Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Blair, NE

Blair is a city and the county seat of Washington County in eastern Nebraska, set in the Loess Hills above the Missouri River valley northwest of Omaha, and part of the Omaha–Council Bluffs metropolitan area.

Blair was platted in 1869 when the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad was extended to that point.

The city is named for John Insley Blair, the railroad magnate credited with bringing the railroad to the town.

Blair was incorporated as a city in 1872 and became the Washington County seat within its first year.

A child injured on a Blair railroad turntable in 1869 produced a lawsuit that became the landmark 1873 U.S. Supreme Court case Sioux City & Pacific Railroad Co. v. Stout.

Blair's crossings of the Missouri River to Iowa came early: the Chicago & North Western railroad bridge opened to rail traffic in November 1883, and the first automobile bridge, the Blair Bridge, opened in 1929.

Danish Lutheran settlers made Blair a center of Danish-American education: Trinity Seminary opened there in 1884 and merged in 1896 into the school that became Dana College, whose name is a poetic variant of “Denmark.”

Dana College occupied a roughly 150-acre campus overlooking the Missouri River valley until financial troubles forced it to close in 2010; the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

The 2020 census counted 7,790 people in Blair, living in 3,221 households, with a median age of 40.8 years.

Black Elk–Neihardt Park in Blair is home to the Tower of the Four Winds, which stands as a memorial to poet John G. Neihardt and Black Elk, the Lakota Sioux holy man.