Greenwood County & the Bluestem Pasture Region of Kansas

The flint in the region's popular name lies in the rock. Zebulon Pike wrote in 1806 that he had "passed very ruff flint hills," and the bedrock here is Permian limestone and shale laid down in shallow seas about 250 million years ago. Unlike the limestones farther east, many of these carry bands of chert, which outlasts the stone around it, so weathering leaves clay soil full of chert gravel and caps the hilltops with it. Settlers could not plow that ground, so it stayed in grass, and ranching rather than cropland became the business of these hills.

What the plaque says

Greenwood County & the Bluestem Pasture Region of Kansas This county lies almost wholly within one of the world's great beef cattle feeding grounds, the Bluestem pasture region of Kansas. The area, more popularly known as the Flint Hills, extends across the state from north to south in a narrow oval two counties wide, and covers four and a half million acres. Each summer a million head of cattle are fattened on its nutritious grasses. The Bluestem region comprises the last large seg- ment of true prairie which once stretched from the forests of the East to the Great Plains. Every spring Southwestern cattle are shipped here for fattening, often a larger number in one year than were driven to all Kansas railheads in an average season during the wild days of the Texas cattle drives, 1866-1885. Greenwood county has a full share of this industry, ranking among the top five Kansas counties in number of cattle grazed. At times as many as 75,000 head are fed on the county's 739,000 acres. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands