About Schmidt|GAR Memorial Hall, Nebraska City — The Museum With Nobody In It

Part of the comedy of Warren's road trip is his dogged, joyless tourism: he stops at every historical marker and small-town museum on the route because stopping is what a man on a trip does. The production found its museum façade in Nebraska City, at the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall, 910 1st Corso.

The building was raised in 1904 by Civil War veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic as their meeting hall — one of very few purpose-built GAR halls still standing anywhere in the country. It is on the National Register and has been restored as the Civil War Veterans Museum, a small red-brick box on a wide street in a town of about seven thousand, half an hour south of Omaha along the Missouri.

Check the opening hours before you drive; volunteer-run museums keep volunteer-run schedules. Then stand across 1st Corso and look at it. It is precisely the kind of place that will give a lonely man an hour of purpose and send him back to the parking lot no better off.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.