Lowell was platted in 1871 by the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad, became Kearney County's first incorporated town, and was named the original county seat on June 17, 1872. When the railroad reached it a few weeks later it briefly boomed as an end-of-track cattle-shipping point (population reportedly near 2,000) and hosted the U.S. Land Office for the Republican Valley. The boom collapsed fast: the railroad extended to Kearney in 1873, the land office relocated in 1874, and the county seat itself moved to Minden by 1878, leaving Lowell a quiet village of about 50 people by 1882.

Today Lowell is an unincorporated community — just a few homes — with no city government and no ZIP code of its own (its area is served by neighboring Gibbon's 68840). What remains on the ground is a Nebraska state historical marker and a "big boot" monument marking the old townsite cemetery's roughly 25 unmarked "boot hill" graves. It's a genuine, well-documented piece of Kearney County history: a boomtown-and-bust story and the county's original seat before Minden.