On the corner of Florence and Burdette streets in north Omaha sits an imposing-looking stone mansion.
Across the street from a fire station, and surrounded by smaller single-story homes, the building has gone by a few names within its storied history: the Burkenroad House, the Broadview Hotel and Trimble Castle.
Currently, the building is owned by Wesley Dacus, who lives on the bottom floor. He rents out the three other apartments on the second and third floors. He began first as a tenant but became the owner in 1995.
Dacus, a 76-year-old Omaha native, was born in the south part of the city, but moved to north Omaha in second grade. He remembers the Trimble house, but didn’t know the history of the building at the time.
Created as an architectural statement, the building gained additional significance when it became a Green Book site in the late 1930s.
Now, a group of volunteers is working to get the building added to the National Register of Historic Places, to further help in preserving it.
Shelley McCafferty, the preservation planner for the city of Omaha, said volunteers are aiming to submit the national register application next month.
To get a building on the historical register, it must meet one of four criteria: association with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history; association with an important person or people; embodying the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction; and/or yielding information important to archeology.
“Well, there are two different areas in which we’re considering this to be significant,” McCafferty said. “First is its contribution to Black ethnic heritage and the Greenbook story, and so that deals with sort of broad patterns of history. The other is the architecture.”
McCafferty is hopeful and excited to get the building added to the register, but there is concern about potential funding cuts. The Trump Administration has proposed huge cuts to the federal Historic Preservation Fund in the 2026 fiscal year that has those in the museum and preservation communities worried. She said the project’s funding is from a previous year and is safe. The only worry for the project is the process being delayed because of personnel shortages at the National Parks Service, the department that approves additions to the register.
“The very fact that this building remains, in spite of everything going against it, all the turmoil and that’s happened in the North Omaha, we still have it,” McCafferty said. “We still have this beautiful, interesting, wonderful, concrete block building. That’s a testament, I think, to the perseverance of the African American community.”
The building is made almost entirely out of concrete blocks, according to McCafferty.
“You’ve got the porch made out of it, the parapet made out of it, you’ve got Gothic arches, round arches, all these different shapes and materials,” McCafferty said.
Designed by Jospeh P. Guth, a German immigrant, and built by the Omaha Cement Stone Company in 1910, the house was originally owned by Max and Flora Burkenroad. Max Burkenroad owned a laundry business called Garett Laundry and did quite well financially. To show this, he had this house built for $6,000, which accounting for inflation, is about $195,800 in today’s money.
McCafferty thinks the concrete blocks used to build the house are partially the reason it is still standing as confidently as it is.
“So many of the wood frame buildings around it are gone, it kind of stands a little bit by itself now,” McCafferty said. “It doesn’t have a lot of the surrounding neighborhood that was once there at one point… but, yeah, I think it because it is concrete block, it’s lasted longer.”
The Burkenroads were part of Omaha’s high society, hosting parties at their house. But in 1918, when their laundry business caught fire and the insurance payout was significantly lower than expected, the Burkenroads moved west toward what is now the Happy Hollow area of the city.
A year earlier, the United States joined World War I, leading to the conscription of many young able-bodied men. With the loss of this labor force, the Omaha packing plants and railroad corporations looked to the large Black population in the South as an untapped labor force.
“This was the beginning of the Great Migration in which poor southern Blacks were coming up to the northern cities to work,” McCafferty said. “But after World War One…having this great influx of African Americans was really disconcerting to a predominantly white population.”
This caused significant racial tension, leading to “white flight,” or a mass exodus of the white population looking to distance themselves from the new Black population that had set down roots in North Omaha.
It all came to a head when Will Brown, a Black man, was wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. A mob would go on to light the Douglas County Courthouse on fire, attempt to hang the then-Omaha Mayor Edward Parsons Smith and lynch Will Brown.
“The military came in and basically designated an area in north Omaha and a little area in south Omaha, and said, ‘we will protect this, this was called the Negro belt, where if you go outside the Negro belt, we won’t guarantee you as an African American, protection,’” said McCafferty. “So, this was the beginning of the ghettoization of North Omaha, where basically the Black population was told you can only live here and we’re not going to give you any freedom of choice outside of that.”
According to McCafferty, this geographical segregation was only furthered by redlining, or the discriminatory practice of denying loans and insurance to residents of certain neighborhoods based on their race or ethnicity.
“Omaha had segregation, just like the South,” said T. Michael Williams, president of the Omaha chapter of the NAACP. “It’s just the law was not as pronounced or well defined, but it was just as segregated.”
The house would change hands a few times, starting with a trunk maker named Harry Rothkup in the early 1920s, eventually becoming a rooming house when a woman named Ella Jackson took over. Then in 1939, Charles and Rosalee Trimble bought the building and named it the Broadview Hotel. That same year, the Broadview Hotel appeared in “The Negro Motorist Green Book International Travel Guide,” also known as the Green Book.
“A Green Book site is a site where African Americans were able to access services when they were traveling out of town,” Williams said. “Unfortunately, Omaha, Nebraska hasn’t always been kind to black folks, and certainly across the country. [These] were sites where people could stop and maybe get a haircut, maybe get a meal and be safe and be treated fairly.”
The Trimbles had experience in the hospitality business, owning and operating a rooming house for those who played at the club they also owned at the time, the Panama Club.
Wesley Dacus was friends with someone who lived at the Broadview Hotel.
“I used to come around here and pick up my friend from Pennsylvania, to walk him, walk us back to the YMCA, before the Boys Club was built,” Dacus said.
They would play basketball together. His friend was the grandson of Rosalee and Charles Trimble. According to Dacus, his friend lived there from seventh grade through high school graduation.
After he bought the house, Dacus said he would have older people stop by and ask if there were any rooms available.
“When I first got the building in, 1995, 2000, 2005, people come by and I’ll be out cutting the grass and (they’ll) say, ‘Hey, man, you got a room for me today?’ I’d say, nah, we don’t do that anymore.”
There is not an official record of who stayed at the Broadview Hotel, and what is known comes from Candacy Taylor’s book about the Green Book, “The Overground Railroad.” She said Ella Fitzgerald stayed at the hotel.
The son of Charles and Rosalie Trimble, Von Trimble, said Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald stayed at the couple’s previous rooming house, as well as the Broadview Hotel.
“I generally tell people we were the creator of Airbnb, because, in addition to hotels, some homes they would house individuals that were traveling throughout the country as well,” said Eric L. Ewing, executive director of the Great Plains Black History Museum.
The hotel was in the Green Book all the way until 1966 when the guide ceased publication. During their ownership, the Trimbles lived in the hotel, eventually converting it into apartments and selling it by 1980.
Ewing remembers seeing the building growing up in North Omaha but not knowing what made it special. He eventually learned about it when a group of college kids from Iowa came to Omaha to do a project on the building.
“One of the biggest problems is a lot of folks don’t know, and so because they don’t know, they see it as, ‘oh, wow, this nice, old, pretty building,’” said Ewing. “I think if they’re made aware of it, then they’d understand the significance of it, and then would want to help ensure that it’s preserved and sticks around.”
The increased scrutiny of organizations like the Smithsonian Institute, and the potential funding cuts to historic preservation are seen as harmful by both Ewing and Williams.
“It is important for us to know our history,” said Williams. “It’s important for us to know trends and the way things develop, and have developed… People need to know, you know, what took place, and who did it, and those kinds of things. And I think that’s one of the dangers of our society today, is that people want to erase history for guilt or for whatever reason, but we can’t allow that to happen.”
Dacus said he’s probably got five or so more years owning the house, and then he’s going to retire.
“It’s something that (I) will cherish, because basically, when I give it up, I’m giving it over to my son, and my son would probably run it for the next 10 to 15 years. But, you know, I’ve been offered, offered to sell it many times, but I don’t think it’s worth doing right now, because it’s got a historical value to it.”
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