HEBRON - In 1920, the passage of the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, nationally. But locally, the groundwork for the suffrage movement had been laid decades prior in Southeast Nebraska. On this year’s Memorial Day, Hebron remembered its central role in Nebraska history. 

Persistent rain prompted a late change of venue, but that didn’t stop a large group from packing the Stastny Community Center in Hebron to spend Memorial Day commemorating the small Southeast Nebraska city’s role on the frontlines of the women’s suffrage effort in the state. 

Orchestrated by members of Hebron’s Historic Preservation Commission, Monday’s ceremony was designed to bring the audience back to the 1870s, when Lucy and Erasmus Correll – portrayed in 2025 by Lee and Dave Cording – were among the first anywhere in the state to champion the value of voting rights for women. 

“Legacy Park here in Hebron will help to remember and honor the hundreds of thousands of women – and men – who fought for decades for the right to vote for you,” Lee Cording said in her address as Lucy Correll. “This is more than a right – it’s a privilege, a responsibility, it’s a duty, which, when exercised, enables women to become a motive force to fulfill the fundamental belief of those early suffragettes: that the combination of social transformation, idealism, and progress can create a better government and a better world. This is your legacy, and the legacy of every American woman.” 

Also present for Monday’s proceedings were Dan Correll along with his daughters and his brother, fourth- and fifth-generation descendants of the trailblazing Lucy and Erasmus.  

“They were far ahead of their time, by many years – they were doing this in the 1880s, when it was unheard of,” Dan Correll said Monday. “They were very active throughout the community, and not just the political side like with suffrage, they were active in education, church, and he was also active in the military, he was a legislator, they ran the newspaper, he was even acting governor for a couple days, because they couldn’t get anyone else to do it, I guess...how he did everything in those years, I don’t know.” 

Correll has been part of other ceremonies in the state that bear his ancestors’ names, but he said some of those have tended to dovetail into debates over other issues related to modern women’s rights such as abortion, whereas Monday’s ceremony remained focused on the historical women’s right to vote that his forebearers championed. Dan lives in Kearney now but spent plenty of time in Hebron as a kid since both of his parents have strong ties to the area, and its history. 

“My father would be so proud. He told me stories about all of this, growing up. We’d come down here for most holidays because my mother and her family were from here also,” he said. “I never even met my grandfather, because he had passed away years before I was born. And he and his wife, my grandmother, Olive, continued the newspaper on here in Hebron, and my dad helped them too, and that was in the 1930s and 40s.” 

With the modern members of the Correll family at the center, the capstone of Monday’s ceremony was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the city’s new Legacy of Courage Park, a literal monument to the efforts of locals like the Corrells, bringing in national suffrage icons like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to help women in Nebraska push to achieve the right to vote – more than three decades before the 19th Amendment finally awarded women that right nationally. 

The Corrells weren’t the only late 19th Century trailblazers that can say their family trees still are growing in Nebraska close to 150 years later. Ivy Green was a teenager in the newly-founded town of Hebron when both Anthony and Stanton rallied for suffrage there at the tail end of the 1870s. Her parents were friends with the Corrells, which motivated Green to join the movement and link up with the Thayer County Woman Suffrage Association, the first of its kind in the state. 

Green kept an autograph book that bears the names of both Stanton and Anthony which has been passed down to her descendants, Hebron staples for literal generations. That lineage can be traced down to Ivy Schure, who on Monday spoke at the ceremony in a portrayal of her namesake great-great-great-grandmother. 

“In October 1877 Mr. Erasmus Correll invited Susan B. Anthony to come to Hebron to speak on ‘Bread Versus the Ballot,’” she recounted. “I remember my mother saying that her good friend, Lucy Correll, stated that ‘Miss Anthony electrified the audience as she talked of women’s rights.’ Anthony was a woman of wealth and culture who felt women were powerless without the ballot, and devoted her time, talents, and means to this work, traveling the western states on a buckboard.” 

Legacy of Courage Park is now open down the road from the Thayer County Courthouse in downtown Hebron, alongside the Secrest Library, which is home to a temporary exhibit on Hebron’s voting rights history until the end of September.