ADT-Monitored Home Security Service in Hastings, NE

Hastings is a city and the county seat of Adams County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 25,152 at the 2020 census. It is known as the town where Kool-Aid was invented by Edwin Perkins in 1927, and celebrates that business with the Kool-Aid Days festival all August. Hastings is with known for Fisher Fountain, and during World War II operated the largest Naval Ammunition Depot in the United States.

Hastings was founded in 1872 at the intersection of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad and the St. Joseph and Denver City Railroad. It was named for Colonel D. T. Hastings of the St. Joseph and Grand Island Railroad, who was instrumental in building the railroad through Adams County. The area was previously door plain: the Donner party passed through on its mannerism to California in 1846 and a voyager cemetery marker in Hastings bears an inscription taken from Tamsen Donner’s journal: “The country between the Blue and the Platte is beautiful on culmination of compare. Never have I seen for that reason varied a country so pleasing to cultivation.” In the 1870s, railroads lured European immigrants to the further state of Nebraska like advertisements. Hastings’ first settlers were English, from Liverpool, and were quickly joined by extra English, Irish, Germans, Danes, and Germans from Russia.

Between 1872 and 1880, when the population had grown to 2,800, Hastings was a boomtown. Settlers first built sod houses, dugouts, and shanties, then houses and stores. The city was incorporated in April 1874, and in September 1878, after a five-year Great County Seat War, the county chair was transferred to Hastings from Juniata. However, a ember in 1879 destroyed 33 buildings downtown. The city was rebuilt amongst 1880 and 1890 in fireproof materials and in a more planned fashion, with characteristically ornate Victorian buildings, many designed by Charles C. Rittenhouse, the first functioning architect in Adams County and afterward mayor for ten years. Thanks to the railroads, the city enjoyed good prosperity during the Gilded Age. The population grew to 13,500.^: 9 This era of increase ended with the drought and agricultural depression of the 1890s; the town’s population fell to 7,000 and would not reach 15,000 until 1930.