Arbor Lodge State Historical Park

State Historical Park At J. Sterling Morton'S Mansion (Nebraska Game And Parks Commission) · Nebraska City, Nebraska

Arbor Lodge State Historical Park is the former home of J. Sterling Morton on the western side of Nebraska City, a Missouri River town about an hour south of Omaha. Morton arrived in Nebraska Territory in the 1850s, built a modest house here, and, as a newspaper editor and politician, proposed Arbor Day, first held in Nebraska in 1872 with a great many trees planted across a nearly treeless state. He later served as Secretary of Agriculture under Grover Cleveland. His family enlarged the house over decades into a white-columned Colonial Revival mansion of about fifty rooms, and gave it to the state, which runs it through the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. Today the park has the furnished mansion, a carriage house, an Italian terraced garden and an arboretum of hundreds of kinds of trees and shrubs. The mansion is open for tours only in the warmer months; the grounds are open far longer. It is a one- to two-hour stop, best combined with Arbor Day Farm close by and the orchards of the AppleJack season.

2600 Arbor Avenue, Nebraska City, Nebraska, 68410, United States

NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The typical pattern: the grounds and arboretum are open daily from morning to around dusk for much of the year; the mansion is open for guided tours only in the tour season, roughly spring to autumn, on set days and hours, often mid-morning to late afternoon, and is usually closed in winter. The traps that ruin a visit are driving in during the winter expecting a house tour, arriving without a state park permit, arriving after the last tour of the day, and meeting AppleJack Festival traffic in September. Confirm current times before relying on them.

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