Upper Oak Creek Descent Ruts of the Woodbury Cutoff, Ox Bow Trail of the California Road
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
From the record
“The Upper Oak Creek Descent Ruts of the Woodbury Cutoff, Ox Bow Trail of the California Road are remnants of the Ox Bow Trail located in southeastern Butler County, Nebraska, United States. They are one of the few trail remnants left of the Ox Bow Trail, which originated at Nebraska City, Nebraska and connected to the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail.”
Wikipedia article Upper Oak Creek Descent Ruts of the Woodbury Cutoff, Ox Bow Trail of the California Road, CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 10 National Register listings published here for Butler County · listed in 1992 · category: Site.
National Register reference number.92001572- 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
18 since 2000
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 18 fires within 5 miles of Upper Oak Creek Descent Ruts of the Woodbury Cutoff, Ox Bow Trail of the California Road
between 2000 and 2018, burning about 289 acres in total. None started naturally. 4 were 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
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
6
Arson/incendiarism
4
Equipment and vehicle use
4
Debris and open burning
3
Smoking
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 National Weather Service names
Brainard, the town this property stands in, in 22 storm reports between 1995 and 2025: 9 thunderstorm wind, 8 hail, 2 tornado, 1 flash flood.
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.
Photos shared via social media of a destroyed outbuilding and a large, downed tree branch which did damage to the roof of a home. Time estimated based on radar.
This brief tornado touched down a quarter mile north of 28 Road and a quarter mile west of Q Road, and tracked east for approximately two-thirds of a mile before dissipating. On the west side of Q road, a center pivot was overturned. Several hardwood trees were blown down on the east side of Q road. This tornado had peak estimated winds of 84 miles per hour, with a max width of 50 yards and an estimated mean width of 40 yards.
Trained spotters with video and photo confirmation reported a tornado lasting approximately 1 minute over open fields. There was no damage found from this tornado, so its width and wind speeds were not able to be accurately estimated.
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
2 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.
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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