Atchison

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison in 1897, in the house of her maternal grandfather, Alfred Gideon Otis, a former judge and president of the Atchison Savings Bank. The Gothic Revival house, built in 1861 on a bluff above the Missouri River and enlarged in 1873, stands at 223 North Terrace Street. It was listed in the National Register in 1971 and stayed a private home until 1984, when Dr. Eugene J. Bribach gave $100,000 for the Ninety-Nines to acquire it. The international organization of women pilots, whose first elected president was Earhart, runs it as a museum.

What the plaque says

Atchison On July 4, 1804, Lewis and Clark exploring the new Louisiana Purchase, camped near this site. Fifty years later the town was founded by Proslavery men and named for Sen. D. R. Atchison. The Squatter Sovereign, Atchison's first newspaper, was an early advocate of violence against abolition. Here Pardee Butler, Free- State preacher, was set adrift on a river raft and on his return was tarred and feathered. Here Abraham Lincoln in 1859 "auditioned" his famous Cooper Union address - unmentioned by local newspapers. During the heyday of river steamboating in the '50's Atchison became an outfitting depot for emigrant and freighting trains to Utah and the Pacific Coast, a supply base for the Pike's Peak gold rush, and in the early 1860's a starting point for the Pony Express and the Overland Stage lines. In this pioneer center of transportation the Santa Fe railway was organized in 1860, modestly named the Atchison & Topeka. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum — 1.9 mi
  A hangar at Atchison's airport built around Muriel, a 1935 Lockheed Electra 10-E of the model Earhart vanished in, saved from scrap, restored over three decades and brought to her birthplace in 2016.
• Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum — 22 mi
  The surviving part of an 1846 Presbyterian mission school near Highland, built largely with the tribes' own annuity money and returned to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska in 2021. Closed during remodeling.

More markers nearby

• Mormon Grove: The City That Disappeared — 2.8 mi
• Historic Fort Leavenworth — 9.2 mi
• Troy — 17 mi
• Fort Leavenworth — 19 mi