Kansas - The Wheat State

Wheat was not always the obvious crop. Until the 1870s Kansans mostly grew spring wheat, which suffered in hot summers. T. C. Henry, a real estate promoter farming near Abilene, planted winter wheat on a large scale along the rail lines to draw settlers, and when grasshoppers struck the spring wheat and corn in August 1874, after his winter crop was in, he made much of it. 'I spread my winter-wheat propaganda,' he boasted. 'No evangelist was ever more active.' Spring wheat had largely vanished by the 1880s, and in 1910 wheat first out-produced corn in Kansas.

What the plaque says

Kansas - The Wheat State For centuries Kansas was the home of Native Americans who benefited from the richness of the region: vast herds of buffalo on the plains, deer and other game in the forested river valleys. Native Americans were the first to farm this area, growing corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers in the fertile valley soils. Today Kansas continues to be a source of agricultural richness, particularly wheat. Kansas produces nearly a fifth of the nation's wheat crop, storing it in huge grain elevators sometimes referred to as "prairie cathedrals." Travelers can find beauty in the vast stretches of wheat land, brown when the soil is being prepared for planting in late summer and fall, light green in late fall and winter, lush green in early spring, and golden in June and early July when the crop is ripe and ready to harvest. Travelers during harvest time will see combines cutting wide swaths through the fields of waving grain, soon to become food for millions all over the world. Salina, an important wheat storage and milling center, lies a few miles to the west. During World War II, Salina's Smoky Hill Army Air Field achieved fame as the location of an important B-29 training base. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home — 9.9 mi
  The six-room house on Southeast Fourth Street where David and Ida Eisenhower raised six sons, and the library, museum and chapel that grew up around it in south Abilene.
• Rock City — 21 mi
  About two hundred sandstone spheres, many as big as a room, crowded into a strip of pasture above the Solomon River south of Minneapolis, where groundwater cemented them inside buried sand.
• Coronado Heights — 27 mi
  A Dakota sandstone bluff 300 feet above the Smoky Valley north of Lindsborg, named by boosters for a Spanish visit that never happened here, with a WPA stone castle on top.

More markers nearby

• Historical Kansas — steps away
• Historic Abilene — 9.8 mi
• Dwight David Eisenhower — 31 mi