Hastings is a city and the county chair 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 thing with the Kool-Aid Days festival all August. Hastings is plus 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 read plain: the Donner party passed through on its habit to California in 1846 and a entrepreneur cemetery marker in Hastings bears an inscription taken from Tamsen Donner’s journal: “The country amongst the Blue and the Platte is beautiful higher than compare. Never have I seen thus varied a country so agreeable to cultivation.” In the 1870s, railroads lured European immigrants to the additional state of Nebraska as soon as advertisements. Hastings’ first settlers were English, from Liverpool, and were quickly joined by other 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 seat was transferred to Hastings from Juniata. However, a flare 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 expected by Charles C. Rittenhouse, the first keen architect in Adams County and after that mayor for ten years. Thanks to the railroads, the city enjoyed great prosperity during the Gilded Age. The population grew to 13,500.^: 9 This mature of increase ended similar to the drought and agricultural depression of the 1890s; the town’s population fell to 7,000 and would not accomplish 15,000 until 1930.

African Americans have lived in Hastings since the 1860s. In 1876, Horace G. Newsom started the first Black-owned newspaper in Nebraska.