24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Kearney, NE

Kearney is a city and the county seat of Buffalo County in south-central Nebraska, and with 33,790 residents in the 2020 census it is the fifth most populous city in Nebraska.

The city takes its name from Fort Kearny, the U.S. Army post established in 1848 a few miles southeast of present-day Kearney to protect travelers on the Oregon, Mormon and other overland trails — and the extra "e" in Kearney crept in because postal workers repeatedly misspelled "Kearny" until the misspelling stuck.

Kearney began as Kearney Junction, a townsite platted in 1871 where the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad joined the Union Pacific line about a mile north of the Platte River, and it was incorporated on December 3, 1873.

Kearney became the seat of Buffalo County in 1874, when the county courthouse was moved there from Gibbon.

During a speculative boom in the 1880s Kearney's population swelled past 10,000 and boosters built an irrigation canal, an electric street railway and a five-story opera house, but the agricultural depression of the early 1890s burst the bubble and the population fell to 5,634 by 1900.

Kearney is nicknamed the "Midway City" because it sits roughly halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and its motto is "Heart of Nebraska."

Kearney bills itself as the Sandhill Crane Capital of the World: every spring hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes — the great majority of the world's population — stop along the Platte River near the city between late February and early April, watched from sites such as Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary.

The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, a museum that spans Interstate 80 at mile marker 274, traces the history of the Great Platte River Road from the Oregon Trail era to today; President Bill Clinton toured it in December 2000, and a scene from the film About Schmidt was shot there.

The University of Nebraska at Kearney began in 1905 as the Nebraska State Normal School at Kearney, later became Kearney State College, and joined the University of Nebraska system under its present name on July 1, 1991; its 235-acre campus holds the 1890s George W. Frank House.

Kearney's Museum of Nebraska Art houses the state's official art collection, with artworks spanning some 175 years.