Council Grove: Small Town, Big History

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]All over the world, you can drive by signs that point to small towns and villages. And most of the time, you just drive on by. But last week, I had the opportunity to visit one of those supposedly vanishing small towns of rural America. It's one of those places that you might call charming and full of history that deserves to be remembered.

[00:00:28]As small towns go, Council Grove, Kansas, certainly isn't the smallest.

[00:00:32]Other towns nearby, like Dunlap and Latimer, have fewer than 100 residents.

[00:00:37]Still, with a population of 2,140 as of the 2020 census, Council Grove meets the definition of a small town under federal code such as 42 US code subsection 6908, which establishes the small town environmental planning program under the Environmental Protection Agency, and is classified as rural rather than urban by the US Census Bureau. For those of us who grew up in a small town, it certainly has bonafides. Note, for example, that this red roofed dinine-in Pizza Hut is still open. There are great deals, I'm told, on Wacky Wednesday.

[00:01:11]Roughly 60 miles from the Kansas State capital of Topeka, Council Grove is the county seat of Morris County. You could certainly say that Council Grove is off the beaten path. The town sits at the crossroads of US Highway 56 and Kansas Highway 177, neither of which are particularly large or particularly busy roads. Although Highway 177 south of Council Grove is an official scenic byway, but to say that is really not fair and that Council Grove is on a particular beaten path that has everything to do with the rich history of the small town.

[00:01:44]Council Grove is in the Flint Hills, an area that covers several counties across East Central Kansas down into Oklahoma.

[00:01:50]The University of Kansas's Kansas Geological Survey notes that between about 299 to 252 million years ago, much of what is today called Kansas was an inland shallow sea called the Peran Sea.

[00:02:02]This created the unique geography of the area. Over millions of years, shells and skeletal remains of microscopic silicar marine organisms accumulated on the seafloor. As the layers of dead organisms and calcium carbonate compressed into limestone, this silica dissolved and recristallized into hard dense nodules and bands of flint. The university website explains because turt is much less soluble than limestone, a clayy soil filled with chy gravel was left behind after the limestone weathered away. The chy gravel caps most of the region's hilltops, slowing their erosion.

[00:02:37]This unique formation, the flint that makes the Flint Hills, still defines the region today. The soil is fertile, a process aated by cycles of growth and burning, but shallow. You only need to dig a few inches in the Flint Hills before you hit rock. This, the University of Kansas explains, makes the soil much more suited to ranching than farming. The United States National Park Service explains, the surrounding area is shaped by the rocks that lie directly beneath the vegetation and soil. These same rocks made cultivation difficult and led to the use of native prairie grasses for ranching. This rocky terrain is closely tied to today's ranching culture. And put simply, the reason why the towns of the Flint Hills tend to be small is because the hills are not amenable to widescale farming. The area is suited for cattle ranching, which requires vast amounts of land and very few people to operate. This is important today, not just because of the economic value of the ranching. Say what you wish about the efficiency of cattle production, but cattle do allow humans to transform grass into human food, but also in terms of the environment. The unique geology of the Flint Hills has served to preserve the grassland. The University of Kansas explains, "As surrounding prairies were plowed up and planted in crops, the Flint Hills region remained largely unscathed. It is now the last sizable remnant of a tall grass prairie that once stretched across a vast swath of North America. This is particularly important to world ecology as the North American grasslands are disappearing at an alarming rate.

[00:04:08]According to data from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, 62% of the North American grassland biome has been lost.

[00:04:14]In the last 10 years alone, we've lost more than 50 million acres of grasslands. Grasslands are critically important for numerous reasons. their home or a place of safe migration for hundreds of species including vital pollinator species like bees, birds and butterflies and grasslands stored carbon in their root systems. The same geology that has created a rural area of cattle ranching has preserved a biome whose ecology is vital to the planet. But of course, cattle weren't the first ruminants to enjoy the green green grass of the Flint Hills. American bison once dominated the Flint Hills by the millions, acting as the keystone species that shaped the tall grass prairie ecosystem. The Flint Hills became a communal hunting ground for Native Americans. And possibly starting around the 16th century, parts of the region became dominated by a Suian speaking group that included the closely related groups today called the Oage and the Ca.

[00:05:09]The Ka had been known by many names including the Cana. Sometime in the 17th century, the peoples of the area acquired horses reintroduced to North America by the Spanish. The horses have been traded north along the Native American trade networks. Ironically, as we will later see, likely originating from the southwest Spanish training hub of Santa Fe. Thus, Europe had transformed the native people of the Flint Hills before they ever encountered Europeans. The Oage and Cancer were noted by French explorers Jacqu Marquette and Louis Juliet on a map from 1673.

[00:05:42]And in 1724, French explorer Etienne Deanar de Burgmont led an expedition to the great plate. He noted the Kanza, meaning possibly people of the south wind, lived in settlements along a tributary of the Missouri. He named the river after them, the Kansas River, and it was from there that the eventual territory and then state would derive its name. Contact, however, brought disease. According to a history on the website of the con nation, the affliction killed cause without mercy for over a century. In the first 10 years after exposure to smallpox, for example, one of every two Kenza males died.

[00:06:19]In 1803, all that would become of Kansas was included in the Louisiana Purchase.

[00:06:24]While the French government had sold its legal claim to the land, in reality, the land was, of course, occupied, and the nation would have to deal with the native peoples on their own. They would soon have a reason to negotiate with the Oage and the CA. Historian La Brigham explained in 1921. In 1821, history tells us, a small pack train fitted out by a man named William Becknell started from Franklin Howard County, Missouri.

[00:06:49]In 1824, another party left the same place for New Mexico. Both of these expeditions were successful. Report of the 1821 and 1824 expeditions to Congress that a wonderful trade opportunity existed in Santa Fe led to an appropriation for a survey of a route to New Mexico. In March 1825, the Congress of the United States of America passed an act to authorize the President of the United States to cause a road to be marked from the western frontier of Missouri to the confines of New Mexico.

[00:07:19]And they also authorized the president to appoint three commissioners to carry out said act and gain the consent of the Indians. The commissioners appointed by President John Quincy Adams left St. Louis in June 1825. Among the tribes across whose lands they had to negotiate were the Osage and the CA. They met with leaders of the Osage on August 10th at a point where the newly created Santa Fe Trail crossed the Neoso River. The trail would be carrying wagons and eventually hundreds of thousands of people. River crossings with steep banks and soft rivereds could be especially dangerous.

[00:07:53]The best crossing of the Neoso River, a tributary of the Arkansas, was a place that had gentle slopes, steady water levels, and a rocky riverbed. all the results of the slow wearing of the land of the Flint Hills. It was there that commissioners Benjamin Reeves, George C.

[00:08:09]Sibli, and Thomas Mats negotiated an agreement with the Council of Leaders of the Osage for safe passage along the trail for all white men and Spaniards in exchange for $800 in goods. The agreement with the Osage Council was made under a large oak which came to be called Council Oak in a grove that there being no settlement there was listed simply as Council Grove. A similar agreement was made with the call leaders 6 days later.

[00:08:37]The grove at the Neos crossing was a natural place for people traversing the trail to meet. Trees are rare in the Flint Hills except along river banks and the Gravois Brigham writes an extensive and dense forest of hardwood trees and covered a large part of the bottom east of the river. The wood not only offered shelter and game, but the wood was necessary for tasks such as repairing wagon wheels and axles. Brigham writes, Josiah Greg in 1845 wrote an article on his first trip to Santa Fe in 1831 and speaks of Council Grove as a fine stopping place. This caravan, the writer says, consisted of nearly a hundred wagons, packules, hacks, and other small vehicles and two small cannons. They had $200,000 worth of merchandise, and this must have been the first large caravan that went west. He says they stopped at Council Grove to procure timber for axle trees and other wagon repairs, which they lashed under the wagons. The land was still sparse, and there was no settlement, Greg wrote. Unless the imposing title council groves suggests to the readers a thriving village, it should be assured that on the day of our departure from independence, we passed the last human abote upon our route.

[00:09:44]Therefore, from the borders of Missouri to those of New Mexico, not even an Indian settlement greeted our eyes.

[00:09:51]Partly owing to the trail and simply from the relentless movement of settlers west, in 1846 the cause signed a treaty seating some 2 million acres of their traditional lands in eastern Kansas. In exchange, they were given a 20 square mile tract along the Neossho River near Council Grove. This move may have been the genesis of the town that still remains today. There was still no settlement at the crossing, but in 1847, a man named Seth Hayes came, having obtained a federal license to trade with the Indians. Hayes was a part of history on his own. He was the great-grandson of Daniel Boone.

[00:10:25]But Hayes started a trend. more people started to arrive, realizing the economic potential at an important stop on the trail in which so many traveled.

[00:10:33]Brigham writes, "The period from 1849 to 1854 was a very prosperous time for Council Grove. It was the last point going west at which supplies could be obtained. The Kansas legislature incorporated the town in 1858. The Santa Fe Trail would remain an important highway of immigration and transportation into the 1870s. And so Council Grove was on a beaten path. The trail brought here because the ancient geology made a natural river crossing in Grove. Settlements began as a means to trade with the native CA, but the settlement would eventually lead to their relocation, finally to Oklahoma in 1871. The relocation of the Plains tribes was facilitated by the trail, which for many reasons aided in the process of the near extinction of the American bison on which they depended.

[00:11:18]When the railroad arrived, the wagon train stopped. The city web page says the last pass through in 1866, but by then the bison were gone and the grass and the railroad made the town a center for ranching and a regional hub for shipping and processing of livestock.

[00:11:32]The town is still an agricultural center, but also has embraced its legacy, drawing tourists. Many sites related to the trail and the early history of the town have been preserved.

[00:11:41]In fact, 25 are listed on a town brochure. These include the first restaurant in town opened by Seth Hayes in 1857.

[00:11:50]The Hayes House is still open, purportedly the oldest continually operating restaurant west of the Mississippi River. I ate there last week. I highly recommend it. Or you can eat at the Turwillinger home, built in 1861 and the last house that freighters along the trail would see until they reached Ben's old Fort.

[00:12:10]Today it has been restored as a museum and cafe. Just down the street is the Last Chance store. Built in 1867 and the oldest commercial building that still remains in town. The stone building was literally the last chance for drovers to purchase goods along the trail. Up the hill from there are two odd sites. A monument to the old town bell, which rang children to school from 1866 to 1884 when a windstorm destroyed the wooden belfry. The bell was rung in 1881 when President Garfield died, the victim of an assassin. And the remains of the bell were incorporated into a monument that was created in 1901 as a monument to President McKinley, also the victim of an assassin. Farther up the same hill's location of a small cave that was inhabited for 5 months in 1863 by a Catholic priest known as Father Francesco, a mysterious hermit described in the local newspaper as an intelligent man who speaks nine different languages.

[00:13:05]Seth Hayes home, built in 1867, is also a museum operated by the Morris County Historical Society. Another museum sits next to the stump of a large oak tree.

[00:13:14]The tree in the original grove where the agreement was made had a cavity at the base, and travelers were reported to have left messages there about water sources, planes, Indian unrest, and other information. The 80ft tall post office tree was reported to be 270 years old when it died in 1990. A portion of its stump is now preserved next to a house originally erected in 1864 and now a post office museum.

[00:13:39]It isn't the only stump to have been preserved. Brigham described the original council oak under which the agreement with the Osage was made as measuring 10 ft 9 in in circumference and was still in a splendid state in 1921.

[00:13:54]The tree blew down in a storm in 1958, but its stump remains in place. Another stump, the remains of an elm under which George Kuster and companies of the Seventh Cavalry camped in 1867 is also on the map. The treaty that created the Kaw reservation in 1846 had included a $1,000 fund for the advance of education of the cause in their own country. The school was established by the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Although the school seems to have not been trusted by the Caw people and most of the boys schooled there were orphans, the school building still stands and today is operated as a state historic site. The heritage of the CA, the people after which the state was named, is represented in a statue of a call warrior by Thomas Mark Samel, installed in 1998 and called the guardian of the grove and Alagawo Memorial Heritage Park, a 158 acre park that is being developed by the C nation. You can visit the cottage house, originally built in 1867 and operated as a boarding house or hotel ever since. This is where I stayed. It's lovely. Stay there if you can. Not everything is about the time of the trail. The Farmers and Drivers Bank was built in 1892 to serve the area's booming cattle and agricultural trade.

[00:15:07]The ornate building in the eclectic style is still an operating bank if you need a loan. The post office, opened in 1939, is also on the National Register of Historic Places because it includes a 1941 mural entitled Autumn Colors by artist Charles B. Rogers, pending it as a part of a New Deal era treasury art program. And you can walk along the river at the location of the Neos Crossing, the legacy of the Flint Hills that was so central to the making of the town.

[00:15:36]And there's quite a lot more. There's a lot of interesting shops in the downtown area. Refreshing as the downtowns of so many small towns seem to be almost abandoned these days. The Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve is just down Highway 177. Preserves a nationally significant example of the once vast tall grass prairie ecosystem.

[00:15:58]Council Grove Lake, which was built for flood control between 1960 and 1964, is only about a mile north of town, offers recreational opportunities. And on June 20th, there will be a music festival that will include a a parade, a car show, and a pow-wow. It's intended to celebrate the past and present culture of Council Grove.

[00:16:19]You know, there's some fear that small towns are dying in America, that they are losing their youth to the cities, and there's some evidence that that's happening. But there is life still in rural America and you can find it. If only you'll turn off the the main road.

[00:16:38]I hope you enjoyed watching this episode of the history guy. And if you did, please feel free to like and subscribe and share the history guy with your friends. And if you also believe that history deserves to be remembered, then you can support the history guy as a member on YouTube, a supporter on our community at locals, or as a patron on Patreon. You can also check out our great merchandise shop or book a special message from the history guy on Cameo.