Most of all, it’s an intangible quality that NHS offers above all others—hope. And for 150 years, it’s the hope that has seen it through.

150 Years of Hope: The Story of the Nebraska Humane Society

Published 2025

In 1875, when Omaha was a dusty livestock town on the Missouri River barely two decades old, a group of well-meaning citizens convened in the city’s Grand Central Hotel to discuss creating a society dedicated to the prevention of cruelty to animals. Now 150 years later, their mission carries on. The Nebraska Humane Society is one of the oldest and largest such societies in the United States.

In modern times, the Nebraska Humane Society has launched major capital campaigns, modernized its facilities, established a dedicated fundraising guild, and outlasted a global pandemic that threatened operations. The story is one of selflessness, ingenuity, adaptability, and hope.

And, of course, a little bit of good luck.

A peek inside

Excerpt from page

Excerpt from page

A pair of foxed polish women’s shoes went for the bargain price of $1.75. There was even a new octagonal pool table at Hogador’s Beer Hall on upper Farnam Street that was causing quite a stir.

And there was a strange story making rounds about two runaway boys from Omaha who, on Monday, August 2, had made it as far as the Platte River when they found an abandoned skiff and started down the river. They soon ran into a sand bar, where they claimed to see the dead body of a woman dressed in white, face down in the sand with a comb in her hair. Frightened, they fled through the woods to Plattsmouth, where they located the marshal and explained their story. However, when they took law enforcement back to the sand bar, there was no body and no sign of anything out of the ordinary.

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The Omaha summer weather had been described as “cool and pleasant,” especially in the evenings, that very week in August 1875. So claimed the newspapers.

It seemed every city in Nebraska was monitoring the migration of grasshoppers, which routinely fed on and caused significant damage to wheat, alfalfa, soybeans, and corn. Cheap farms and free homes were advertised along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad, including 160-acre homesteads for soldiers.

A man could get his clothing tailored at M. Hellman & Company in Omaha while his wife shopped for first-class furniture at Dewey & Stone Furniture Dealers.

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Excerpt from page

The boys clung to their story, and the marshal shipped them back to Omaha, while the mystery of the woman in white remained unsolved.

On the evening of Saturday, August 7, the 23rd Infantry Band held an outdoor concert on Capitol Hill, which was apparently open to the public. If music didn’t stir your soul, you could trek down that very evening to the Grand Central Hotel where a meeting was held “to organize a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals,” reported the Omaha Evening Bee.

That was the beginning.

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