The City of Leavenworth

Fred Harvey made Leavenworth his home for the rest of his life. He came to New York from Liverpool in 1853 at 17 and started as a pot scrubber and busboy. Railroad work brought him to Leavenworth, and his travels taught him how bad the food served to passengers was. He built the Harvey House lunch rooms, restaurants and hotels along the Santa Fe, and when he died in Leavenworth on February 9, 1901, there were 47 Harvey House restaurants, 15 hotels and 30 dining cars. His former residence in Leavenworth houses a Fred Harvey Museum.

What the plaque says

The City of Leavenworth Two weeks after Kansas was officially opened for settlement the state's oldest city was born. The date was June 12, 1854, and the town was named for nearby Fort Leavenworth. In September, type for the first regular weekly newspaper in Kansas was set under an elm tree on the levee. The newspaper came in "even before our sins," a journalist wrote later. Within four years Leavenworth's population had soared beyond 10,000 as steamboats and freighting wagons, supplying Western forts and the ever-advancing frontier, made business boom. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, William T. Sherman and Fred Harvey were early area residents before they won fame respectively as army scout and showman, Civil War general, and restaurateur. Abraham Lincoln, on a speaking tour, spent four days here in December, 1859. The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, established in 1858, operates nearly 100 schools and colleges, including nearby St. Mary. Prisons abound near Leavenworth. South, at Lansing, are the state penitentiary and women's industrial farm, while north of the city are the U.S. disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth and the federal penitentiary. The historic Fort Leavenworth-Fort Gibson military road, laid out in 1837, passed near this marker. Erected by State Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Quindaro Townsite — 18 mi
  The wooded ruins of a free-state river port built on a Wyandot woman's land in 1857, a crossing for people escaping slavery in Missouri and later the home of Western University.
• Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum — 22 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.
• Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site — 26 mi
  Three brick buildings in Fairway from the manual labor school the Methodist church ran for Shawnee and other Native children from 1839, which the Shawnee Tribe now calls by its plain name, a boarding school.

More markers nearby

• Fort Leavenworth — 1.3 mi
• Historic Fort Leavenworth — 12 mi
• Kansas Indian Reservations — 16 mi
• Delaware Crossing and the Grinter Ferry — 19 mi