The Geographic Center

The point the board sends you to lies on private land. The 1918 survey that put the center of the 48 states about 2.6 miles northwest of Lebanon was accurate to about 20 miles, and to protect the landowner's privacy a proxy marker went up about half a mile away. Its stone, dated April 25, 1940, and sponsored by the Lebanon Hub Club, credits L. T. Hagadorn and county engineer L. A. Beardslee with locating it from Coast and Geodetic Survey data. The point stopped being the whole nation's center when Alaska and Hawaii joined in 1959.

What the plaque says

The Geographic Center In a park three miles north and one mile west is the exact geographic center of the 48 contiguous states. The location has been officially established by the U.S. Geological Survey. It is the point where a plane map of the 48 states would balance if it were of uniform thickness. Transcontinental highway mileages are: Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — 15 mi
  Six hundred and twelve acres of never-plowed mixed-grass prairie south of Red Cloud, once Kitkehahki Pawnee country, named for the writer who said the grass was the country.
• National Willa Cather Center — 21 mi
  The restored Moon Block on Red Cloud's Webster Street, home of the Willa Cather Foundation, with the town she grew up in and wrote about laid out around it.
• Home on the Range Cabin — 21 mi
  Dr. Brewster Higley's 1872 homestead cabin on West Beaver Creek in Smith County, where he wrote the poem that became Home on the Range, kept on its ground by a farm couple who would not sell it.

More markers nearby

• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — 15 mi
• Burlington Depot — 20 mi
• St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church — 21 mi
• Waconda Springs — 21 mi