Columbus, Nebraska Columbus, Nebraska Highway 81 athwart the Loup River at Columbus Highway 81 athwart the Loup River at Columbus Platte County Nebraska Incorporated and Unincorporated areas Columbus Highlighted.svg Columbus is a town/city in and the governmental center of county of Platte County, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. The populace was 22,111 at the 2010 census.
6.3 Columbus Public Schools In the 18th century, the region around the confluence of the Platte and the Loup Rivers was used by a range of Native American tribes, including Pawnee, Otoe, Ponca, and Omaha. The Pawnee are thought to have descended from the Protohistoric Lower Loup Culture; the Otoe had moved from central Iowa into the lower Platte Valley in the early 18th century; and the closely related Omaha and Ponca had moved from the vicinity of the Ohio River mouth, settling along the Missouri by the mid-18th century. In 1720, Pawnee and Otoe allied with the French massacred the Spanish force led by Pedro de Villasur just south of the present site of Columbus. In the 19th century, the "Great Platte River Road" the valley of the Platte and North Platte Rivers running from Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie was the principal route of the westward expansion. For travellers following the north bank of the Platte, the Loup River, with its soft banks and quicksands, represented a primary obstacle.
The site of Columbus was settled by the Columbus Town Company on May 28, 1856.
Just west of the Columbus site, the Elk Horn and Loup Fork Bridge and Ferry Company, headed by James C.
In 1855, Mitchell had obtained from the First Nebraska Territorial Legislature the right to operate a ferry athwart the Loup River.
In 1858, the Platte County Commissioners passed an act of incorporation making Columbus a town; at this time there were 16 people.
The ferry athwart the Loup was replaced by a cyclic pontoon bridge, used in the summer and taken up in the winter.:5 The barns reached Columbus in June 1866, when the city's populace was about 75. Union Pacific depot in Columbus The energetic and eccentric promoter George Francis Train envisioned building "a magnificent highway of cities" from coast to coast along the Union Pacific route; Columbus was to be one of these. In 1865, he bought a several hundred lots in the city.
In the following year, seeing the close-by townsite of Cleveland as a threat to his plans for Columbus, he bought the only building on the site, a hotel, and moved it to Columbus.
He retitled the building the Credit Foncier Hotel, after his territory company, Credit Foncier of America;:45 in it, he set aside a room permanently reserved for the President of the United States.:6 Train believed that the capital of the United States should be in the geographic center of the nation, and promoted Columbus as "...the new center of the Union and quite probably the future capital of the U.S.A." Columbus interval and prospered amid the 1870s, as a result of both expanding agriculture in Platte County and traffic on the barns .
During the decade, the populace of the county interval threefold, and Columbus became the trade center for an eight-county area.
The Black Hills Gold Rush in 1875 led the city's merchants to promote it as a staging and outfitting region for gold seekers, who could ride the barns to Columbus and then travel overland to the gold fields. In 1879, Columbus became the focus of a war between barns companies.
The Burlington and Missouri proposed to precarious a line from Lincoln through Columbus and into northwestern Nebraska, and urged the people of Platte County to vote a bond of $100,000 for assembly expenses.
Union Pacific financier Jay Gould, displeased at the prospect of competition, informed the voters of the county that if the measure passed, he would do his best to ruin Columbus.
The Burlington and Missouri assembled a line from Lincoln to Columbus, but stopped there; for their diagonal route athwart Nebraska, they chose one that crossed the Union Pacific at Grand Island clean water Columbus.:324 When the Union Pacific advanced its subsidiary Omaha, Niobrara and Black Hills Railroad, he directed that it cross the Loup River at Lost Creek, then run south to join the Union Pacific's chief line at Jackson (since retitled Duncan), bypassing Columbus.
Railroad officials agreed to reroute the line down the north bank of the Loup to Columbus in exchange for a $25,000 donation from the city.:325 Lincoln Highway Garage, assembled in downtown Columbus in 1915 Later that same year, John Nicholson, originator of the highway, spoke at a meeting in Columbus, at which the Nebraska Meridian Road Association was organized.
The proposed north-south transcontinental highway crossed the Platte and the Loup rivers at the Columbus bridges.
It followed the Platte River route athwart Nebraska; ultimately, about half of its mileage was on the Union Pacific right-of-way. It also crossed the Loup on the bridge at Columbus. In 1926, the route became U.S.
Traffic on the two transcontinental auto routes through and near central Columbus spurred a burst of commercial construction.
To make the route through Columbus more attractive to motorists, the town/city undertook to illuminate and pave the downtown streets.
The civic and commercial leaders of Columbus aggressively sought federal and state funds for small-town construction projects amid this time.
In 1931, the Meridian Viaduct was completed, carrying the combined Meridian and Lincoln highways athwart the Union Pacific tracks and eliminating a grade-level crossing.:328 In 1930 31, the aging and inadequate bridge athwart the Platte was replaced; in 1932 33, a new bridge was assembled at the Loup crossing. The most expensive and ambitious of Columbus's Depression-era public-works accomplishments was the assembly of the Loup Project.
This was a 35-mile (56 km) canal running from a diversion weir on the Loup River in Nance County to the Platte River about 1 mile (1.6 km) below the mouth of the Loup.:130 33 The waters of the canal run through two hydroelectric generating stations: one north of Monroe with a capacity of 7,800 k - W; and one at Columbus with a capacity of 45,600 k - W. Loup Canal hydroelectric plant and tailrace canal at Columbus To make payments on the Loup Project bonds, the Loup River Public Power District had to find a market for its electricity.
Rural electrification was not expanding rapidly, and private power companies in Nebraska were only willing to buy a small fraction of the project's power.
Although the provisions of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 gave East Coast holding companies an incentive to sell off their Nebraska subsidiaries, bankers were unwilling to finance their sale to the Loup District because of its debts from the canal project.:139 40 In 1939, Consumers Public Power District was formed in Columbus.
The new organization's purpose was to buy power from the Loup Project and from the Tri-County and Sutherland projects on the Platte in central Nebraska, and to market it to consumers and municipal utilities.
By 1942, it had purchased all of the private electrical utilities in Nebraska outside of the immediate vicinity of Omaha;:139 47 by 1949, the last of the private utilities had been bought up, making Nebraska the only state in the country to be served entirely by enhance power. With the arrival of World War II, Columbus's boosters sought a war plant for Columbus.
Columbus is positioned at 41 25 58 N 97 21 31 W (41.432785, -97.358530), 85 miles (137 km) west of Omaha and 75 miles (121 km) northwest of Lincoln.
It is on the north side of the Loup River near its confluence with the Platte River.
According to the United States Enumeration Bureau, the town/city has a total region of 10.08 square miles (26.11 km2), of which, 9.85 square miles (25.51 km2) is territory and 0.23 square miles (0.60 km2) is water. In the city, the populace was spread out with 28.2% under the age of 18, 8.4% from 18 to 24, 28.0% from 25 to 44, 20.8% from 45 to 64, and 14.6% who were 65 years of age or older.
Columbus's economy is based on agriculture and manufacturing, with many industrialized companies thriving by cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power.
Major non-manufacturing employers include Nebraska Public Power District, which is headquartered in Columbus; Columbus City Schools; and Columbus Community Hospital. Columbus has one newspaper, the Columbus Telegram.
KZEN at FM 100.3 broadcasts nation music; the station is licensed in Central City, but the studio is in Columbus.
Columbus has three high schools.
The biggest is Columbus High School, with 1,100 students.
Columbus Public Schools Columbus Public Schools District operates a middle school and five elementary schools: Centennial, West Park, North Park, Lost Creek, and Emerson. The precinct has closed a several elementary schools inside the past 10 years, most recently the close-by Duncan Elementary School, which had been in the precinct since 1967. The Columbus Marching Festival is held every September, hosting High School marching bands from in and outside of the state. Lon Milo Du - Quette, occultist author and musician, is a graduate of Columbus High School.
Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) details for Columbus, Nebraska; United States Geological Survey (USGS); March 9, 1979.
"Emergence of Historic Tribes: The Lower Loup Culture".
Nebraska State Historical Society.
Nebraska State Historical Society.
Platte County, Part 2.
National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Columbus Commercial Historic District.
Nebraska State Historical Society.
Nebraska State Historical Society.
Nebraska State Historical Society.
National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Columbus Loup River Bridge.
Nebraska State Historical Society.
Nebraska State Historical Society.
"Community Facts: Columbus, Nebraska".
United States Enumeration Bureau.
"Community Fast Facts Profile: Columbus, Nebraska".
Columbus Telegram official website.
Columbus High School.
Columbus Public Schools.
"School marks final days with open home" Columbus Telegram.
"Nebraska National Register Sites in Platte County".
Nebraska State Historical Society.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Columbus, Nebraska.
City of Columbus "Columbus, a town/city of Nebraska".
Municipalities and communities of Platte County, Nebraska, United States
Categories:
Cities in Nebraska - Micropolitan areas of Nebraska - Cities in Platte County, Nebraska - County seats in Nebraska - Populated places established in 1856 - 1856 establishments in Nebraska Territory
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