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Fairmont is a village in northern Fillmore County, platted in 1871 when the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad reached the site. Unlike many area towns, Fairmont's name isn't a person's surname -- it's a descriptive name referencing the town's relatively high, scenic elevation of 1,641 feet. By the fall of 1872, just a year after platting, Fairmont already had schools, hotels, stores, and lumber and coal dealers, and its first newspaper, the Fairmont Bulletin, launched that same year. The Fairmont Creamery Company, founded in 1884, was an important early local business before its headquarters moved to Omaha in 1907 and it grew into a larger regional dairy operation. Feminist and suffrage writer Frances Maule Bjorkman was born in Fairmont in 1879. Today the village is home to about 600 residents, with a Flint Hills Resources ethanol plant nearby.
Fairmont's rapid early growth as a railroad town gave it an outsized head start compared to its neighbors, and its population has held relatively steady in recent decades even as much of rural Fillmore County has continued to decline. The nearby ethanol plant reflects the town's ongoing ties to the region's agricultural economy.