46 Nebraskaland • July 2023
of Easter sunrise services, local ladies cooking meals for
church camps, long walks, riding paddleboats on the lagoon
and the log cabin store at the old park.
"All the kids thought it was wonderful," said Marge
Rotherham, whose husband, Vince, was superintendent at
the park. They had four children together there. "When it
rained, it protected them. They quickly went to the shelter."
"I remember a birthday party there … and catching a
baby duck that my mom made me let go," said Dina Barta of
Lincoln, a Niobrara native and Game and Parks conservation
offi cer who spent her summers at the park growing up. She
also remembers the store, bringing her pet squirrel there for
visitors to see, selling sweet corn from her pink banana-seat
bike, and visitors signing or carving their names in the log
beams.
Village residents loved the park. "It was a way of life for all
of us," Barta said. "The park made the town."
Flooding on the Missouri and Niobrara rivers was a
recurring problem for the village and Niobrara State Park.
It forced the town to move in 1881. Another fl ood, this one
moving much slower, began when Gavins Point Dam was
completed on the Missouri 32 miles downriver from Niobrara
in 1956.
With the Missouri's water slowed, the sand carried by
the Niobrara began to settle out in both rivers. And with
high spring fl ows erased by Fort Randall Dam and others
upstream, it stayed, forming a delta, raising the water table
and fl ooding basements in the village. In the mid-1970s,
the town was relocated to the bluff above the rivers. The
In 1966, people gather to enjoy the picnic shelter that was
located in the park's original location, before the park was
relocated in the 1980s. NGPC LIBRARY
Trail riders and anyone traveling the loop road at Niobrara State Park could easily spot the old shelter in 2007.
ERIC FOWLER, NEBRASKALAND
