Elwood

The first westbound Pony Express rider crossed the river here. Johnny Fry was due out of St. Joseph at 5 p.m. on April 3, 1860, but the train bringing his pouch ran late, and he left at 7:15 to a cannon, a brass band and a cheering crowd. A ferry carried horse and rider over the Missouri to Elwood, and Fry rode on through the wooded bottoms and across the Kickapoo reservation to Seneca, 80 miles out, with 49 letters, five telegrams and special newspapers in the mochila. He was killed in 1863 at Baxter Springs, fighting Quantrill's raiders.

What the plaque says

Elwood Elwood, first called Roseport, was established in 1856. In its heyday scores of river steamboats unloaded passengers and freight at its wharves and every 15 minutes ferryboats crossed to its Missouri rival, St. Joseph. During the 1850's thousands of emigrants outfit- ted here for Oregon and California. Late in 1859, Abraham Lincoln, seeking the Republican nomination, here first set foot in Kansas, and spoke in the three-story Great Western Hotel. Elwood was the first Kansas station on the Pony Express between Missouri and California. Construction of the first railroad west of the Missouri river began here in 1859. On April 23, 1860, the first locomotive, "The Albany," was ferried over and pulled up the bank by hand. Elwood's ambitions for greatness were thwarted, not by St. Joe, but by the river which under- mined the banks and washed much of the old town away.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum — 21 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.
• Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Troy — 10 mi
• Atchison — 20 mi
• Mormon Grove: The City That Disappeared — 22 mi
• Historic Fort Leavenworth — 25 mi