Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Fort Calhoun, NE

Fort Calhoun is a city in Washington County in eastern Nebraska, sitting on the bluffs above the Missouri River about 15 miles north of Omaha.

The city takes its name from John C. Calhoun, President James Monroe's Secretary of War — the name originally intended for the frontier fort built beside the townsite, which instead honored its commander as Fort Atkinson.

The high bluff just east of the city was the original Council Bluff, where Lewis and Clark held their first formal council with Native nations on August 3, 1804, meeting Oto and Missouria leaders.

In 1819, Colonel Henry Atkinson's Yellowstone Expedition wintered in the river bottom below the bluff at Cantonment Missouri, arriving with the steamboat Western Engineer.

After the Missouri River flooded the cantonment in the spring of 1820, the soldiers rebuilt atop the bluff as Fort Atkinson, the first United States Army post west of the Missouri River.

Fort Atkinson's garrison topped 1,100 soldiers, making it the largest U.S. military post of its era, and the Nebraska Legislature has credited the fort community as the first town in Nebraska.

The expedition's first winter was deadly: roughly 160 of its 1,120 men died during the winter of 1819–20.

The Army abandoned Fort Atkinson in 1827, but the site is now Fort Atkinson State Historical Park, a National Historic Landmark with a reconstructed fort and summer living-history demonstrations.

When Washington County was created on February 22, 1855, Fort Calhoun was made its first county seat; the seat moved to De Soto about three years later and then to Blair in 1869.

The 2020 census counted 1,108 people in Fort Calhoun, up from 908 in 2010.