Bloomington Nebraska 68910 - Nebraska Directory

Bloomington Area Cameras

Town Overview

Bloomington is a village of 110 people (2020 census) in southern Franklin County, on the bluffs just north of the Republican River. It is a small place with an outsized history: for forty-six years it was the county seat, and it owed that to a United States Land Office. Population was 124 in 2000 and 103 in 2010, against a peak of more than eight hundred by 1894.

The site was reached first by the army: soldiers from Fort Kearny laid out the Brookline Road and built a stockade called Antietam Post at what is now the village’s south-east corner, around 1867. The town carried three names in succession — Brooklyn, then Waterloo, then Bloomington, the last adopted in 1873 at the suggestion of Sol Males, after Bloomington, Illinois. A townsite company organized at Brownville had picked the spot in 1872, once it was clear the railroad would come.

It did, on 10 March 1879, when the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad completed its line from Red Cloud to Bloomington. For a while the rails stopped here, and the village became the supply point for a huge stretch of country — two or three hundred freight wagons a day. When the Burlington pushed on west, that trade went with it, and the railroad platted a new town called Franklin halfway between two earlier Franklin sites.

The village’s best-known native is the professional baseball player Frank Hoxie “Kid” Willson, born here on 3 November 1895.

Adjacent Counties & Nearby Towns

Franklin County covers about 576 square miles and had 2,889 residents in 2020. It is named for Benjamin Franklin, and the Republican River runs east through its southern half. Its entire southern boundary is the Kansas state line. It borders Kearney County to the north, Phelps County to the north-west, Harlan County to the west and Webster County to the east, with Smith County, Kansas to the south-east and Phillips County, Kansas to the south-west. The county peaked at 10,303 people in 1910.

Nearest towns. Franklin, the county seat, is only about 4.6 miles east — a straight run along U.S. Route 136. Naponee is about 5.5 miles west-south-west and Republican City about 10 miles west. Riverton lies about 15 miles east, Hildreth about 17 miles north, and Alma, the Harlan County seat, about 17 miles west. Campbell is about 21 miles north-east, Red Cloud about 27 miles east and Holdrege about 30 miles north-west. These are straight-line distances.

Points of Interest & Events

The old courthouse square. The block at the center of the village is still called the courthouse square, because from 1874 to 1920 the Franklin County courthouse stood on it. Every county office was inside except the sheriff, who had his own building. The courthouse itself is gone, and the square is now the village park — but a good deal of Bloomington’s history is gathered on it.

The Old Rock Jail is the village’s signature building and the sheriff’s old quarters — built in the mid-1890s of a distinctive green river rock quarried about five miles south, across the Republican. Inside were the sheriff’s office and three cells, two of them all-steel and one an isolation room, heated by a pot-belly stove. Its first prisoners arrived after a murder in 1899. The exterior is essentially unchanged.

Also on the square: a 155 mm German cannon captured in France in 1918, which the village paid around $200 to have shipped out from Washington and still fires on patriotic occasions; an 1870s horse trough, once fed by a windmill and still holding water; and the bell from the old Bloomington high school, saved by public subscription and mounted on bricks from the school building. The Community Center and Museum across from the park holds a pictorial history of the town and material from the school, and shares its building with the post office.

Harlan County Lake, the largest Army Corps reservoir in Nebraska at 13,250 acres, lies about nine miles west; the dam sits two miles south of Republican City and was built after the catastrophic Republican River flood of 1935. Walleye, white bass, wipers, catfish, crappie and pike, with camping, beaches and boat ramps.

Events. The Franklin County Fair is the area’s big annual event, held over roughly ten days in July at the fairgrounds in Franklin, about five miles east — livestock and 4-H shows, a carnival, tractor pulls, demolition derbies and live entertainment. Bloomington itself marks Memorial Day and the Fourth of July on the courthouse square, cannon and all. No separate named village festival could be documented.

One National Register listing lies in the vicinity — the Lost Creek Archeological Site, added in 1983 — but its location is restricted and it is not open to visitors. Neither the rock jail nor the former land office is listed.

Education & Health

Schools. There is no school at Bloomington today. The village lies within Franklin Public Schools (Nebraska district 31-0506), a PK–12 district covering roughly 340 square miles — well over half of Franklin County — with its buildings at 1001 M Street in Franklin, about five miles east. The teams are the Flyers. Parts of the county fall in the Alma, Silver Lake, Wilcox-Hildreth, Minden and Red Cloud districts, but Bloomington is squarely in Franklin’s.

Health care. The nearest hospital is Franklin County Memorial Hospital, 1406 Q Street in Franklin, about five miles east, with a 24-hour emergency room, outpatient services, laboratory and radiology; the Pool Medical Clinic shares the campus. Harlan County Health System, 717 North Brown Avenue in Alma, about 17 miles west, is the next nearest.

Highway Access

U.S. Route 136 is Bloomington’s road. It runs east–west along the northern bluffs of the Republican valley and passes just north of the village — under a mile from the center — so you turn off the highway to come into town. Eastward it reaches Franklin in about five miles and carries on to Riverton and Red Cloud; westward it runs past Naponee and Republican City toward Alma.

Nebraska Highway 10 meets US-136 at Franklin, five miles east, and is the main road north toward Minden and the interstate. U.S. Route 183 joins US-136 between Orleans and Alma, twenty-odd miles west, and U.S. Route 281 at Red Cloud, about 27 miles east. Nebraska Highway 4 does not serve Bloomington — it runs across the north of the county through Ragan and Campbell, some seventeen to twenty miles away.

The nearest interstate is I-80, about 41 miles due north in a straight line; the natural access is exit 279 at Minden and Kearney, by way of NE-10.

Bloomington's 46-year run as county seat is an outsized piece of history for a town its current size, and its rivalry with Franklin over that status is one of the more distinctive local-government stories in the county. Today it remains a small, quiet farming community.