establishment of an army air field at the site of the Keens Municipal Airport. Construction of the Kearney Army Air Field (KAAF), one of eleven in Nebraska, was approved on September 5, 1942, and completed February 1, 1943. The KAAF was designated as a processing center for B‐17 and B‐29 heavy bombers and their crews prior to deployment to Europe and the Pacific. Actor Clark Gable, as an army air forces officer, passed through KAAF in 1943 en route to England. During the first six months of 1945, 554 B‐29 crews were processed at KAAF for overseas assignments.
At its peak, some 800 civilians and 3,000 military personnel worked at KAAF, including 200 African American soldiers and as many as 132 members of the Women’s Army Corps. After the war, Kearney fought to keep the air field open, and it was briefly designated as the Kearney Air Force Base to house the 27th Fighter Wing. The air base was closed in March 1949, and the site became the Kearney Municipal Airport.
]]>Pioneers settling in this area, including many Civil War veterans, bought five acres from the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad for $25 and established a school in 1875. Osco School District No. 6 deeded two acres for the Pleasant Prairie Graveyard in 1876, and the earliest known burials took place that year. More acreage was purchased in 1898, and the name was later changed to Osco Cemetery. It is the oldest organized cemetery in Kearney County.
Two monuments honoring veterans are located in the cemetery, the newest one having been erected in 1995. On Memorial Day, formerly "Decoration Day," veterans' organizations from Campbell, Upland, Minden, and Heartwell have helped recognize the Osco veterans. Children from Osco School also took part.
The cemetery never affiliated with a church, but kept its ties to the school. Volunteers have always seen to the upkeep of both. In 1949 the Osco School closed its doors and was purchased by the Osco Cemetery Association. Through the years the building was used for cemetery meetings, as a polling place, and for serving lunch on Memorial Day.
]]>The Trail Which followed the south side of the Platte River was the main route to Oregon and California. Fur traders going to the Rocky Mountains took the first wagons over the trail in 1830. Oregon-bound missionaries followed in the mid-1830s, and the first group of settlers embarked for Oregon in 1841. The number of emigrants reached 40,000 in 1849 after gold was discovered in California.
Most emigrants traveled in ox-drawn wagons averaging about fifteen miles a day. In the 1850s and 1860s, freight wagons and stagecoaches carrying passengers and mail used the road. From April 1860 until October 1861, the Pony Express carried mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California.
Fort Kearny (1848-1871), east of here, provided protection and supplies for travelers. Supplies could also be purchased at nearby Dobytown. One of many road ranches along the Oregon-California trail was located just southeast of this marker.
Wagon travel on this overland route declined following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
]]>Swedish immigrants began homesteading Mirage Township, Kearney County, in 1873. By 1876 these families had formed the Swedish Lutheran Church (Bethany Lutheran), the first church in Kearney County. The tempo of settlement increased with the coming of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad in 1883. Tradition says Axtell was named after the engineer of the first train to pass though the village. Axtell was incorporated December 14, 1885.
Cooperative effort resulted in the establishment of three Axtell institutions. A mutual insurance company was founded April 19, 1885, to cover losses from fire, hail, wind, and theft. Pastor K. G. William Dahl, deeply concerned that people "remember them that are in bonds," received community support in establishing Bethphage Mission February 19, 1913. The first reorganized school district in Nebraska, R-1, was ratified in a special election May 6, 1952, by the residents of Axtell and thirteen surrounding school districts.
In the early 1900s Axtell was known as "Windmill Town" because of its many windmills. International renown was brought to Axtell in 1964 and in 1968 by Gary Anderson, who won Olympic Medals in rifle marksmanship.
]]>The Boom Town played an important role in the West, and few Nebraska towns had such a boom history as Lowell. It was selected as a townsite by the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad in 1871, and its first businesses were soon established.
Lowell, first incorporated town in Kearney county, was chosen county seat at the reorganization election of June 17, 1872. The B & MRR arrived on July 8, and for a short time it was end-of-track, becoming a major shipping point for central Nebraska. Also in July, it was selected as the site for the U.S. Land Office for the Republican Valley, and its streets were crowded with homesteaders. It was a temporary shipping point for herds of cattle trailed north from Texas. The courthouse and land office stood near here.
Lowell's decline began as early as 1872, when the railroad built on to Kearney, making it the regional trading center, and a wagon bridge built across the Platte at Kearney in 1874 continued the drop in business. The removal of the land office in 1874 continued the drop in business. The removal of the land office in 1874 added to decline of Lowell. When the county seat was removed in 1878, a quiet village replaced the boom town. The school closed in 1963.
]]>The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad entered Nebraska at Plattsmouth in 1870 and built west to join the Union Pacific at Kearney Junction (now Kearney city) on September 3, 1872. The railroad bridge into Kearney was used for 104 years. It linked southern Nebraska traffic with the transcontinental Union Pacific. In 1872-73, thousands of trailed-in Texas Longhorns were shipped from Lowell, 5 1/2 miles east of here. Sugar beets and prairie hay were once primary freight items. During World War II as many as 200 carloads of cement, steel, and Weeping Water limestone were carried here for highway construction.
This 24-mile Kenesaw-Kearney segment of Burlington track carried its last train on November 3, 1976. Except for 1.8 miles of right-of-way, including the Platte bridges, designated as a Nebraska Game and Parks Commission hike-bike trail, the land was sold. This marker is erected on the grade between Lowell and Newark. In an early forestation experiment, Chief Engineer Thomas Doane in 1872 hired nurseryman Ezra F. Stephens of Crete to plant 750,000 trees along 100 miles of this line between Lincoln and Lowell to prevent snow drifts.
]]>The growth of overland emigration to Oregon after 1842 resulted in the establishment of military posts across the West to protect travelers. The first post, Fort Kearny, was established in the spring of 1848 "near the head of the Grand Island" along the Platte River by Lieutenant Daniel P. Woodbury. It was first called Fort Childs, but in 1848 the post was renamed Fort Kearny in honor of General Stephen Watts Kearny.
Despite its lack of fortifications, Fort Kearny served as way station, sentinel post, supply depot, and message center for 49'ers bound for California and homeseekers traveling to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. By the 1860s the fort had become a significant state and freighting station and home station of the Pony Express. During the Indian Wars of 1864-1865 a small stockade was apparently built upon the earth embankment still visible. Although never under attack, the post did serve as an outfitting depot for several Indian campaigns.
One of the fort's final duties was the protection of workers building the Union Pacific. In 1871, two years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the fort was discontinued as a military post. This site has been entered on the National Register of Historic Places.
]]>Two miles to the east is the site of Walker's Ranch, an early Kearney County landmark. The ranch was established by Charles Walker in 1872 as a station on the government mail route from Kearney City to the Republican Valley. It consisted of a house, well, and stable large enough for forty horses. In 1873, the buildings were purchased by Deputy U.S. Marshal Daniel B. Ball who homesteaded the quarter-section on which the ranch was located.
An interesting episode in the early history of Walker's Ranch was Ball's capture of two men who had reportedly jumped his claim and murdered one of their companions. As settlement increased, the ranch assumed new importance with the establishment there of a postoffice in 1874 and a store in 1879.
The first term of School District 11 commenced at Walker's Ranch in 1877. The following year, the district's first schoolhouse, a sod structure, was built on a site just east of here. to the west was a racetrack constructed by the Wilcox District Fair Association in 1893. No traces of these early landmarks remain.
]]>Following the 1848 establishment of Fort Kearny three miles east of here and the later expansion of overland commerce and emigration, the small commercial center of Kearney City was established near here in 1859. The town's more common name, Dobytown, was derived from the resemblance of its twelve to fifteen earthen buildings to adobe structures.
Dobytown itself developed in response to the thousands of soldiers, freighters and travelers whose "needs" could not be met within the fort. Gambling, liquor and disreputable men and women were its principal attractions. One of the town's most famous visitors, General William Tecumseh Sherman described the horrible whiskey he was served here as "tanglefoot." However, in addition to its notorious functions, Dobytown also served as the major outfitting point west of the Missouri River, the center of frontier transportation from 1860 to 1866, a Pony Express station and the first county seat of Kearney County.
The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 reduced the flow of travel by the fort until finally in 1871 it was abandoned, souncing the death knell of Dobytown, a pioneer frontier town.
]]>In 1903 the legislature appropriated $50,000 to establish a state normal school in central or western Nebraska. After 111 ballots, the State Board of Education chose Kearney as the site. The city donated twenty acres on the west side of town for a campus, including one building, Green Terrace Hall, which was used mainly as a dormitory until razed in 1960. Construction of the administration building began in 1904. The first classes at Kearney State Normal School were held in the summer of 1905 with 96 students enrolled. In 1921 the school was renamed the Nebraska State Teachers College at Kearney and became a four-year college. The granting of liberal arts degrees was authorized in 1949, and a graduate program was established in 1956. The name was changed to Kearney State College in 1963. On July 1, 1991, the institution became part of the University of Nebraska, to be known as the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). Under its various names, UNK has played an important role in state development and continues to meet the educational, research, and service needs of Nebraska.
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