About Fairmont
Fairmont is a village in Fillmore County, Nebraska, at an elevation of 1,641 feet. It covers 1.15 square miles. The 2020 census counted 602 residents, up from 560 in 2010 but below the 691 counted in 2000.
History
Fairmont was platted in 1871, when the Burlington and Quincy railroad was extended to that point. In April of that year the railroad hired four men to file pre-exemption claims on the land it wanted for the town site. The name fits the alphabetical run of stations along the line: Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, Grafton. It is a descriptive name, referring to the town's setting at a high elevation. By the autumn of 1872 Fairmont had a school building, hotels, more stores, lumberyards, and coal and feed yards under construction.
The army air field
Construction of the Fairmont Army Air Field began on 17 September 1942. The 1,980-acre base had barracks for nearly 6,000 officers and enlisted men and a 350-bed hospital, the largest in Nebraska. B-17s, B-24s and B-29s flew from the field, and eight bombardment groups trained there. Lt Col Paul Tibbets came to Fairmont and selected the 393rd Bomb Squadron for the 509th Composite Group, the unit that dropped both atomic bombs on Japan. The base closed in 1945 and was declared surplus in 1946. Fairmont State Airfield, three miles south of the village, is still in use and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
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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.