The story
Officially it was Kearney City, the first county seat of Kearney County, but everyone called it Dobytown — for the adobe, or 'dobie,' buildings it was thrown together from in 1859. It stood a couple of miles west of Fort Kearny on the Platte, and it existed to separate westbound travelers and off-duty soldiers from their money. Gambling, whiskey, and prostitution were the main trades in what was, for a few years, one of the busiest supply and outfitting points on the overland trail; a Pony Express station stood here too. General William Tecumseh Sherman, passing through, remembered the whiskey he was served as 'tanglefoot.'
It was a boomtown of the trail, and it lived and died on the traffic. When the Union Pacific Railroad laid its tracks a short distance away, the wagon traffic dried up, and the closing of Fort Kearny in 1871 removed the town's last reason to exist. Dobytown was abandoned soon after.
Nothing of the adobe town remains on the open farmland near Fort Kearny State Historical Park, but the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, and a roadside marker tells the story.
What remains today
No structures — open farmland near Fort Kearny; a historical marker and the National Register listing note the site.
Questions from the field
- Why was it called Dobytown?
- For its adobe — 'dobie' — buildings. Its official name was Kearney City, the first seat of Kearney County, but the nickname stuck for the rough supply town beside Fort Kearny.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Dobytown — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Dobytown's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 1873810
- — Wikipedia — Dobytown, Nebraska
- — History Nebraska — Dobytown marker