Imperial, NE

Imperial is the county seat of Chase County in southwestern Nebraska. The 2020 Census counted 2,068 people, and county records place the city at the center of an 897-square-mile county. Chase County Schools, the courthouse, and Mid-Plains Community College give Imperial a civic and educational role that reaches beyond its city limits. The Frenchman River is the county’s principal watercourse, a reminder that the town sits in a broad rural landscape shaped by water, roads, and agriculture.

Imperial began on land homesteaded by Thomas Mercier and M. J. Goodrich. They offered a town lot to anyone who would put up a building and help start the community, and Mercier became the first postmaster on December 14, 1885. The railroad grade reached Imperial in 1888; service arrived on August 15, 1892, and the line ended there. That origin still gives the city its basic shape: county business and schools in the center, with the old railroad story running underneath a modern county-seat town.