Brandon Miller remembers the feeling of utter futility when the combined power of the Platte and Missouri rivers converged on Falconwood Park in March 2019.
“My grandpa and I met at a gas station across the street,” he said. “He went in and bought a case of beer, and we sat down and just started drinking Busch Lights and watched the water rise because there was nothing we could do.”
Falconwood had already weathered one natural disaster in the four years since Miller and his dad bought an old park in Bellevue and transformed it into an up-and-coming concert and event venue. It would face an entirely different disaster nearly a year after the floods.
Out of the trio of catastrophes, the 2019 floods – responsible for an estimated $3.4 billion worth of damage in Nebraska – left the most indelible mark on Falconwood, now home to the annual Outlandia Music Festival.
Flood waters peaked around 9 feet, 2 inches – at least that’s how high it rose inside the park’s main lodge. Miller pointed to the stain during a recent tour of the grounds ahead of this year’s Outlandia, Aug. 9-10. The watermark, still visible after the building’s reconstruction, is a reminder of hard times and hard work. It is the story of Falconwood, the story of the Miller family’s fight to make a dream come true.
Hullabaloo origins
Falconwood Park’s story dates back to 2010 when Miller, a bass player for R&B favorites the Kris Lager Band, was looking for somewhere to host a small music festival. For those first two years, Miller’s Hullabaloo Music Festival was held in Elkhorn, “but we just kind of outgrew the space with nowhere to expand,” Miller said.
Mark Grubbs from the Blues Society of Omaha suggested Miller check out Sokol Park in Bellevue. Located just off Highway 75 about 20 miles south of downtown Omaha, the 26-acre campground offered Hullabaloo plenty of room to grow, with a sizable lodge and other support buildings.
But after renting the property in 2013, Miller saw potential beyond the annual festival. He thought that the bucolic campground and facilities were the perfect spot to host weddings.
When the Sokol group decided to sell the property in 2015, Brandon and his dad, Jim Miller, made an offer. Their only competition for the property came from the neighboring Salvation Army camp, which was looking to expand.
The Millers’ offer of around $400,000 was accepted in April 2015. Son and father quickly set out to rebuild and upgrade, adding a 30-space RV park, installing a large performance stage, constructing decks for “glamping tents” and even buying equipment and building a screen to operate a small drive-in movie theater, Brandon said.
Weathering the storms
Just as business was booming, the first in a series of catastrophes struck fledgling Falconwood Park. A pair of tornadoes blew through the campgrounds in 2017, knocking down 130 trees.
The Millers quickly rebounded, only to be hammered by the epic floods of 2019, the result of a season of record snowfall followed by a quick heat wave and rain.
“Everything just melted fast,” Brandon said. “The ground was still frozen and the water, and rivers, had nowhere to go.”
“We got it from both sides,” said Jim. “I could see firewood floating down the driveway. It came in from the north and topped the levee. The water was coming down the road so hard and so fast my truck was being pushed toward the ditch.”
Because of the flood waters, the Nebraska National Guard locked the Millers out of their property for 15 days. When finally allowed to return, they faced a massive clean-up.
“I reached out to my network of friends that included my drummer’s girlfriend’s uncle, who brought down his construction crew,” Brandon said. “Dad worked hand-in-hand with everyone, and they just started ripping out everything. We didn’t have power, so we ran generators with fans to dry everything out.”
Furniture and equipment were buried in mud and debris. The drive-in theater equipment and sound system had been swept away. Things looked bleak, but the all-hands-on-deck effort to rebuild from everyone, including Brandon’s grandmother, Edda Philippsen, saved the day.
Falconwood Park reopened for its first wedding event May 18, two months after the flood struck. Brandon said the same team of friends and family that helped them through the flood continues to support the park today. “They saved our lives and saved our business,” he said.
But as quickly as they turned things around, the park found itself shut down again, this time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Innovation kept Falconwood in business. The park was among the nation’s first to try “drive-in concerts,” where bands performed to an audience who watched and listened safely from inside their cars.
Building on that idea, Falconwood partnered with Omaha-based concert promoters 1% Productions to host “pod concerts,” where groups of four to eight sat together in isolated “pods” to ensure social distancing.
The pandemic-era ingenuity was so successful that Falconwood’s 2020 revenues were higher than 2019’s.
The silver lining
While there was no silver lining to the pandemic, the 2019 flood ended up being a different story.
The sprawling 200-acre Salvation Army camp adjacent to Falconwood’s property was all but abandoned after flood waters receded. The campground’s cabins and structures — filled with mud, debris, dead animals and left-behind clothing and other personal items — remained untouched as grass and weeds grew along the once-manicured pathways. The Millers said at one point scrappers began taking down gutters and other pieces of metal from the camp’s buildings.
“It looked like a zombie apocalypse movie set,” Brandon said.
A Salvation Army representative eventually showed up at the property gate. “He said he was coming in to take a look at things because they were getting ready to list the space,” Brandon said. “I told them ‘don’t list it – we’ll buy it,’ even though we didn’t have a plan in place to do it.”
Any concerns about a repeat of the 2019 flood were nixed when the Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt and strengthened the surrounding levees to new federal standards due to the proximity of Offutt Air Force Base.
Still, the property was a wreck. Brandon and his dad were skeptical about the amount of work needed to make it usable. Brandon’s mother and grandmother talked them into making an offer.
“We low-balled it, knowing the clean-up and restoration was going to be insane,” Brandon said. Their bid of roughly $800,000 was accepted, and overnight Falconwood Park grew from 26 acres to roughly 220 acres. “Our property line is actually in the middle of the river,” Jim said.
The Millers ended up investing around $1.2 million to rebuild the property, which is now valued at many times their total cost.
Enter Outlandia
At the same time the Falconwood team tackled the new campground reconstruction in the fall of ’21, Brandon received a visit from his old pals at 1% Productions – Marc Leibowitz and Jim Johnson – along with Tyler Owen, CEO and president of local industrial giant Owen Industries.
Owen also had been one of the founders of Omaha’s Maha Music Festival, the annual multi-band event held at Stinson Park in Aksarben Village. After leaving the Maha Festival board, Owen was searching for somewhere to host a new music festival to compete with Maha.
“We wanted to make our event even better,” Owen said. “A lot of that would involve the location.”
Falconwood was the perfect fit. Its size allowed camping – just like the highly successful Hinterland Music Festival held annually in St. Charles, Iowa, 30 miles south of Des Moines.
“Hinterland had 15,000 (patrons) a night last year,” Owen said. “(Falconwood) has the potential to do every bit of that and more. There are no limitations to what we can do there.”
But Owen said Falconwood’s appeal goes beyond the space. “There’s just a vibe, a feel. You smell it. You can feel it. It isn’t a festival in the city or in a downtown park. It’s something unique to the area,” he said.
The inaugural Outlandia Festival at Falconwood in 2022 featured nationally lauded indie music headliners Wilco and The National. Brandon said electricians and plumbers were still installing equipment and widening the park’s access road when the gates opened on Day 1.
Year two of Outlandia, held last August, featured Lord Huron and Modest Mouse. This year’s event boasts indie giants The Flaming Lips, The Head and the Heart and The Revivalists.
While Owen was satisfied with the turnout the past two years, he said year three will be “make or break” for the festival’s future. “If you make it through your third year, you’re probably good,” he said, “but the first couple years, you’re activating an unknown property. I think that’s what hurt us in year one – nobody either knew about it or understood it.”
Owen said the park’s distance from Omaha also could be another barrier. “There is that weird ‘Omaha is not Bellevue. Bellevue is not Omaha’ kind of thing,” he said. “I think that’s softening quite a bit as more people get an opportunity to go and see how beautiful this space is.”
Challenges and the future
“We are a very well kept secret, and that’s not intentional,” Brandon said.
With more than 120 wedding events booked this year, additional festivals such as Grrrl Camp held last month and Hippie Fest Aug. 24-25, their ongoing drive-in movie series and other events, Falconwood may not remain a secret much longer.
Another challenge involves the necessary resources to keep the property running. “We use a wheelbarrow where we need a dump truck,” Jim said, adding that just keeping the grounds mowed with two 60-inch zero-turn mowers and a string trimmer is a four-day-a-week commitment.
Portions of the campgrounds impacted by the 2019 flood have yet to be renovated or repaired, including a number of the acquired buildings.
It’s a challenge that has become a family affair.
“My dad saw my dream here and immediately jumped in to support it,” Brandon said. “We’re not a heavily funded rich family; we’re working people. My grandpa got involved because my dad was involved. They’re doing it for me and I’m doing it because I want to be able to have something for my son and daughter and their sons and daughters, for our next generation.”
1 Comment
The entire Miller family is truly a loving and caring family. The size of their 200+ acre event center at Falconwood still does not match the size of each of their hearts. Their willingness to help others has not gone unnoticed. They are a recipe for success.