Gibbon Nebraska

City · Buffalo County · Population 1,878 (2020 census) · ZIP 68840 · Founded 1871

About Gibbon

Gibbon is a city of 1,878 people (2020), the most it has had, in eastern Buffalo County, at 2,064 feet on US 30 and the Union Pacific about 13 miles east-northeast of Kearney. I-80 Exit 285 is a few miles south, with Windmill State Recreation Area, the Rowe Sanctuary and the Richard Plautz crane viewing site along the Platte beyond it. Gibbon is on Central Time.

History

Gibbon was settled by the Soldiers’ Free Homestead Colony, organized in the winter of 1870–71 by Col. John Thorp of West Farmington, Ohio, who advertised “free homes and free lands” along the Union Pacific. The first group, about 80 families, reached the Gibbon siding on April 7, 1871, to land just blackened by a prairie fire, and a blizzard struck two days later; they lived in railroad boxcars until they could build, and in time 129 families from 15 states joined. The town, named for Maj. Gen. John Gibbon, was platted by Thorp and George Gilman. Gibbon became the county seat in 1871 and built a brick courthouse in 1872, but voters moved the seat to Kearney in 1874, and the building was later sold to the school district. Andreas noted in 1882 that Gibbon had never had a saloon. The Wood River flooded the town in March, July and August 2019. Criminologist Edwin H. Sutherland (1883) and Ben M. Cherrington, chancellor of the University of Denver (1885), were born here, and Dick Cavett’s family lived here when he was born in 1936.

Things to see

the Gibbon Heritage Center, with an 1899 church sanctuary, Civil War relics and a mammoth bone · the old Gibbon Baptist Church, 917 2nd St. (National Register 2016) · Windmill State Recreation Area at I-80 Exit 285: six lakes, camping and the “Gibbon, 1871–1971” historical marker · Rowe Sanctuary and the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center on the Platte, with crane tours each spring · the free Richard Plautz Crane Viewing Site, 1½ miles south of Exit 285 · Gibbon Valley View Golf Club, 14155 Pawnee Rd.