UNO’s First Home

If not for a fire, UNO alumni today might be able to dance in what once was the university’s first home — on a lake island in southwest Minnesota.

That home originally was an Omaha farmhouse, built in 1875 at 24th and Pratt Streets. Omaha attorney, real-estate developer and judge John Redick later bought the house, expanding it to 17 rooms while adding a large circular porch and 60-foot-tall open-tower balcony. Thus it became “Redick Mansion.”

By the early 1900s, though, Redick and his family had moved elsewhere. In 1909 the newly established Omaha University purchased the mansion and its accompanying 10-acre homestead. The parlor was converted into a chapel; bedrooms became classrooms, laboratories and space to socialize; the kitchen housed physics and the garage chemistry.

On Sept. 14, 1909, 26 students met for OU’s first classes in what was renamed Redick Hall. In less than a decade, though, the university would need more space, and in 1917, construction was completed on a new home, the three-story, 30-classroom Joslyn Hall 

Redick Hall was sold to Rudolph Beal, a wealthy Omaha grain broker. Beal had the house dismantled, a project that took just three weeks. He also purchased fixtures and furnishings from 11 Omaha saloons — closed after the city went “dry” May 1, 1917. Those materials and numerous empty whiskey barrels were loaded onto railway cars and shipped to Currie, Minn.

They arrived at Lake Shetek, where the one-time mansion would be used in construction of the Valhalla Dance Pavilion and Café on Keely Cure Island. The whiskey barrels were used to build a floating pontoon bridge to transport materials to the island.

Valhalla featured an enormous dance floor on its second story with mirrored walls, soft-colored moving lights and the busts of life-sized animals hung on its walls.

Omaha historian Harry Walters, who studied Redick Mansion extensively, said in a 1996 UNO Alum magazine article that "As many as 10,000 visitors would flock to the island during special weekend events.

But the roaring fun would come to a roaring end. On March 3, 1928, Valhalla burned to the ground. The cause of the fire never was determined.

Ten years later, Omaha University left its original location and moved to its present campus. Where Redick Hall once stood is the 12-story Evans Tower, an Omaha Housing Authority senior community.