh yeah we saw a lot of cranes through the years.

(laughs) soaring up in the air, beautiful.

NARRATOR: Gene Gustafson has been a part of that scene his entire life.

This 95 year old, longtime farmer, has always lived by the river.

And has even served as a guide for crane watchers.

GUSTAFSON: It's just God's creation in the morning and the sunrise just can't be beat.

You know, it's- it is so beautiful.

Especially in my opinion over the Platte River.

NARRATOR: The cranes have served as inspiration for many artists.

Gene is one of them.

His canvas is a block of wood.

From that he carves out the cranes he remembers from those many mornings on the river.

GUSTAFSON: I guess I know what a crane looks like.

And the closest you can get to what a crane looks like the better off you are, you know with that.

NARRATOR: Transforming the wood into a crane though, has taken plenty of practice, Gene didn't start carving until the age of 74.

When he took a class to learn how to do it.

Since then he's spent several hours most days whittling his time away.

GUSTAFSON: What else have I got to do today?

You know?

Don't have much of an agenda when you're 95.

(laughs) NARRATOR: That agenda has been a full one though for the past 20 years.

He started carving ducks.

And along the way has made his share of Swedish Dala horses and even large replicas of Noah's Arc for his grandchildren.

But his attention always turns back to the cranes.

GUSTAFSON: They're pretty special you know?

They're a crazy looking bird but, you know, they have their place too you know?

They sure do.

Evidently I'm interested in them or I wouldn't keep messing around with them I guess, you know?

(laughs) (band saw cutting wood) NARRATOR: There's a structure and an order to Gene's messing around.

He goes through 27 different steps before one crane is complete.

Gene uses catalpa wood from trees his grandfather planted.

He is currently carving from his fourth tree.

He twists and turns that wood on his saw until he creates a familiar shape.

GUSTAFSON: That would be the beginning of a crane.

NARRATOR: And then he uses his knife to sharpen the finer points.

And a homemade sander smoothes the bird's rough spots.

Pieces of coat hanger will serve as the legs and he even adds knee caps.

Just don't ask him how he does that.

GUSTAFSON: It's really kind of a secret, you know?

NARRATOR: Then he moves to another room in his basement where he mounts the crane to a base built in the shape of Nebraska.

(slams wood on table) GUSTAFSON: There's our crane.

NARRATOR: All that's left to do is add some finishing touches with his paintbrush and the crane is complete.

It's a process he estimates he's done about 500 times.

Some of Gene's cranes end up here, at the Crane Trust Nature Center.

It's the same place where he used to lead crane watching tours.

Gene is still showing visitors the beauty of the cranes.

GUSTAFSON: Here I've got an outlet for them if I'm going to keep going.

You know, I've got an outlet.

NARRATOR: Just like those cranes on the river, Gene plans to keep coming back, to this hobby he's grown to love.

And after 95 years, he's learned a simple lesson he's happy to share.

GUSTAFSON: You never know for sure what's laying back there, that you would enjoy and that you might even be halfway good at.

You know?

Just go for it, you know, don't just sit around, go for it.

NARRATOR: Gene Gustafson is proof you're never too old to carve out you're own niche in life.

(cranes squawking) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Watch more Nebraska stories on our website, Facebook and YouTube.

(upbeat music) Nebraska Stories is funded in part by the Margaret and Martha Thomas Foundation.

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