Nebraska is the 37th State Admitted to the Union

The word “Nebraska” first began to appear in publications in 1842, when Lt. John C. Fremont explored the plains and mountains of the western United States. His report mentions the “Nebraska River,” the Oto Indian name for the Platte River. The term was taken from the Oto word “Nebrathka” meaning “flat water.” U.S. Secretary of War William Wilkins, in his report of Nov. 30, 1844, stated: “The Platte or Nebraska River being the central stream would very properly furnish a name to the (proposed) territory.”

The first bill to organize the new Nebraska Territory, introduced in Congress on Dec. 17, 1844, by Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, failed to pass. Douglas and other Midwestern politicians wanted the territory organized so a future transcontinental railroad could be built across the Plains. Another bill, called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was passed after a long, bitter struggle and signed by President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854. The struggle between the slave and free states for control in the Nebraska region gave rise to the Republican Party and caused border conflicts before the Civil War. Slaves were first bought and sold in the 1850s in Nebraska City and, at one time, the Underground Railroad may have operated in Nebraska.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act officially created the Kansas and Nebraska territories, opening the area to settlement west of the Missouri River. The Nebraska Territory’s boundaries extended from the 40th parallel to the Canadian border and from the Missouri River to the Continental Divide, including parts of present-day Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado, as well as Nebraska. By 1863, Congress created several more new territories from this region, reducing the Nebraska Territory to about the state’s present size.

President Pierce appointed Francis Burt of South Carolina as the first governor of the Nebraska Territory. When Burt died two days after taking the oath of office on Oct. 16, 1854, the territory’s secretar...

As new states entered the Union, Congress made land grants to provide support for public education. On April 19, 1864 the U.S. Congress passed, and President Abraham Lincoln signed, the enabling act for Nebraska statehood. Upon its admission to the Union on March 1, 1867, Nebraska received 2,797,520 acres of land for the “support of the common school.” This original endowment represented nearly one eighteenth of the entire state of Nebraska, or 4,371 square miles of land. That is an area larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

This original grant represented sections sixteen and thirty-six in each township “or lands in lieu thereof.” This “in lieu land” provision was necessary because settlers living on sections sixteen and thirty-six before statehood were allowed to remain where they had settled. Thus, other lands in other sections had to be selected for the School Trust.