Strang is a small village in Fillmore County. The Lincoln Land Company first called the place Media when the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad came through in the mid 1880s. The name changed for good in 1886, when A. L. Strang, a windmill salesman, offered to give the community a tower and pump if it would take his name. The village incorporated that November.
For a while the railroad kept it busy. Two freight and two passenger trains passed through every day in the 1890s, and Strang served as a dividing point on the line. Population peaked at roughly 400 around 1890. Then came the droughts of 1893 to 1896 and of the 1930s, four serious Main Street fires, and a bank failure in 1927. The fire of July 1934 took a full block, including the post office, a grocery store and a cafe. The depot agency closed in 1964.
Thirty-four people lived in Strang at the 2020 count. Several buildings survive from the busier years and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, among them the town hall and jail and the Strang Public School, which closed in 2007. A small museum and a public library both sit on Main Street. The first high school class graduated in 1895 and the last in 1951.
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Strang is Fillmore County's smallest town, settled in the 1880s along the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad. Its name went through an unusually colorful sequence of changes: the settlement was first called "Media," renamed "Bixby" about a month later, and then renamed again in April 1886 to Strang, honoring A. L. Strang, who donated a windmill and water pump to the town. That donated windmill reportedly still stands today as a local landmark, and the town's history is preserved at the Strang Museum on Main Street. Strang suffered two significant fires, in 1899 and again in 1934, the latter destroying an entire block including several civic buildings. Two structures tied to the town are separately listed on the National Register of Historic Places: a historic town hall and jail building, and the Belle Prairie Township Hall. With a 2020 population of just 34, Strang remains a tiny but enduring rural community.
Strang's triple-renaming story is one of the more distinctive small-town histories in Fillmore County, and its surviving windmill landmark and two NRHP-listed structures give the tiny village a stronger historical footprint than its population alone would suggest.