Osceola is a city and the county seat of Polk County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 880 as of the 2010 census.

According to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the first settlers of Osceola, which included the families of Reverend James Query and Vinson Perry Davis, arrived in October 1868. Davis is recognized with naming the settlement after a city of the similar name in Iowa, which had been named after Chief Osceola of the Seminole people. After three years of harmony and disputes over the long-lasting location, the town itself was organized by frontiersmen William Francis Kimmel and John Hopwood Mickey in the early slip of 1871. It had been contracted in an election by a margin of 14 votes, prior to the formation that the “geographic center of the county” was best suited to be the settlement’s site. A courthouse was erected the later than spring and a general collection was founded in May. During the summer, a declare office was built, which served as a terminus amongst the cities of Lincoln and Ulysses. The town’s first full year concluded taking into account the foundation of a public school. The afterward year brought Methodism to the town, and a church for the faith had been completed by 1878. In the succeeding year, Nebraska Wesleyan educational was founded in the church, serving 11 students by means of 4 instructors. The assistant professor would unconventional move to Fullerton. The Omaha and Republican Valley Railroad, reached the town in 1879 and named a locomotive after the city, however it was ultimately renamed the number “9.” Two years later the initiation of the railroad, the unity was incorporated as a village upon August 26, 1881 after accumulating a population of 200 citizens. The city would ultimately reach its summit of 1,200 residents in 1920.

A newspaper titled The Homesteader was received in August 1873. It was renamed the Osceola Record in March 1876, and as of 1995 it is known as the Polk County News. It currently has a circulation of nearly 1,850 subscribers.

The city experienced a drought from 1893–95. During the total stages in 1895, much of the city was burned by a two-hour-long flare that left deserted two buildings standing.