The First 300

I'm a numbers guy, so let me begin with some hard data:

• 300: The number of towns we have visited so far on our travels around the Sunflower State
• April 5, 2014: The date we started our adventures, in the lovely town of Westmoreland
• 2 months: The age of our son Zed when we started out
• 9 years, 11 months: The age of our son Zed now
• 11,222.6: The approximate number of miles we have driven on these journeys
• 39.4: The number of years it will take us to finish visiting the 1,271 remaining towns at the rate we've gone so far

The name of this blog is "Toddling Through Kansas" because we had two toddlers and a newborn when we started it. Today, those two toddlers are 13 and 11, and their 2-mile time is faster than mine has ever been. The newborn is about to turn double digits, he knows pretty much all there is to know about the NFL, and he's getting taller every day. And don't even get me started on the baby of the family, who wasn't even born when we started and is turning into a little woman right before my eyes.

If the years before us go anything like the years behind, then by the time we finish, I'll be the toddler. With the help of a walker. If I'm lucky.

In 2023, a 23-year-old Nebraskan named Seth Varner visited all 627 incorporated towns in Kansas, took a startling number of pictures, and has published an excellent book about it. That's how I dreamed our journeys would go. 

Which leads me to my first observation from our travels: Great expectations often don't materialize. You don't have to be a master of analysis to notice that around half of the towns we have visited are dead or dying. For instance, this town we visited on September 19, 2021:

Feterita is just a railroad with silos and a private drive leading to a few houses. Nothing more remains; this seems to be the way of a lot of towns out here. The railroad keeps going, often long after the people stop. (Though there was still a dog who seemed quite interested in us.)

Or this one we visited on July 5, 2014: 

Western Kansas has a lot of small towns that aren't much more than a co-op, a church or two, and perhaps a couple of businesses.

Mingo was one of these. We didn't see any businesses, but it definitely had a grain elevator and a small church.

Sometimes, I get depressed by towns like this one. They're growing smaller each day, and before too long, perhaps no one will be left. It feels like the life is slowly draining out of them, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop the trend.

Many of these towns were platted out by speculators who sold eager settlers on the idea that it would be the next Kansas City, or at least Dodge City. A century and a half later, many of them only have a railroad and a grain elevator to mark the fervid hopes of those early Kansans.

But even in our frustrated expectations, there is hope. In my post about Mingo, I go on to say:

To stop there is to forget that these towns are populated by a heroic people.

Farmers, ranchers, teachers, business owners, and many others are still there, and they will hang on to the end. Like the stalwart defenders at the Alamo or the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, these folks aren't contented to go gentle into that good night.

They are determined to keep living on their ancestral land, to keep sowing and harvesting, and, in short, to keep doing what they can to maintain the way of life they love.

And dedication like that, my friends, is something worth driving out to Mingo to see.

Which leads me to my final thought for now. Kansas is a place where people came with high hopes, and they stay with a dedication to making things better. Whether it's Brianna's Cafe in Montezuma, where they serve the finest pie east of Denver, or Muscotah, where the town banded together to turn the old water tower into a baseball-shaped garden shed, or LaHarpe, where some folks decided the park needed a zipline, so they built one, Kansas is full of surprising and delightful resilience. 

Yes, there will be difficulty. But beyond it, sometimes, we reach the stars.

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:

• American Legion building 
• Insurance agency
• Fire station
• Post office
• Dog groomer
• Senior center 
• Bank 
• Mortuary
• Café

Gray

Gray, KS is an elevator and a few structures; not much else.

One funny thing about this that the Pride Ag Resources website spells the town's name as "Grey." I googled quite a bit, and it seems that no one else has ever spelled it that way... but I guess it's their business, so they can call it what they want. 

Hanston

From driving through Hanston, you would never suspect that the town's name was a point of significant conflict. According to the library's website:

The City of Hanston was established as the town of Marena in 1878. In 1901, the railroad came through town and the town name was changed to Olney-Hannston. A depot with stockyards was built for the transport of cattle. The name of the town changed again in 1902 to Hanston. The Hann family had donated land to the city. There was a lengthy feud over the changing of the town name.

As we drove into town, we saw Saint Anthony's Parish Church, a cemetery outside of town, and an elementary school. Hanston also has some quiet little neighborhoods, a few dirt roads, and a grain elevator, as well as a few other churches. On Main Street, we saw the library, city hall, a senior center, and Ruff Stuff Parts Supply. We also saw three defunct gas stations of varying ages. The city park is on the edge of town, right next to a cornfield.