Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Stapleton Stapleton, NE

Stapleton is an incorporated village in Logan County, Nebraska, and serves as the Logan County seat.

Stapleton was established in 1912 as the terminus town of a new Union Pacific Railroad branch, laid out about three and a half miles west of the older county seat of Gandy.

The town was named for a Mr. Stapleton, a friend of one of the townsite officials whose donation helped get the town started.

Stapleton was incorporated on January 30, 1913, and homes, both of Gandy's banks, the drug store, and other businesses soon moved west to the railroad town.

Gandy refused to die quietly: it incorporated in 1911 specifically to force the railroad to build it a siding and depot, and it clung to the county seat for nearly two more decades.

Stapleton won the county seat in a special election on May 2, 1929, and after a year of court challenges the county records were moved to Stapleton on February 24, 1930, with the old Nicholas Hotel building converted into the courthouse.

Logan County is one of Nebraska's smallest counties by population, with just 716 residents at the 2020 census, and Stapleton is its largest community.

The 2010 census counted 305 people in Stapleton, nearly 40 percent of the entire county's population, and the 2020 census counted 267 residents.

Stapleton peaked at 431 residents in 1930, the year it finally secured the county seat.

Stapleton is part of the North Platte, Nebraska Micropolitan Statistical Area and sits at about 2,900 feet elevation on the southern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, where the South Loup River rises nearby in Logan County.