Hastings Museum
City Museum Of Natural And Cultural History, Home Of The Kool Aid Exhibit And The J.M. McDonald Planetarium · Hastings, Nebraska
The Hastings Museum of Natural and Cultural History is the city museum of Hastings, a railroad and farm town of roughly 25,000 people in south-central Nebraska, about 20 minutes south of Interstate 80. It grew from a collection started in the 1920s and has long occupied a brick building on North Burlington Avenue, where it mixes natural history, regional history and a small planetarium under one roof. Its best-known gallery tells the story of Kool-Aid: Edwin Perkins, a Hastings mail-order businessman, turned a liquid drink concentrate into a powder here in 1927, and the museum shows his early packets, advertising and the story of the brand before production moved to Chicago. Around that sit mounted-animal dioramas, a well-known whooping crane display, pioneer and Native American galleries, and the J.M. McDonald Planetarium. It is a regional museum, not a destination in its own right: a good two-hour stop on a Platte Valley trip, especially in crane season, and there is no Kool-Aid factory, tasting room or plant tour anywhere in town.
1330 North Burlington Avenue, Hastings, Nebraska, 68901, United States
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The typical pattern: open Tuesday to Saturday roughly 9 or 10 am to 4 or 5 pm, with shorter afternoon hours on Sundays, closed on Mondays and on major holidays. Planetarium and film showings run at set times on set days, not continuously, and may be fewer outside school holidays. The traps that ruin a visit are arriving on a Monday from Interstate 80, arriving late in the afternoon after the last planetarium show, and expecting a Kool-Aid factory tour that does not exist. Confirm current times before relying on them.