Broken Bow Nebraska

City · Custer County · County seat · Population 3,506 (2020 census) · ZIP 68822 · Founded 1882 · Peak population 3,979 (1980)

About Broken Bow

Broken Bow is a city of 3,506 people (2020) and the seat of Custer County, near the geographic middle of Nebraska at about 2,477 feet. NE 2 and NE 92 run together through town on South E Street, NE 21 begins here and heads south toward Oconto and I-80, and NE 70 begins just east of town and runs east through Westerville toward Arcadia. Broken Bow has the county’s hospital, Broken Bow Public Schools, a Mid-Plains Community College campus, the public library, an aquatic center, a nine-hole golf course and city RV parking at Tomahawk Park; Victoria Springs State Recreation Area is about 15 miles north-northwest. Adams Land & Cattle, whose feedlots south of town hold more than 85,000 head, BD’s Broken Bow plant, Sargent Irrigation and Thomas Livestock are among the larger employers. Broken Bow is on Central Time.

History

Homesteader Wilson Hewitt opened a post office in his dugout on Mud Creek in November 1879. Three names he sent to Washington were refused; then his sons brought home a broken Indian bow from an old campsite, and “Broken Bow” was accepted. A piece of the bow is kept at the Custer County Museum. Jesse Gandy filed the town plat in June 1882 and gave the land for the courthouse and the square, and Broken Bow took the county seat from the temporary seat at Milo Young’s ranch in an election of late 1882, effective in January 1883. It became a village in 1884 and a city in 1888; the square was planted with trees on Arbor Day 1886, the year the Burlington’s Grand Island & Wyoming Central reached town. Photographer Solomon D. Butcher, whose pictures of sod-house families are the best-known record of the Nebraska frontier, opened the county’s first studio in 1882 and lived in Broken Bow from 1915 to 1926. The present courthouse, by John Latenser, dates from 1911, and the Arrow Hotel from 1928. A fire on April 1, 2007, destroyed several businesses on the square; the Arrow East hotel opened on one of the sites in 2017. Broken Bow reached 3,979 people in 1980. Race driver Earl Cooper, journalist and designer Bettina Bedwell, Congressmen A. R. Humphrey and Omer M. Kem, and football player Kent McCloughan are among the people associated with the town.

Things to see

the Custer County Museum, 445 S. 9th Ave. on the square: the Solomon D. Butcher gallery, the Wescott, Gibbons & Bragg store collection and a research room; free · the 1911 Custer County Courthouse, the 1928 Arrow Hotel, the Security State Bank building, the Carnegie library building and the Stillman P. Groat House, all on the National Register, as is the Commercial Square Historic District around the square · the Sandhills Journey Scenic Byway Visitor Center, a red barn at 44106 NE Hwy 2 on the east edge of town · the Fox Theater, the Boneyard Creation Museum and the Kinkaider Brewing · Melham Memorial Park, with a stocked lake, trails, disc golf and the Broken Bow Aquatic Center · Tomahawk Park RV sites and the Broken Bow Golf Club · the Custer County Fair, July 24–30 in 2026