Kearney

Kearney, a city and the county-seat of Buffalo county, Nebraska, U.S.A., about 130 m. W. of Lincoln. Pop. (1890), 8074; (1900), 5634 (650 foreign-born); (1910), 6202. It is on the main overland line of the Union Pacific, and on a branch of the Burlington & Missouri River railroad. The city is situated in the broad, flat bottom-lands a short distance N. of the Platte River. Lake Kearney, in the city, has an area of 40 acres. The surrounding region is rich farming land, devoted especially to the growing of alfalfa and Indian corn. At Kearney are a State Industrial School for boys, a State Normal School, the Kearney Military Academy, and a Carnegie library. Good water-power is provided by a canal from the Platte River about 17 m. above Kearney, and the city’s manufactures include foundry and machine-shop products, flour and bricks. Kearney Junction, as Kearney was called from 1872 to 1875, was settled a year before the two railways actually formed their junction here, where the city was planned. Kearney became a town in 1873, a city of the second class and the county seat in 1874, and a city of the first class in 1901. It is to be distinguished from an older and once famous prairie city, popularly known as “Dobey Town” (i.e. Adobe), founded in the early ’fifties on the edge of the reservation of old Fort Kearney (removed in 1848 from Nebraska City), in Kearney county, on the S. shore of the Platte about 6 m. S.E. of the present Kearney; here in 1861 the post office of Kearney City was established. In the days of the prairie freighting caravans Dobey Town was one of the most important towns between Independence, Missouri, and the Pacific coast, and it had a rough, wild, picturesque history; but it lost its immense freighting interests after the Union Pacific had been extended through it in 1866. The site of Dobey Town, together with the Fort, was abandoned in 1871. Fort Kearney and the city too were named in honour of General Stephen W. Kearny, and the name was at first correctly spelt without a second “e.”