Gibbon, NE

Gibbon is a Buffalo County city in the Kearney micropolitan area, with 1,878 residents at the 2020 census. It began in 1871 when the Soldiers' Free Homestead Colony arrived on a Union Pacific train, bringing many Civil War veterans to a siding that had little more than a section house. The settlers spent their first days in railroad boxcars and then built dugouts and sod houses. The place was named for Major General John Gibbon, the Union officer whose name was already attached to the siding.

Gibbon was chosen as Buffalo County's original seat, and a courthouse was built there in 1873. The county-seat fight ended in 1874, when voters chose Kearney; county records were moved in the middle of the night in a farm wagon, which is still one of the better Nebraska courthouse stories. U.S. 30 passes through town, and Interstate 80 runs a few miles south. Gibbon is a prairie road town with a Civil War veteran beginning, a short-lived county-seat chapter, and a railroad history that is still easy to find in the way the place sits on the map.