Cherry County is a county located in the U.S. state of Nebraska. As of the 2010 census, the population was 5,713. Its county seat is Valentine. The county was named for Lt. Samuel A. Cherry, an Army officer who was stationed at Fort Niobrara and who had been killed in South Dakota in 1881. Cherry County is located in the Nebraska Sandhills.
In the Nebraska license plate system, Cherry County is represented by the prefix 66 (it had the sixty-sixth-largest number of vehicles registered in the state when the license plate system was established in 1922).
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 6,009 square miles (15,560 km2), of which 5,960 square miles (15,400 km2) is land and 49 square miles (130 km2) (0.8%) is water. It is by far the largest county in land area in Nebraska and larger than the state of Connecticut, or the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The county is within the Sandhills region of Nebraska; the dunes that give the region its name are a result of the most recent glacial period, known as the Pinedale glaciation. During the Holocene glacial retreat the sand dunes, which had been deposited in their current location by the vast continental glaciers, were exposed and grasses eventually took over.