Toddling Through Kansas: Pawnee County

Larned

Larned was named for the nearby military base that was established to protect traffic on the Santa Fe Trail. So it seemed appropriate for us to spend a long time at Fort Larned finding all the things so the kids could get their National Park Service Junior Ranger badges.

Larned itself is a fair-size town with a baseball diamond, nice homes, a swimming pool with a slide, and a park with a train going around it. There are some neat old brick streets and some neighborhoods on hillsides. The downtown has a fair number of businesses, but also empty store fronts. There's a mural painted on one of the buildings, but the paint is aging and peeling.

Some other things we noticed in town:

Theaters
Hardware store
Post office
Library
Health department
Courthouse
Lots of businesses and churches
Fairgrounds
Golf course
Airport on the edge of town

Sanford

Sanford is just a grain elevator and a location of the Golden Valley co-op. There are a couple of farms, surrounded by lots of farmland. We loved all the trees lining the Pawnee River and around the farmsteads.

Rozel

Rozel has a couple of grain elevators, including one with the town name painted one letter per silo. The houses here are generally pretty neat and tidy. There are a few older buildings, but none in decay. There's a ball diamond on the edge of town.

Rozel's high school was consolidated together with Burdett's as Pawnee Heights High School in 1966, but the Rozel Tigers fans got to keep their mascot.

Here are some other things we saw in town:

Pawnee Heights High School
Baptist church
A small city park with all the swings removed (for maintenance maybe?)
City hall
Post office
Family Fitness
Lions Club
City of Rozel
Main Street Bar and Grill
Big 4-H shamrocks chalked onto Main Street

Burdett

The first thing we saw near Burdett was the old Browns Grove Cemetery outside of town. The Burdett post office used to be in Brown's Grove until it was moved in 1887.

Burdett was established in 1876 and was the teenage home of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto. A Kansas hailstorm destroyed his family's crops and his hopes for going to college, but he built his own telescopes. Tombaugh's drawings of Jupiter and Mars were good enough to get him a job at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ at the age of 23.

Burdett has a grain elevator and a number of small homes on quiet streets. Downtown, there's an auto body shop, a garage, and an auto detailer, as well as a couple of propane tanks with landscape scenes painted on them.

Other things we saw in town: