About Exeter
Exeter is a village in Fillmore County, Nebraska, at an elevation of 1,608 feet. It sits on the divide between the south fork of the Blue River and Turkey Creek. The village covers 0.63 square miles. The 2020 census counted 516 residents, down from 591 in 2010 and 712 in 2000.
History
Dr Horace Greeley Smith filed a homestead claim at the site in 1870 and settled on the land in the winter of 1871. In the autumn of 1871 the Burlington and Missouri was completed through Fillmore County. The railroad named its new towns in alphabetical order as it built west from Lincoln. One of the families that had settled in the area had come from Exeter, New Hampshire, and proposed that name. It fitted the sequence and was adopted.
The town takes shape
Two large grain elevators were built in 1878, along with a number of businesses, and the town's first newspaper, the Enterprise, was established that year. Exeter became an incorporated village on 1 April 1879. By the late 1880s it had banks, churches, schools and small manufacturing, and both the Burlington and the North Western kept depots in town.
People
Jeff Zeleny, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is from Exeter. So are Richard A. Dier, a United States federal judge, and Donald Trauger, a nuclear scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
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Exeter traces its origin to 1870, when Dr. Horace Greeley Smith filed a homestead claim on the site in anticipation of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad's westward expansion; the railroad reached the area the following year, and the town was formally incorporated in 1879. Its name is said to come from a local settler family who had emigrated from Exeter, New Hampshire, a name that also happened to fit the railroad's practice of naming its stations in alphabetical order heading west. Exeter is the birthplace of journalist Jeff Zeleny, a longtime senior political correspondent for CNN and ABC News who grew up on the family farm there, and of Donald Trauger, a nuclear scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later became a director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The village is home to Gilbert's Park, which includes an aquatic center built in 2009, along with the Edgar Recreation Center and three churches.
With a 2020 population of 516, Exeter remains one of the larger villages in Fillmore County, supported by recreational amenities like its aquatic center that are relatively substantial for a town its size. Its connection to nationally recognized figures in journalism and nuclear science gives it a notable legacy beyond its agricultural roots.