[3] The fort became the eastern anchor of the Great Platte River Road and thus an important military and civilian way station for 20 years.

The first post, Fort Kearny, was established in the spring of 1848 "near the head of the Grand Island" along the Platte River by Lieutenant Daniel P. Woodbury.

Throughout the decades of its use until the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the character of the buildings became slightly more permanent, changing from adobe and sod structures to wooden frame construction.

In 1838, Kearny had scouted the area along the Missouri River at the mouth of Table Creek near present-day Nebraska City looking for a suitable location for an outpost to protect westward travelers.

The Army then sent Colonel Kearny with a detachment of men from Fort Leavenworth up the Missouri to the area with orders to construct an outpost at the selected site.

Construction was subsequently halted on the site, with the exception of the erection of a number of log huts for temporary quarters for a battalion of troops who wintered there in 1847–1848.

In 1850, the fort acquired regular once-a-month mail service with the arrival of a stagecoach route between Independence, Missouri and Salt Lake City.

Fort Kearny's location was chosen based on its proximity to the junction of several existing smaller trails, which joined into a single broader route that became known as the Great Platte River Road.

At this location, immigrant trains from the Missouri River trail head converged[4] and thousands of overland travelers passed by the fort each year.

[10] In the summer of 1864, the irritation of the Native Americans at the encroachment by white settlers culminated in violent attacks on wagon trains along the Platte and the Little Blue River.

[11] The construction of the Union Pacific Railroad across Nebraska starting in 1865 largely marked the end of the need for a fort to protect and supply wagon train emigrants.

[13] In 1928, the Fort Kearny Memorial Association was formed by Nebraska citizens to raise money to purchase and restore part of the grounds.

These digs have uncovered and marked the foundations of all major building on the site including headquarters, officers and troops quarters, parade grounds, storage and livestock stockade.

In the novel Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, a train in the process of being hijacked by Sioux stops at Fort Kearny to request aid from the troops there.

Fort Kearny also appears in the short-lived television western drama series The Loner starring actor Lloyd Bridges.

The series, created and written by Rod Serling of "The Twilight Zone" fame, takes place in the late 1860s and features the fort in an episode titled "Westward the Shoemaker".

The "Westward..." episode concerns an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who seeks a new life in Nebraska Territory as a bootmaker but runs afoul of a card shark.

The fort is mentioned in the introduction to an episode of the TV series Wagon Train, "The Willy Moran Story" as the next destination of the settlers.

The fort is mentioned in the 2014 film The Homesman, as the post Tommy Lee Jones character was stationed when a soldier with the US Dragoons.