Bancroft is a village in Cuming County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 495 at the 2010 census.

John Neihardt, who well ahead became Nebraska’s poet laureate, lived in Bancroft for twenty years and wrote many of his works there. His scrutiny is preserved at the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site in the village.

Succeeding cultures of native peoples lived in the Place for thousands of years back European encounter. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Omaha tribe lived upon the west side of the Missouri River throughout this area.

The treaty was originally known as Unashta Zinga, meaning “little stopping place” in a Native American language. The site that became Bancroft was homesteaded in the mid-1870s by Ford Bella Barber and Deborah (Watson) Barber, who came from Maine to consent in Nebraska. In 1880, when the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway began planning a extraction through the area, the Barbers deeded 80 acres (32 ha) of land to the railway for the platting of a town. At that time, the approximately 25 residents were of mostly German, Irish, and Scandinavian descent; some were immigrants. When the village was platted, townspeople named it Barbersville, but the couple refused the honor. The village was named after George Bancroft. Sources differ on who this was. In her 1925 Nebraska Place-Names, Lilian Linder Fitzpatrick says that it was historian George Bancroft. However, more recent sources say that the Bancroft whose post was used was “a Popular civil engineer taking into consideration the railroad”.