Adjacent Counties & Nearby Towns

Washington County covers about 390 square miles between the Missouri River and the Elkhorn valley, with Blair as its seat. It borders Burt County to the north, Douglas County to the south and Dodge County to the west, with Harrison and Pottawattamie counties in Iowa across the river to the north-east and south-east.

Nearest towns. Kennard is closest at about 10 miles south-west by road, and Fort Calhoun — the county’s first seat — about 10 miles south-east. Herman is about 12 miles north-north-west and Arlington, where the county fairgrounds are, about 19 miles west-south-west. Across the Missouri, Missouri Valley, Iowa is only about 12 miles east. Tekamah lies about 19 miles north-north-west, Fremont about 26 west-south-west, and downtown Omaha about 26 south-south-east. These are road distances.

Points of Interest & Events

Black Elk-Neihardt Park, high on the bluffs at College Drive and 32nd Street, is Blair’s signature green space. It holds the Tower of the Four Winds, a large mosaic honouring the Lakota holy man Black Elk and the Nebraska poet laureate John G. Neihardt, whose Black Elk Speaks carried his words to the world. There are walking trails, a mountain-bike trail and a disc golf course.

DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, about five miles east, spreads over 8,362 acres either side of the state line — roughly 54 per cent in Nebraska, 46 per cent in Iowa — around a Missouri River oxbow. It was established in 1958. Its visitor centre holds one of the great archaeological finds of the American river trade: the steamboat Bertrand, which sank here in 1865 carrying supplies to the Montana gold fields, was rediscovered in 1968 and yielded more than 500,000 artefacts — everything from bottled food to mining tools, preserved in the mud. The Bertrand site was added to the National Register in 1969.

Boyer Chute National Wildlife Refuge, 4,040 acres of restored Missouri River side channel established in 1992, is also in Washington County, though it sits about three miles east of Fort Calhoun rather than near Blair. It has nature trails, fishing piers and a footbridge to an island.

Historic Blair. Nine of Washington County’s National Register listings are in or around Blair, among them the Washington County Courthouse, the Congregational Church of Blair, the Abraham Castetter and C. C. Crowell Jr. houses, Long Creek School, the Old McDonald Farm, and the 1889 Blair High School building, listed in 1991. The Trinity Seminary Building, listed in 1980, survives from the school that grew into Dana College. The 1901 federal post office at Lincoln and 16th was designed by James Knox Taylor, Supervising Architect of the Treasury.

Other places to know: River Wilds Golf Club, an eighteen-hole public course on North US-75; Steyer Park, with a pool, skate park and an arboretum in the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum collection; Lion’s Park with its restored depot; and the Blair Family YMCA. The Optimist boat ramp gives access to the Missouri itself.

Events. Gateway to the West Days is Blair’s annual festival, held over four days in June — in 2025 it ran 5–8 June. It opens with a Taste of Blair and takes in a parade, a carnival, a craft show, a kids’ triathlon, a pickleball tournament, the June Jam concert at Generations Park and an annual Car Show and Shine. The Washington County Fair is held in late July at the fairgrounds in Arlington, not in Blair. Down at Fort Calhoun, Fort Atkinson holds Living History Days on the first weekend of each month from May to October.

Economy & Industry

Blair is a biotechnology town, which is not something you can say of many places this size. The Cargill campus on the edge of town runs to 650 acres and employs around 600 Cargill staff; the company describes it as its largest single investment anywhere in the world. At its heart is a corn wet-milling complex turning maize into sweeteners, dextrose, livestock feed ingredients, corn gluten meal, fuel-grade ethanol and crude corn oil.

What makes it unusual is the ring of companies that have built plants alongside it to use that dextrose as a feedstock:

NatureWorks opened here in 2002 and makes Ingeo, a polylactic acid bioplastic derived from corn sugar rather than petroleum — the first and largest PLA plant in the world, with capacity raised to 150,000 metric tons. Novonesis (formerly Novozymes) inaugurated its plant in May 2012 and calls it the largest enzyme manufacturing facility dedicated to biofuels anywhere; it employs around 145 people and has expanded repeatedly. Evonik produces Biolys, a lysine feed additive for pigs and poultry. Avansya, a Cargill joint venture with Royal DSM, began commercial production of the fermentation-derived zero-calorie sweetener EverSweet here in November 2019. Corbion, the lactic acid producer, is also on the campus.

Education & Health

Schools. Blair Community Schools serves the city and a good deal of the surrounding county — about 151 square miles, or roughly two-fifths of Washington County — with 2,184 students across five buildings and about 154 teachers. Blair High School at 440 North 10th Street fields the Bears in purple and white and competes in the Eastern Midlands Conference; the district also runs Gerald Otte Blair Middle School and elementary and preschool buildings. Blair Christian Academy and Blair Kids Academy are the private options in town.

Dana College, 1884–2010. Danish Lutheran settlers founded Trinity Seminary here in 1884 to train pastors, and the school that grew from it became Dana College after a merger with the Danish college at Elk Horn, Iowa, in 1899. It was Danish to the end — its teams were the Vikings, and Danish royalty visited the campus in 1939, 1976 and 2009. Carrying debt to bondholders, the board agreed in 2010 to sell to a for-profit investor group, but the Higher Learning Commission refused to transfer the college’s accreditation, finding the plan would not preserve its residential liberal-arts mission. The buyers withdrew and Dana announced its closure on 1 July 2010, with roughly 550 to 600 students enrolled.

The 150-acre campus has since had several owners and is now Dana Village, run by Lutheran Family Services. Three former dormitories have been converted into 73 housing units, of which fourteen are reserved for young adults aged 18 to 25 who have aged out of Nebraska’s foster care system — roughly 300 do so statewide each year — at rents capped around $450 a month, with about a year of case management. Some $17 million, largely donated, went into the first two buildings. The Durham Center houses Lutheran Family Services, the alumni association and Christ Lutheran Church, and the gym still hosts an alumni homecoming. Fewer than half the campus buildings are usable so far; the long-term plan runs to 400–600 units.

Health care. Memorial Community Hospital and Health System at 810 North 22nd Street is a 25-bed critical access hospital with an emergency department, inpatient care, primary care, women’s and men’s health, behavioural health, diagnostic imaging, occupational health, therapy and a sleep lab, plus a specialty clinic for outpatient procedures. It runs clinics in Blair, Fort Calhoun and Cottonwood, serving Blair, Fort Calhoun, Tekamah and communities either side of the river.

Highway Access

Blair sits where two U.S. highways cross. U.S. Route 30 — the Lincoln Highway — runs east–west through town and over the Missouri into Iowa; U.S. Route 75 runs north–south, up from Fort Calhoun and Omaha toward Tekamah. The two run concurrently along Washington Street for about half a mile through the middle of Blair before separating, US-30 heading south-west toward Fremont and US-75 resuming north.

Nebraska Highway 133 has its northern terminus at a roundabout with US-30 in Blair and runs about twenty miles south-south-west as a four-lane divided highway, past Blair Municipal Airport and across I-680, becoming North 90th Street in Omaha and ending at West Dodge Road. It is the main Blair-to-Omaha commuter route.

The Blair Bridge, formally the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Bridge, carries US-30 across the Missouri. The original truss opened as a toll bridge in 1929; the tolls came off in 1962 and the crossing was replaced with a new structure in 1991. Interstate 29 is about twelve miles east on the Iowa side at Missouri Valley, and Interstate 680 about twenty miles south by way of NE-133.

Town Overview

Blair is the county seat of Washington County and, with 7,790 residents at the 2020 census across 5.51 square miles, much the largest town in it. It sits on the bluffs above the Missouri River about 26 road miles north-west of Omaha, inside the Omaha–Council Bluffs metropolitan area, at an elevation of about 1,089 feet. The population has been broadly steady for a generation — 7,512 in 2000, 7,990 in 2010, 7,790 in 2020.

The town was platted in 1869, when the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad pushed through and chose the Carter Valley crossing of the Missouri, bypassing the older river town of DeSoto. It was named for John Insley Blair (1802–1899), the New Jersey railroad builder and Sioux City & Pacific official who bought the land and laid the town out; lots were auctioned that year to the tune of about $61,000. Blair took the county seat from Fort Calhoun in 1869 — Washington County has had three seats in its time, Fort Calhoun, DeSoto and Blair — and incorporated as a city in 1872. (Sources differ on the exact platting date: Andreas’s 1882 history says 10 March 1869, the Blair Historic Preservation Alliance says 10 May.)

Modern Blair is unusual for a Nebraska town of its size in two ways: it has a genuine industrial base, the 650-acre Cargill campus on its edge being one of the larger bio-industrial clusters in the country, and it has lost a college — Dana College, a Danish-Lutheran institution founded here in the 1880s, closed in 2010, and its campus is now being reborn as housing.

On 26 April 2024 the Elkhorn–Blair tornado, later rated EF4, cut a 32-mile path through the area. Homes south of Blair were swept away and tank cars were derailed at the Cargill plant, but there were no fatalities.

With roughly 7,800-8,000 residents, Blair is Washington County's largest city and historical hub, home for decades to Dana College, the site of a landmark 1873 Supreme Court railroad case, and more recently the community that endured and is recovering from an EF4 tornado in April 2024.

Navigate & Explore Blair

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