40 Fun Facts About Topeka

The name Topeka is usually traced to a Kansa phrase about a good place to dig which food crop?

Potatoes give Topeka its name, which the town's founders chose in 1855 because it was novel, of Indian origin and pleasant to the ear.

Which tech company did Topeka unofficially rename itself after for a month in 2010, hoping to win a fiber network?

Google returned the compliment on April Fools' Day 2010, announcing that it was changing its own name to Topeka and relabeling its home page.

Which New Mexico city completes the name of the railroad chartered in 1859, the Atchison, Topeka and what?

Santa Fe ended up off the main line, because the railroad bypassed the mountains around the city. A branch from Lamy finally reached it in 1880.

Which NAACP chief counsel, later a Supreme Court justice himself, argued Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka?

Thurgood Marshall won a unanimous ruling in 1954. In 1967 he joined the court he had argued before, as its first African American justice.

Topeka is the capital of Kansas, but which city to its southwest is the state's most populous?

Wichita counted 397,532 residents at the 2020 census, about three times as many as Topeka's 126,587.

The rainbow-painted Equality House in Topeka sits across the street from which congregation known for its pickets?

Westboro Baptist Church got its colorful neighbor after the nonprofit Planting Peace bought the house opposite in 2012 and had it painted in the colors of the pride flag.

Which actress, a star of American Beauty and The Kids Are All Right, was born in Topeka in 1958?

Annette Bening spent most of her youth in San Diego after her family left Kansas, and began her stage career with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1980.

Which acoustic ballad was the only US top-ten single for Kansas, the rock band formed in Topeka in 1973?

Dust in the Wind began as a fingerpicking exercise by guitarist Kerry Livgren, then climbed to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978.

The Pappan brothers' ferry carried wagons across the Kansas River at the future site of Topeka on which pioneer route?

The Oregon Trail crossing dates from the 1840s, when the French-Canadian Pappan brothers and their wives, three sisters of part-Kansa descent, started the ferry.

Which shoe chain was founded in Topeka in 1956 by cousins Louis and Shaol Pozez?

Payless started out as Pay-Less National, a self-service store where shoppers picked budget shoes off the shelves themselves.

Topeka's Brown v. Board of Education case overturned which earlier ruling that had upheld separate but equal facilities?

Plessy v. Ferguson had stood since 1896, when the court upheld a Louisiana law that put Black and white rail passengers in separate cars.

The Menninger family's clinic made Topeka a world-famous training center for which branch of medicine from the 1940s?

Psychiatry drew so many trainees to the Menninger school, opened in 1946, that it became the largest training center in the country, driven by the need to treat returning veterans.

Topeka Zoo lays claim to the first captive hatching, in 1971, of which large North American bird of prey?

Golden eagle chicks put the zoo on the map in 1971. Its Tropical Rainforest is also billed as one of the first indoor rainforest exhibits in the United States.

Which pet food company, the maker of Science Diet, began in 1907 as a rendering works serving Topeka?

Hill's took on its first veterinary diet in 1948, when a vet asked it to produce the kidney food he had devised for Buddy, a pioneering guide dog.

The Topeka shiner, a federally protected species of the Midwestern prairies, is what kind of small animal?

A minnow only a few inches long, the silvery Topeka shiner lives mainly in prairie streams and was listed as endangered in 1998.

The bronze Kansa warrior atop the Kansas State Capitol dome in Topeka aims his arrow at which celestial target?

The North Star is the target of Ad Astra, a sculpture by Richard Bergen that was chosen from 27 entries and hoisted onto the dome in 2002.

Which Southern state gave its name to the Topeka neighborhood settled in the 1870s by formerly enslaved Exodusters?

Tennessee was home to so many of the newcomers that the district became known as Tennessee Town. A local pastor opened a pioneering kindergarten for Black children there in 1893.

Which hatchet-wielding temperance crusader smashed the Senate Saloon in Topeka in 1901 while the legislature sat?

Carry Nation picked her moment: lawmakers were in session, and the Senate Saloon they liked to visit was one of several bars operating illegally in the capital.

Which poet, born in Topeka in 1917, became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize?

Gwendolyn Brooks won the 1950 poetry prize for Annie Allen. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, she served as poet laureate of Illinois for 32 years.

Which Topeka-born politician with Native American ancestry served as vice president under Herbert Hoover from 1929?

Charles Curtis was born in North Topeka a year before Kansas became a state, and rose to Senate majority leader before he joined Hoover's ticket.

Which Kansas governor, who made his home in Topeka, lost the 1936 presidential election to Franklin D. Roosevelt?

Alf Landon carried only Maine and Vermont, losing even his own state. He lived to 100, and Ronald Reagan came to Topeka for his birthday party.

Washburn University's teams in Topeka take which nickname from the first name of the school's 1868 benefactor?

Ichabods honor Ichabod Washburn, a church deacon who pledged $25,000 to the young college. The tailcoat-wearing mascot was drawn in 1938 by alumnus Bradbury Thompson.

Which 1896 novel by Topeka pastor Charles Sheldon popularized the question later abbreviated to WWJD?

In His Steps grew out of the sermon stories Sheldon wrote for his Sunday night services, and has sold more than 50 million copies.

Which Christian movement is often said to have begun in 1901 at Charles Parham's Bethel Bible College in Topeka?

Pentecostalism took its hallmark teaching from Parham's school: that speaking in tongues is the evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Which American glassmaker's stained glass windows fill the entire sanctuary of Topeka's First Presbyterian Church?

Tiffany glass decorates the whole sanctuary, a distinction shared with only a few other American churches, including one in Dubuque, Iowa.

Which Kansas-born painter created Tragic Prelude, the Kansas State Capitol mural dominated by a raging abolitionist?

John Steuart Curry's murals won notoriety for showing unsavory sides of state history. He left them unsigned and never completed the rotunda commission.

Which Topeka-born golfer, once a college basketball player at Washburn University, won the 2019 US Open?

Gary Woodland left Washburn after a year for a golf scholarship at the University of Kansas, and took the title by three shots at Pebble Beach.

Which legendary North Carolina basketball coach was an all-state player at Topeka High School in the 1940s?

Dean Smith then played at the University of Kansas, winning the 1952 national title under a coach who had been taught by basketball's inventor, James Naismith.

Topeka is the seat of which Kansas county, one of several in the state named after Native American peoples?

Shawnee County was one of the original 33 counties created by the first territorial legislature in 1855, when it had a population of about 250.

By what nickname do locals know the Kansas River, which flows through the middle of Topeka?

The Kaw and the river's formal name both come from the Kanza people, whose name passed through a French spelling on its way into English.

Topeka-born singer Katrina Leskanich fronted the British band the Waves on which feel-good hit of 1985?

Walking on Sunshine came from a band formed in Cambridge, England, which went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest in 1997.

Which Chief Justice wrote the single unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954?

Earl Warren had led the court for only a few months, after his predecessor died in September 1953, and set out to bring every justice behind one opinion.

Which president opened the Brown v. Board of Education historic site in Topeka on the ruling's 50th anniversary?

George W. Bush opened the site on May 17, 2004, in a building that had been one of Topeka's four segregated elementary schools for Black children.

Which future CBS anchor and A&E host made his name warning Topeka viewers on air about the 1966 tornado?

Bill Kurtis had left a bar review class to fill in on the 6 o'clock news that evening. His coverage led to a reporting job and a long career as a Chicago anchor.

Topeka-born painter Aaron Douglas became a leading visual artist of which 1920s New York cultural movement?

The Harlem Renaissance was at its height when Douglas, a 1917 graduate of Topeka High School, was persuaded to stay in the neighborhood and develop his art.

The flagpole outside Topeka High School is a spar taken from which US Navy frigate nicknamed Old Ironsides?

USS Constitution has supplied the pole twice: after years of wear, the first spar was replaced in 2004 with another from the same ship.

Which hill on Topeka's southwest side was said in local legend to shield the city from tornadoes, until 1966?

Burnett's Mound lay in the path of the F5 tornado of June 8, 1966, which passed over it before ripping through downtown and Washburn University.

Which Topeka founder and railroad promoter donated the land on which the Kansas State Capitol was built?

Cyrus K. Holliday gave the tract in 1862, served as the town's mayor, and founded the railroad that carried Topeka's name across the Southwest.

Which former segregated school in Topeka now houses the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park?

Monroe Elementary was the school Linda Brown had to travel a mile to reach, although a white school stood just seven blocks from her home.

Which town was the official proslavery capital of Kansas Territory while Free-State settlers made Topeka their base?

Lecompton housed the legally recognized territorial government, while antislavery settlers gathered in Topeka in 1855 to draw up a rival framework for a free state.