Pioneer Village (Nebraska)

Pioneer Village is a museum and tourist attraction along U.S. Highway 6 in Minden, Nebraska, United States, featured in many roadside and historical attraction guides. It is made up of a collection of 50,000 historical objects and 28 historical buildings. Its location in Minden has been a boon to the city since its opening in 1953, through to the present day.





== History ==





=== Inception ===

The Pioneer Village was founded in 1953 by Harold Warp, a Chicago manufacturer of Flex-O-Glass, a plastic film. He returned to his home town of Minden to find that the city had put the one-room school house he attended as a child up for auction. He purchased the building in 1953, and placed it on the future museum grounds. This began the collection of historical buildings, technology, and art that would come to represent his recollection of the history of man's progress.





=== The Warp Family ===

Pioneer Village has been continuously family operated. In 1983, Harold Warp donated the museum to the nonprofit Harold Warp Pioneer Village Foundation.

After Harold Warp's death in 1994, his son Skip Warp took over, but because he managed his fathers Flex-O-Glass business and lived in Chicago, he often wasn't involved with the museum's upkeep.