NENebraska Fun Facts

Nebraska runs the only one chamber legislature in the United States. Forty nine members, called senators, elected without party labels on the ballot, with no house and senate to negotiate between. The second surprise is the ground itself: the state climbs almost a full mile from its southeastern corner to its southwestern one, which makes the flat Nebraska in most people's heads wrong.

Facts most people get wrong

• Nebraska is not flat. The land rises from around 840 feet along the Missouri River to 5,424 feet at Panorama Point in the Panhandle. That high point is taller than the highest ground in every New England state except New Hampshire's Mount Washington.
• The state is not all on Central time. The western Panhandle counties run on Mountain time, so driving Interstate 80 across Nebraska crosses a time zone line.
• The Sandhills are not cropland. They are roughly 20,000 square miles of grass covered dunes, the largest dune field in the Western Hemisphere. Ranchers graze cattle on them because plowing the sod sets the sand moving again.
• Boys Town is not a movie invention. It is an incorporated village with its own government sitting inside the Omaha city limits, founded by Father Edward Flanagan in 1917. The Spencer Tracy film came two decades later, in 1938.
• Nebraska does not hand all its electoral votes to one candidate. It splits them by congressional district, a system it shares only with Maine, and the Omaha based second district broke from the statewide winner in 2008, 2020 and 2024.
• The Reuben's origin is contested, not settled. Omaha's claim points to the Blackstone Hotel and a poker game around 1925, and a Blackstone waitress won a national sandwich contest with it in 1956. A rival claim credits a Manhattan deli owner.

Records and firsts

• Only unicameral state legislature, in place since 1937 after a 1934 ballot measure led by Senator George Norris cut the old two chamber body from more than 100 members down to 43.
• Only all public power state. Every Nebraskan buys electricity from a publicly owned utility. No investor owned power company operates in the state.
• Arbor Day started here, on April 10, 1872, an idea of J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City. Nebraska was the Tree Planters' State until it adopted Cornhusker State in 1945.
• Kool-Aid was invented in Hastings in 1927 by Edwin Perkins, who wanted to ship a fruit drink without shipping the water. It became the official state soft drink in 1998.
• Vise-Grip locking pliers came from DeWitt, invented by blacksmith William Petersen in the early 1920s and patented in 1924.
• Longest sellout streak in college football. Memorial Stadium in Lincoln has filled for every Nebraska home game since November 3, 1962. On game day the crowd makes the stadium the third largest population center in the state.

Geography that surprises

• Six states touch Nebraska: South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and Wyoming, which is more neighbors than most states of its size.
• A piece of Iowa sits on the Nebraska side of the river. An 1877 flood cut off a Missouri River oxbow and stranded land that stayed Iowa. Carter Lake, Iowa is still Iowa, and it is reachable overland only through Omaha.
• Panorama Point, the 5,424 foot high point, is a low swell of private ranchland in the far southwest corner, closer to Denver than to Omaha.
• About 80 percent of the world's sandhill cranes stop on a stretch of the Platte River near Kearney each spring, the largest concentration of cranes anywhere on earth.
• Chimney Rock, near Bayard, is the landmark mentioned most often in surviving Oregon Trail diaries, the marker that told wagon trains the plains were ending.

Where the name comes from

Nebraska comes from an Otoe and Omaha term rendered as Ni Brathge or Ni Btaska, meaning flat water. It described the Platte River, a wide shallow braid of channels crossing the state. French traders had already translated the same idea when they called it la rivière Plate, the flat river, so the state and its main river carry the same name in two languages. The word came into official use in the 1840s, attached to the territory created by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and stayed on when Nebraska became the 37th state on March 1, 1867. The state motto, Equality before the law, dates from that founding.

Bordering states

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