Rides 5 Cents
Our 3 Children - 1983
Inside Schoolhouse
"All Aboard"

Submitter: Kearney County Coordinator shared their family photographs & color brochure & postcard from their July 1983 visit to Pioneer Village.

OPENING --- June 6, 1953 Harold Warp Pioneer Village..Main Entrance on U.S. Highway 6

 

Pioneer Village, Minden, Nebraska (aerial view)

1983 Pioneer Village Color Brochure cover (below)
Inside Text Excerpts

Open Every Day 8 a.m. to Sundown
Pioneer Village is arranged so efficiently that you waste no walking between exhibits—it didn’t “just grow,” so the visitor’s comfort has been considered from the start.

It’s no hodge-podge of donated antiques. Its owner/builder conceived Pioneer Village as a living history of America’s growth, then built it according to plan.

Harold Warp, a Minden native and for more than 50 years a Chicago industrialists, began his village in 1948. His childhood rural one-room school became the nucleus for a truly unique preservation: one item each of the tools and toys and trappings that built the nation.

Warp, whose company manufactures Flex-O-Glass and other Warp plastics, first opened the Village in 1953 with a 2-block area. It now covers (1983) 20 acres, housing 30,000 or more historic items in 24 buildings, plus motel, restaurant, and camp grounds.  As a “living” history, most of the machines have been restored and still operate—just as they did when their proud owners first purchased them.
THE HAROLD WARP PIONEER VILLAGE IS AUTHENTIC ALWAYS, and structures are actual restorations wherever possible, or else are built with exacting fidelity to the specifications of their day.  Some re-create pioneer homes or businesses complete with lovingly preserved furnishings and appointments. Others are museums that house displays showing the evolution of some segment of daily living, all arranged in careful chronological order.  The Village dramatizes the march of mechanization toward today. Older visitors enjoy a memory; youngsters marvel at the stamina of their forebears and capture an appreciation of the craftsmanship of an earlier generation.