KSKansas Fun Facts

Kansas has spent a century living down a joke: that it is flatter than a pancake. The geographers who eventually measured flatness for real put Florida first and Kansas seventh. The state climbs more than 3,300 feet from its southeast corner to a cattle pasture on the Colorado line, and almost nothing else people repeat about Kansas survives a check either.

Facts most people get wrong

• Kansas is not the flattest state. The pancake line came from a joke paper published in the Annals of Improbable Research in 2003. When geographers Jerome Dobson and Joshua Campbell ran a serious flatness analysis in 2014, Florida ranked first and Kansas placed seventh.
• The man who wrote Dorothy's Kansas never lived there. L. Frank Baum published "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" in 1900 after years running a store and a newspaper in Aberdeen, in what is now South Dakota. The 1939 film was shot on soundstages in California.
• Eisenhower was not born in Kansas. Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, in 1890. His family moved to Abilene when he was two, which is why his boyhood home and presidential library sit there.
• Kansas City is not the biggest city in Kansas. Wichita is, by a wide margin. The famous Kansas City is in Missouri, and the Kansas side of the state line is a separate, smaller city with the same name.
• Kansas does not lead the country in tornado count. Texas records more twisters in a typical year because it is more than three times the size. Kansas ranks near the top per square mile, which is the number that matters if you live under it.
• Kansas fought its way in as a free state. The violence of Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s was about whether slavery would be legal here. Kansas was admitted free on January 29, 1861, weeks before the Civil War started.

Records and firsts

• The first Pizza Hut opened in Wichita in 1958, started by brothers Dan and Frank Carney with $600 borrowed from their mother.
• White Castle, the first fast food hamburger chain in the country, opened in Wichita in 1921.
• Susanna M. Salter of Argonia became the first woman elected mayor anywhere in the United States, in April 1887, at age 27. Her name was placed on the ballot by men trying to humiliate her, and she won.
• Dodge City averages close to 14 miles per hour of wind, which regularly makes it the windiest city in the United States. Chicago, which owns the nickname, sits closer to 10.
• Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ended legal school segregation, began as a lawsuit against the Topeka school board.
• Strataca in Hutchinson takes visitors 650 feet down into a working salt deposit, the only salt mine museum in the Western Hemisphere open to the public.
• Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison in 1897, in her grandparents' house above the Missouri River.

Geography that surprises

• Mount Sunflower, the state high point at 4,039 feet, is a gentle rise in a private cattle pasture a mile from Colorado. The low point, around 679 feet, is on the Verdigris River near Coffeyville. The grade between them is so slight that drivers never feel it.
• Kansas is a near perfect rectangle, roughly 410 miles wide and 210 miles tall, except in the northeast where the Missouri River bends and gives the state a curved edge.
• The geographic center of the contiguous 48 states is marked near Lebanon. The center of all 50 is in South Dakota and the center of North America is in North Dakota, so Kansas holds one title out of three.
• From 1901 until 1983, every survey in North America was measured from a brass disk at Meades Ranch in Osborne County. Property lines from Panama to the Arctic traced back to that Kansas pasture.
• The state is landlocked and entirely on Central time, yet the far western counties sit closer to Denver than to Kansas City.

Where the name comes from

Kansas is named for the Kansa, also called the Kaw, a Dhegihan Siouan nation that lived along the river the French later mapped as the Kansas. Traders spelled the word dozens of ways, including Kansa, Kanza, Konza and Escansaque, and it is usually translated as people of the south wind. The order matters: the people named the river, the river named the territory, and the territory named the state, so Kansas received its own name third hand. The Kaw Nation is headquartered today in Kaw City, Oklahoma. The state motto adopted in 1861, Ad astra per aspera, means to the stars through difficulties, and was chosen with the territorial bloodshed still fresh.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #15 of 50
• Admitted: 1861
• Capital: Topeka
• Largest city: Wichita
• Time zone: Central

Bordering states

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