Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
Nemaha County, Nebraska
The county forms the core of the Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation formed in the Fourth Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1830 as land for the offspring of traders and Native Americans. The grounds of modern Indian Cave State Park mark where the county's first community, Saint Deroin, was founded in 1853 by members of the reservation as a trading post on the Missouri River. When white settlement was permitted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, this area was part of Forney County (named for US cabinet member John W. Forney) which stretched along the Little Nemaha River from the Missouri River to west of Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1855 Nemaha County was formally founded with Brownville as its county seat. Johnson County, also founded in 1855, was initially administratively attached to Nemaha, but was organized as a stand-alone county in 1857.