Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Fairbury, NE

Fairbury is a city in, and the county seat of, Jefferson County in southeastern Nebraska, set on the Little Blue River.

Fairbury was founded in 1869 when freighter James B. Mattingly and Woodford G. McDowell each contributed 80 acres for a townsite on the projected route of a railroad, naming it after McDowell's hometown of Fairbury, Illinois.

Fairbury was chosen as the Jefferson County seat in 1871 and was incorporated in early 1872; its newspaper, the Fairbury Gazette, had been founded in 1870.

For nearly 80 years Fairbury was the headquarters of the Western Division of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, with an extensive yard and an 18-stall roundhouse at the junction of the railroad's north-south and east-west lines.

At the peak of the railroad era, fourteen passenger trains passed through Fairbury daily, and the city's population climbed to an all-time high of 6,395 in 1950.

The Campbell Brothers Circus wintered in Fairbury from 1885 until its closing in 1913, and at its peak it was the second-largest circus in the world.

E. J. Hested opened a Fairbury dime store in 1909 that, renamed Hested's, grew to more than 150 stores across the Midwest and Mountain states before being acquired by the J. J. Newberry chain in 1969.

The first Walmart store in Nebraska opened in Fairbury in 1982.

The 2020 census counted 3,970 residents in 1,710 households in Fairbury, a slight rebound from 3,942 residents in 2010.

Fairbury's former Rock Island depot now operates as the Rock Island Railroad Depot Museum, and a ten-block downtown area including the courthouse square is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Fairbury Commercial Historic District.