Columbus is the county seat of Platte County, Nebraska, situated at the confluence of the Loup and Platte rivers roughly west-northwest of Omaha and northwest of Lincoln by road, near the county's southern edge. With an estimated population of 24,464 as of 2024, it is the 10th-most populous city in Nebraska.
Initially settled in May 1856 along the historic Great Platte River Road, the city was named for Columbus, Ohio; its location along the proposed transcontinental railroad made it especially attractive to early settlers. Despite the construction of a hydroelectric plant, the Great Depression hit the region especially hard. Its economy has since pivoted to one based on agriculture, manufacturing, and services such as healthcare.
Today, Columbus is governed by a mayor and a city council. The city is located in the Omaha media market, and has 6 radio stations licensed to it; it is also home to the Columbus Telegram, a newspaper published five days per week. A campus of Central Community College is located outside Columbus; its sports teams are the Raiders.
History
Native Americans and Exploration In the 18th century, the area around the confluence of the Platte and the Loup Rivers was used by a variety of Native American tribes, including Pawnee, Otoe, Ponca, and Omaha.Olson, James C. and Ronald C. Naugle. History of Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press. 1997. p. 32. The Pawnee are thought to have descended from the Protohistoric Lower Loup Culture;"Emergence of Historic Tribes: The Lower Loup Culture". NebraskaStudies.Org. Retrieved 2010-01-09. the Otoe had moved from central Iowa into the lower Platte Valley in the early 18th century;"Emergence of Historic Tribes: The Oto & Missouria Tribes". NebraskaStudies.Org. Retrieved 2009-01-09. and the closely related Omaha and Ponca had moved from the vicinity of the Ohio River mouth, settling along the Missouri by the mid-18th century."Emergence of Historic Tribes: The Omaha & Ponca Tribes". NebraskaStudies.Org. Retrieved 2009-01-09. In 1720, Pawnee and Otoe allied with the French massacred the Spanish force led by Pedro de Villasur just south of the present site of Columbus. Nebraska State Historical Society. Retrieved 2010-01-09."Villasur Sent to Nebraska". NebraskaStudies.Org. Retrieved 2010-01-09. In 1739, the French traders Pierre and Paul Mallet stayed at the Pani-Maha village near this site while making the first known French voyage to Spanish-ruled Santa Fe.
In the 19th century, the "Great Platte River Road"—the valley of the Platte and North Platte Rivers running from Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie— was the principal route of the westward expansion.Mattes, Merrill J. (1969). The Great Platte River Road. Nebraska State Historical Society. p 6. For travellers following the north bank of the Platte, the Loup River, with its soft banks and quicksands, represented a major obstacle. In the absence of a ferry or a bridge, most of these followed the Loup for a considerable distance upstream before attempting a crossing: the first major wave of Mormon emigrants, for instance, continued up that river to a point about downstream from present-day Fullerton.Mattes (1969), p. 132.
Settlement and early history
The site of Columbus was settled by the Columbus Town Company on May 28, 1856. The group took its name from Columbus, Ohio, where most of the settlers had originally lived. The townsite was selected for its location on the proposed route of the transcontinental railroad.Evans, Marion Reeder (1936). "80 Years of Progress". Columbus 1856–1936. The Art Printery.
Just west of the Columbus site, the Elk Horn and Loup Fork Bridge and Ferry Company, headed by James C. Mitchell, had laid out the townsite of Pawnee. In 1855, Mitchell had obtained from the First Nebraska Territorial Legislature the right to operate a ferry across the Loup River. The two companies consolidated in November 1856.
At the time of its initial settling, the land Columbus occupied still belonged to the Pawnee. However, in 1857, the Pawnee signed a treaty whereunder they gave up the bulk of their Nebraska lands, save for a reservation on what is now Nance County, Nebraska.Hyde, George E. (1951). Pawnee Indians. University of Denver Press. p. 183.
In 1858, the Platte County Commissioners passed an act of incorporation making Columbus a town;Platte County, Part 2. Andreas' History of the State of Nebraska. Retrieved 2009-12-13. at this time there were 16 citizens. It became the county seat shortly thereafter. In that same year, at the recommendation of the U.S. Army, a ferry across the Loup was installed; contemporary documents suggest that the Mitchell company had failed to act on its right to operate such a ferry.
Railroads and growth Growth of the town was slow until 1863. In that year, construction began in Omaha on the transcontinental railroad. The Homestead Act, passed the previous year, attracted a host of settlers to the Plains and gave rise to increased emigrant traffic business. The ferry across the Loup was replaced by a seasonal pontoon bridge, used in the summer and taken up in the winter. The railroad reached Columbus in June 1866, when the city's population was about 75.
The energetic and eccentric promoter George Francis Train envisioned building "a magnificent highway of cities" from coast to coast along the Union Pacific route; Columbus was to be one of these.Larsen, L. H., B. J. Cottrell, H. A. Dalstrom, and K.C. Dalstrom. (2007) Upstream Metropolis: An Urban Biography of Omaha and Council Bluffs. University of Nebraska Press. p 62. In 1865, he bought several hundred lots in the city. In the following year, seeing the nearby townsite of Cleveland as a threat to his plans for Columbus, he bought the only building on the site, a hotel, and moved it to Columbus. He renamed the building the Credit Foncier Hotel, after his land company, Credit Foncier of America;Curry, Margaret. History of Platte County. Culver City, California: Murry & Gee, Inc., 1950. in it, he set aside a room permanently reserved for the President of the United States. Train believed that the capital of the United States should be in the geographic center of the nation, and promoted Columbus as "...the new center of the Union and quite probably the future capital of the U.S.A."Howard, R. W. (1962) The Great Iron Trail: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Putnam. p. 206.
Columbus grew and prospered during the 1870s, as a result of both expanding agriculture in Platte County and traffic on the railroad. During the decade, the population of the county grew threefold, and Columbus became the trade center for an eight-county area. The Black Hills Gold Rush in 1875 led the city's merchants to promote it as a staging and outfitting area for gold seekers, who could ride the railroad to Columbus and then travel overland to the gold fields.
In 1879, Columbus became the focus of a war between railroad companies. The Burlington and Missouri proposed to develop a line from Lincoln through Columbus and into northwestern Nebraska, and urged the citizens of Platte County to vote a bond of $100,000 for construction expenses. Union Pacific financier Jay Gould, displeased at the prospect of competition, informed the voters of the county that if the measure passed, he would do his best to ruin Columbus. After a heated campaign, the measure passed despite Gould's threats. The Burlington and Missouri built a line from Lincoln to Columbus, but stopped there; for their diagonal route across Nebraska, they chose one that crossed the Union Pacific at Grand Island rather than Columbus.
Gould sought to make good on his threat. When the Union Pacific developed its subsidiary Omaha, Niobrara and Black Hills Railroad, he directed that it cross the Loup River at Lost Creek, then run south to join the Union Pacific's main line at Jackson (since renamed Duncan), bypassing Columbus. Fortunately for Columbus, an ice jam destroyed the Lost Creek bridge in the spring of 1881. Railroad officials agreed to reroute the line down the north bank of the Loup to Columbus in exchange for a $25,000 contribution from the city.
Automobile age
In 1911, the Meridian Highway project was launched with the formation of a Meridian Road association in Kansas. Later that same year, John Nicholson, originator of the highway, spoke at a meeting in Columbus, at which the Nebraska Meridian Road Association was organized. The proposed north–south transcontinental highway crossed the Platte and the Loup rivers at the Columbus bridges. In 1922, it was designated a state highway. The completion of the Meridian Bridge in 1924, replacing a seasonal ferry across the Missouri River at the Nebraska-South Dakota border, made the highway a year-round route from Canada to Mexico. In 1928, the route became U.S. Highway 81.Slattery, Christina, Chad D. Moffett, and L. Robert Puschendorf (2001). Retrieved 2010-04-14.
In 1913, the Lincoln Highway was established as an east–west transcontinental highway. It followed the Platte River route across Nebraska; ultimately, about half of its mileage was on the Union Pacific right-of-way.Puschendorf, L. Robert (2007). Retrieved 2010-04-14. It also crossed the Loup on the bridge at Columbus.Fraser, Clayton D. (1991). Retrieved 2010-04-14. In 1926, the route became U.S. Highway 30.Puschendorf, L. Robert (2000). . Retrieved 2010-04-23.
Traffic on the two transcontinental auto routes through and near central Columbus spurred a burst of commercial construction. Hotels were expanded and new ones built; service garages were opened. To make the route through Columbus more attractive to motorists, the city undertook to illuminate and pave the downtown streets. By 1925, all of the city's major commercial thoroughfares were paved, and almost every lot along 13th Street (the Lincoln Highway) between 23rd and 29th Avenues was occupied by a commercial building.Kooiman, Barbara M. and Elizabeth A. Butterfield (1996). Retrieved 2010-04-14.
Rural Platte County suffered badly from the Great Depression. Grain and livestock prices had been high during World War I, engendering a bubble in farmland; to acquire additional acres, farmers had secured them with mortgages not only on the newly purchased land, but also on their older holdings. The fall in the prices of agricultural commodities, combined with drought-induced crop failures in 1934 and 1936, forced many such farmers to abandon their lands.Olson, Ralph Eugene (1937). Water Power Development on the Lower Loup River: A Study in Economic Geography. Master's thesis, Department of Geography, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Retrieved 2010-04-14.
The civic and commercial leaders of Columbus aggressively sought federal and state funds for local construction projects during this time. In 1931, the Meridian Viaduct was completed, carrying the combined Meridian and Lincoln highways across the Union Pacific tracks and eliminating a grade-level crossing. In 1930–31, the aging and inadequate bridge across the Platte was replaced; in 1932–33, a new bridge was built at the Loup crossing.
Hydro power The most expensive and ambitious of Columbus's Depression-era public-works efforts was the construction of the Loup Project. This was a canal running from a diversion weir on the Loup River in Nance County to the Platte River about below the mouth of the Loup. The waters of the canal run through two hydroelectric generating stations: one north of Monroe with a capacity of 7,800 kW; and one at Columbus with a capacity of 45,600 kW.
Initially financed with a loan and grant of $7.3 million from the Public Works Administration, construction of the diversion structure, canal, and powerhouses began in August 1934 and was finished, apart from some final details, in September 1938. At its peak, in October 1936, the project directly employed 1,352 people.