Nebraska Life Magazine

Nebraska’s oldest continuously inhabited community began on a bluff above the Missouri River.

In the 1820s, Bellevue was a fur-trade post linking St. Louis commerce to the Platte Valley and the country beyond. Goods moved west, furs moved downriver and traders worked from the bluff where Nebraska’s earliest permanent community took shape. Over time, that post became a town shaped by river trade, mission activity, early institutions and the landscape that still defines Bellevue today.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

PC: George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Bellevue University, Fontenelle Forest

On a hill near North Platte, 20 weathered grain bins and a massive barn still carry the imagination of Lori Clinch. What began with one old bin the Clinches found near Paxton became Grain Bin Antique Town, a small wooden village filled with antiques, stories and the displays Lori arranged with humor, warmth and an eye for making old things feel alive again.

Lori, who died in 2022, was a nurse, mother, humor columnist, author, bookkeeper and the heart of the business she built with her husband, Pat. Her handwriting remains on tags, her books sit near the checkout counter and some displays are still exactly as she left them – reminders that visitors come not only for the rare bins and antiques, but for the spirit she left in every room.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

PC: Kristin Dahl, Chris Amundson

More than 600 volunteers are needed to raise and unfurl a 250-by-505-foot American flag during Memorial Day weekend events in Omaha and Lincoln celebrating America 250. The 126,000-square-foot flag weighs 3,000 pounds, turning the act of remembrance into a large-scale community effort.

Events begin May 22 at Memorial Park in Omaha and continue May 24 at Sandhills Global Event Center in Lincoln, with volunteer training, food, entertainment, a Benjamin Franklin reenactor, skydivers and drone shows. The weekend concludes May 25 at Memorial Park in Omaha with a Memorial Day ceremony, free pancakes, reenactors portraying service members who died in the nation’s wars and displays including the National Remembering Our Fallen Memorial, Flanders Field of Flags and a half-size replica of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

PC: Patriotic Productions

In the years before World War I, photographer Archer King used oversized ears of corn, giant livestock and staged farm scenes to make Nebraska look larger than life.

Working from Table Rock, King created exaggeration postcards that blended humor, illusion and advertising, helping sell the promise of Nebraska to people far beyond the state line.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

Midland University’s women’s flag football team is helping establish one of Nebraska’s newest collegiate sports programs while competing in a game growing rapidly across the country.

Built through national recruiting, player leadership and a belief that football has room for them too, the Warriors are creating a foundation for the next generation of athletes in Nebraska.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.
PC: Jeremy Buss

At Flyover Brewing Company in Scottsbluff, Joe and Andrea Margheim turned the phrase “flyover country” into a point of pride, building a brewery with German-style lagers and seasonal beers like CAMPAIGN!, brewed with local sugar beets during harvest.

That regional focus carries through the menu, with wood-fired pizzas and ingredients sourced across the High Plains, shaping a place grounded in local agriculture and community.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.
PC: Mackenzie Westphal

From her ranch near Arthur, writer and photographer Ainslie Wilson writes about the shift from winter to spring, a period marked by calving, long days in the saddle and a landscape slowly coming back to life.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

PC: Ainslie Wilson

By early summer, a half-inch Salt Creek tiger beetle flashes metallic brown and green across the mud in Lancaster County’s saline wetlands, hunting by sight and speed along stream edges.

The federally endangered species survives only in less than 15 acres of habitat along Little Salt Creek, where about 275 adults remain and biologists work to protect and restore the moist, exposed ground it needs.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

PC: Arthur Jones/Nebraska Public Media News

Across roughly 20,000 square miles of dunes, river valleys and wetlands, the Nebraska Sandhills remain one of North America’s most intact prairie ecosystems – and one of its least populated, with about one person per square mile.

In Secret Nebraska Sandhills: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, & Obscure, Alan J. Bartels documents overlooked history, fading towns like Mariaville and Angora and local folklore, drawing on firsthand accounts from ranchers, historians and residents.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.

PC: Alan J. Bartels

For years, a lone elm stood on a rise along Branched Oak Road near Garland, its silhouette a familiar marker against the prairie. Photographer Dillon Hardinger returned to it again and again, capturing it through seasons, storms and starlit nights. When the tree was cut down in 2025, the hill stood bare – but in his images, it remains.

Read the full story in the March/April 2026 issue of Nebraska Life.
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PC: Dillon Hardinger