On a Sunday afternoon in Wymore, Nebraska, a small museum opens its doors. Inside are exhibits on immigration from Wales, a lending library, microfilm of Y Drych — The Mirror, the Welsh-American newspaper — and an archive that its founders say is the only one in the United States dedicated primarily to interpreting the legacy of Welsh settlers on the Great Plains. Outside, a mural titled "Wales to Nebraska" covers a wall, and a memorial garden sits beside it. The building is at 307 South 7th Street, in a town of about 1,400 people in Gage County, roughly an hour south of Lincoln.
On October 20, 2026, two of the people who run that museum will bring its story north. Robert Humphries, executive director of the Great Plains Welsh Heritage Project, and Gwenith Closs-Colgrove, its board president, will give a Lunchbox Lecture at noon at the Nebraska History Museum, 131 Centennial Mall North in Lincoln. The talk is titled "Preserving America's Welsh Heritage on the Great Plains," and it centers on the Welsh immigrants who settled communities like Wymore — one of what the museum describes as a dozen Welsh communities in Nebraska. The Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation funds the lecture series and the recording, which is broadcast on LNKTV.
The project behind the talk began with a conversation, not a building. According to the organization's own history, the Great Plains Welsh Heritage Project was established in September 2000, shortly after Lori McAlister interviewed Ellsworth Closs, a Wymore native. That interview set in motion an effort that has now run for more than a quarter century, and Closs-Colgrove — who leads the board today — is part of the family name at its center. In a virtual tour of the Wymore museum, she and board vice president Janey Williams Rudder walk viewers through the exhibits and archives.
The project's reach extends well past its own walls. In 2017, to mark Nebraska's sesquicentennial, it produced a 20-minute documentary, "Pobl y Paith / People of the Prairie: The Welsh in Nebraska." The film, directed by Grant Rogers and co-produced by Martha Davies and Robert Humphries, combines interviews with descendants of Welsh settlers with historical photographs and images of Welsh sites around the state. It has aired on Nebraska Public Television, and major funding came from the Cooper Foundation and Humanities Nebraska. Humphries, who co-produced it, is the same person who will speak in Lincoln in October.
The organization also cares for a piece of the immigrant experience that is easy to overlook: a one-room schoolhouse. The Historic Pleasant View Rural School District 81 building, constructed in 1906 and now restored in Wymore's McCandless Park, educated the children of Welsh and German immigrants until it closed in 1960. Closs-Colgrove and volunteer Dean Cole were among its last students, and in another virtual tour they recall growing up in what the project calls "the Little Welsh Schoolhouse on The Prairie." A nearly 100-page book on the school, meticulously researched by Jeff Jones with full-color illustrations and newspaper articles, is sold by the center for $35.
What makes the Wymore archive unusual is its language. Because the center holds primary sources written or published in Welsh, it can offer genealogical lookups in Y Drych for people who lived in Welsh communities across the United States and Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with some Welsh-to-English translation. The project's own research has found that Welsh immigrants often wrote more candidly in their own language than in English — letters and accounts that reveal more authentic records of the lives they actually lived. That is the kind of detail a lunchtime lecture can convey in a way a museum label cannot.
The center is also in the middle of a growth spurt. Its website announces that construction has begun on a museum expansion, framed as an effort to tell the story of the Welsh in North America more fully. Exhibits and facilities have been refreshed: volunteers repainted two areas inside the heritage center, rehung historic textiles for easier viewing — including a quilt sewn in 1910 to raise funds for the Welsh church in Denver — and added interpretive panels and newly displayed items. The center also hosts "Welsh Voices," a series of free virtual seminars on Zoom featuring experts on Welsh and Welsh North American culture, and it keeps a full calendar of gatherings, presentations and performances in Wymore.
For anyone in Lincoln, the October lecture is a low-stakes way into all of it. It is a lunchbox lecture — the kind of midday program the state historical society runs for people who can slip away for an hour — and it puts a national story in a local frame. Welsh immigration to the Great Plains is not a headline chapter of American history; it is a story of a dozen small Nebraska communities, of a newspaper read in a borrowed language, of a schoolhouse that closed in 1960 and the people who went there, and of a museum in a town of 1,400 that ended up as the country's main repository for it. Humphries and Closs-Colgrove will tell it at noon on October 20 at the Nebraska History Museum.