24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Columbus, NE

Columbus is a first-class city and the county seat of Platte County, set at the confluence of the Loup and Platte rivers in east-central Nebraska.

The Columbus Town Company settled the site on May 28, 1856, naming it for Columbus, Ohio, where most of the settlers had lived, and picking the spot for its place on the proposed transcontinental railroad route.

Columbus was incorporated in 1858, when it had only 16 citizens, and it became the Platte County seat shortly afterward.

The land under Columbus belonged to the Pawnee until an 1857 treaty in which the tribe gave up most of its Nebraska territory, keeping only a reservation in what is now Nance County.

The Union Pacific Railroad reached Columbus in June 1866, when the town's population was only about 75 people.

Eccentric promoter George Francis Train bought hundreds of Columbus lots and promoted the town as the geographic center of the nation and the probable future capital of the United States, even reserving a hotel room there permanently for the President.

Both of America's early transcontinental highways crossed at Columbus: the east–west Lincoln Highway, now U.S. Route 30, and the north–south Meridian Highway, now U.S. Route 81.

Columbus's biggest Depression-era project was the Loup Project, a 35-mile hydroelectric canal finished in 1938 whose two power stations — at Monroe and at Columbus — generate power from Loup River water diverted across the county.

The 2020 census counted 24,028 people in Columbus, and Census Bureau survey estimates put the city at roughly 9,850 households in the early 2020s, averaging about 2.45 people per household.

A campus of Central Community College, whose teams are the Raiders, sits about four miles outside Columbus and serves the surrounding region.