Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
From the record
“Miles Ranch near Dawson, Nebraska was the first of the great ranches established west of the Missouri River. It was established by Stephen Boyd Miles in 1855 as part of "mail grant land" awarded by the United States Government in exchange for transporting mail, freight, and passengers between Independence, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah.”
Wikipedia article Miles Ranch, CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 11 National Register listings published here for Richardson County · listed in 2012 · category: Building.
National Register reference number.12001075- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Fires near this property
12 since 2007
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 12 fires within 5 miles of Miles Ranch
between 2007 and 2019, burning about 306 acres in total. None started naturally. None was recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Debris and open burning
10
Equipment and vehicle use
1
Power generation/transmission/distribution
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
1 working within 5 miles of Miles Ranch: 1 producer.
All of them still produce. What was taken out: Stone, Crushed/Broken. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Dawson, the town this property stands in, in 18 storm reports between 1996 and 2025: 7 hail, 5 thunderstorm wind, 4 tornado, 1 heavy rain.
No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
The National Weather Serivce in Topeka relayed a report to the Omaha-Valley National Weather Service of a funnel cloud in Richardson County, to the east of Du Bois.
Storm chasers and a sheriff deputy collected video of a small tornado that moved north-northeast in open fields south of Dawson, NE. No discernible damage was noted from this tornado.
Thunderstorm wind gusts estimated at over 60 mph blew down a tree across Highway 75 a little south of the intersection of Highway 8. The winds were accompanied by hail which reached up to 1.5 inches in diameter.
A line of mini-supercells moved north across southeast Nebraska this late afternoon and early evening. The storms produced several small and short-lived tornadoes that touched down from west of Falls City up to south of Auburn. This was the first report of a touchdown with this outbreak. The tornadoes apparently all touched down in open areas, were short-lived and produced very little or no damage.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
Listed places nearby
3 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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