Nebraska

Wilber, a small town southwest of Lincoln built by Czech Catholic and Reformed immigrant farm families under the Homestead Act, turned its ethnic parish identity into a civic institution in February 1962, when four residents, including a state senator and a local pastor, founded an organization specifically to preserve Czech culture and hold an annual festival. The first Wilber Czech Festival ran that same year, and by 1987 the effort had grown enough public recognition that Congress passed a resolution, signed by President Reagan, formally declaring Wilber the Czech Capital of the United States. The festival now called Czech Days draws thirty to fifty thousand visitors to the town on the first weekend of every August, built around the same parish communities whose Catholic and Reformed churches anchored Wilber and neighboring Prague, Nebraska from their nineteenth century founding onward, civic celebration growing directly out of religious ethnic identity rather than replacing it.

German, Swedish and Danish immigrants settled Nebraska's plains under the same Homestead Act in the same general period, building Lutheran, Catholic and Reformed rural parishes that still anchor small towns statewide, while the Omaha and Winnebago reservations in the northeast preserve traditions tied to the Missouri River. Evangelical Protestant identification leads the state today at thirty one percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study.