50 Fun Facts About Kansas

Which city is the capital of Kansas?

Wichita is the most populous city, but the seat of government has sat on the Kansas River since statehood in 1861.

What is Kansas's official nickname?

The state flower is the wild native sunflower, and the same bloom shares the reverse of the 2005 Kansas quarter with a bison.

In which year was Kansas admitted to the Union as the 34th state?

Statehood came on January 29, weeks after Southern legislators began walking out of Congress, which cleared the way for entry as a free state.

The violent 1850s struggle over whether the territory would allow slavery is remembered by what name?

At least 56 political killings were documented in the territory between 1854 and 1859, a rehearsal for the Civil War that followed.

Which 1854 law by Stephen Douglas organized two new territories and let settlers vote on slavery?

Stephen Douglas drafted it mainly to clear a path for a transcontinental railroad; the popular-sovereignty clause repealed the Missouri Compromise and lit the fuse.

Which Kansas town was burned in the August 1863 raid led by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill?

Around 150 men and boys were killed; the town had been a Jayhawker headquarters and an anti-slavery stronghold since its founding by New Englanders.

The 1954 Supreme Court case striking down school segregation was against which Kansas city's school board?

Oliver Brown's daughter had been refused a spot at the school nearest her home; the unanimous ruling partially overturned Plessy v. Ferguson.

Which Kansas town did President Dwight D. Eisenhower consider his hometown?

His family moved there in 1892; his presidential library and grave are there today, and a funeral train carried his body home in 1969.

Aviator Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in which Kansas river town?

She was born in her grandfather's house; he was a former judge and president of the local savings bank.

What is the highest natural point in Kansas?

At 4,039 feet it sits half a mile from the Colorado line on a private ranch, complete with a plaque reading "On this site in 1897, nothing happened."

The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states lies near which small Kansas town?

A 1918 survey fixed the point in Smith County; a proxy marker was put up in 1940 to keep visitors off the private land where the true point falls.

The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas are famous for holding the densest remaining stretch of what ecosystem?

Settlers could not plow the rocky, chert-strewn soil, so the hills went to cattle instead of crops and were never turned over.

Which explorer coined the name "Flint Hills" in his 1806 journal?

His entry read "passed very ruff flint hills"; the flint is chert weathering out of the Permian limestone underneath.

Which Kansas town, the 'Queen of the Cowtowns', employed lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson?

At its 19th-century peak the town shipped up to 500,000 Texas cattle a year; the radio and TV western Gunsmoke was set there.

In 1866 a Texas steer was worth about $4. What did it fetch in the North and East, spurring the Chisholm Trail?

The Civil War had cut Texas off from its markets and left it awash in longhorns; Joseph McCoy's new stockyards at the Kansas Pacific railhead opened the next year to cash in.

What is the Kansas state motto?

It means "To the stars through difficulties"; a bronze Kansa archer aiming at the North Star, titled Ad Astra, has topped the Capitol dome since 2002.

Which bird is the state bird of Kansas?

Five other states share it, making it second only to the cardinal as America's most-adopted state bird.

Which tree did Kansas name its state tree in 1937, calling it "the pioneer of the prairie"?

Wyoming and Nebraska later adopted the same tree; Custer's cavalry fed its bark to their horses during the winter of 1868-69.

The Kansas state song is which American classic, written as a poem by a Smith County homesteader?

Brewster Higley wrote it in the early 1870s as "My Western Home"; the state adopted it in 1947 and KU's band plays it after every home game.

Which reptile is the state reptile of Kansas?

It is one of only two land turtles native to the Great Plains, and Nebraska picked the same one.

Who first proposed making the tiger salamander the Kansas state amphibian in 1993?

Two pupils at O-K Elementary in Wichita pitched the idea to their teacher and the class petitioned the governor; Colorado adopted the same salamander in 2012.

Roughly what share of all winter wheat grown in the United States comes from Kansas?

About 95% of the state's crop is hard red winter wheat, a variety brought over by German-Russian Mennonite settlers in the 1870s.

Which immigrant group is credited with bringing hard winter wheat to Kansas in the 19th century?

Miller Bernhard Warkentin imported seed from Ukraine to feed demand, and USDA crop explorer Mark Carleton went to Russia hunting for more varieties.

Which Kansas town's Plaza Cinema (1907) is listed by Guinness as the world's oldest operating cinema?

Kansas also had one of the first stand-alone film theaters west of the Mississippi, the Patee, which had to build its own generating plant in 1903 because its town was not yet electrified.

Cessna, Beechcraft and Hawker were merged under which Wichita-based company in 2014?

Boeing, by contrast, ended decades of Kansas manufacturing between 2012 and 2013.

Which restaurant chain was founded in Wichita in 1958 by two brothers with a $600 loan from their mother?

Dan and Frank Carney chose the name because their sign only had room for eight letters.

Which chain, credited as the world's first fast-food burger chain, was founded in Wichita in 1921?

Cook Walt Anderson and insurance man Billy Ingram started with $700; sliders sold for five cents.

The inventor of basketball founded the University of Kansas program in 1898. Who was he?

He was hired as a chapel director and physical-education instructor, and finished 55-60, the only losing record among Kansas coaches.

How many NCAA tournament championships had Kansas men's basketball won through 2022?

The titles came in 1952, 1988, 2008 and 2022; the Helms Foundation retroactively added 1922 and 1923 to make six overall.

Which university's teams are the Wildcats, wearing Royal Purple?

Their annual meetings with the Jayhawks are the Sunflower Showdown, and the basketball edition is sometimes scheduled around Kansas Day.

Which coach arrived at Kansas State in 1989 and turned its football program into a No. 1-ranked team?

He retired in 2005, came back in 2009 and won the Big 12 again in 2012; the home field is now named for his family.

Which MLS club has been Kansas's only major-league franchise since moving across the state line in 2011?

Lamar Hunt founded the club in 1995 as the Wiz, then Wizards; it rebranded in 2010 for the move to a new stadium at Village West.

What is Wichita State's nickname, referring to students who once harvested wheat?

Early Fairmount College games were played on a stubbled wheat field, and the pep club members were called Wheaties.

In L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, what carries Dorothy's Kansas farmhouse to the Land of Oz?

Baum called it a cyclone though he described a tornado; the falling house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East.

Which small Kansas town has a museum holding more than 25,000 Wizard of Oz artifacts?

The collection is on permanent loan from a friar; the Oz Winery and other shops followed after the museum opened in 2004.

Which Kansas city races Olney, England, in the Shrove Tuesday International Pancake Day race?

The rivalry began in 1950 and the times are compared across the Atlantic; the Kansas side also hosts a Land of Oz exhibit with a recreated Dorothy's house.

Which Kansas town is nicknamed "Little Sweden", complete with Dala horses downtown?

Immigrants from Värmland settled it in 1869; the Swedish Pavilion from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair ended up there too.

Which Kansas city, founded as a fort in 1827, was the state's first permanent settlement?

Colonel Henry Leavenworth built it to protect the Santa Fe Trail; the fort is now the oldest active Army post west of the Mississippi.

Fort Riley, near Junction City, is home to which famous Army division?

The "Big Red One" is the oldest continuously serving division in the Regular Army; the fort sits where the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers form the Kansas River.

In 1881 Kansas became the first U.S. state to do what?

The amendment stood until 1948, and liquor by the drink was not legal statewide until 1987.

Hatchet-wielding temperance crusader Carrie Nation smashed her first saloon in 1900 in which Kansas town?

She lived in Medicine Lodge, where she had founded a WCTU chapter, but the first attack came in the neighboring town near the Oklahoma line.

The Dalton Gang was largely wiped out in 1892 trying to rob two banks at once in which Kansas town?

Four of the gang died in the street; Emmett Dalton survived 23 gunshot wounds and served 14 years before a pardon.

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood recounts the 1959 Clutter family murders in which western Kansas town?

Capote arrived before the killers were caught, bringing his childhood friend Harper Lee to help take notes.

The name of the African Americans who migrated from the South to Kansas in the late 1870s was what?

Benjamin "Pap" Singleton was a leading promoter; the all-black town of Nicodemus, founded in 1877, survives as a National Historic Site.

Which Kansas-born citizen of the Kaw Nation was the first Native American US vice president?

He served under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933 and had introduced the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1921.

In which Kansas town was Bob Dole born and raised?

Phog Allen personally travelled there to recruit him for KU basketball; the town was also the boyhood home of Senator Arlen Specter.

Which Kansas governor was the 1936 Republican nominee who won only Maine and Vermont?

He did not even carry Kansas; his daughter Nancy Kassebaum later became the first woman to represent the state in the Senate.

The Cosmosphere museum, which restored Apollo 13's Odyssey capsule, is in which Kansas city?

It grew from a planetarium on the state fairgrounds in 1962 and now holds the largest collection of Russian space artifacts outside Moscow.

Strataca, the only salt mine in the United States open to tourists, takes visitors how far underground?

The deposit under the Salt City formed 275 million years ago; the mine's excavated rooms would stretch 150 miles laid end to end.

Big Brutus, the largest electric shovel still in existence, stands as a museum in which corner of Kansas?

It dug coal near West Mineral from 1963 to 1974 and was simply too big to move when the mine closed, so it stayed put.