After four years, the Pershing mural is resurrected at Lincoln’s Wyuka Cemetery

Luke Holle, owner of Superboy Construction, gets every square inch of the bottom left corner of a 50-foot concrete wall covered in mud before he lays that last square of the Pershing mural. That final piece is one of 763,000 tiles that were cleaned and sorted.

Holle uses his trowel to create the grooves, talking through the tiling process with attendees at a commemorative event Thursday for the final stage of mural’s move.

Holle joined the project a year ago with his Superboy team, but this has been in the making for four years.

In 2022, the Pershing Mural Historic Preservation Committee raised $844,000 to remove the mural from Pershing Auditorium before the building was demolished. The mural was then disassembled and put in storage in 2024.

The official move to Wyuka followed in April with the first set of tiles laid.

Organizers raised $4.1 million since the project started, said Liz Shea-McCoy, the chair of the Pershing Mural Historic Preservation Committee.

“Nebraskans did this. We just we were kind of the energy and the springboard, but Nebraskans did this,” Shea-McCoy said.

This isn’t the end of the project, though. Shea-McCoy told attendees that organizers are fundraising $360,000 to complete landscaping refurbishment. She said they’re hoping to turn the area into a cultural event space.

“We want it the best,” Shea-McCoy said. “We want to bring these, our visitors, to a place that's really a showcase of engineering, of determination, precision, and heart.”

Shea-McCoy told Nebraska Public Media that having the mural in a park – like Wyuka – is what organizers were striving for.

“Cemeteries are changing their culture too, becoming a place that's both for the living and for the past because we see a new opportunity to be out in nature, to connect with our culture, to connect with the people who came before us,” Tim Kenny, the project’s accountant, said.

Wyuka is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Another reason why organizers thought it was the perfect spot for the mural.

“Every little tidbit, every little bit of history – and we love history – just made this installation location the perfect place for this cultural monument, really, that represents the state of Nebraska,” McCoy said.