Towanda - Land of Many Waters

When Andreas described Towanda in 1883 it was a live little town of seventy-five people on the Whitewater. Mooney laid it out in June 1870 as eight blocks of twelve lots, with streets sixty-six feet wide and a Main Street of 100. G. W. Baker put up the first house, used as a store. In 1871 Mooney built a large hotel and barn, and a schoolhouse went up for $1,500. On March 31, 1892, an F4 tornado killed at least nine people here.

What the plaque says

Towanda--Land of Many Waters-- The town and township lie tucked in the pleasant valley of the Whitewater River, and take their name from the Osage Indian term "many waters." First settler was C.L. Chandler, a returning '49er from the California gold fields who built his cabin in 1858. Towanda town- ship was one of the first four in the makeup of Butler County--the largest in Kansas. In 1870, Rev. Isaac Mooney, frontier preacher and community builder, platted ten acres for a townsite. The village quickly became a trade center on the Emporia- Wichita wagon road and a division point for two stage lines. Towanda gained wide fame in 1917, when giant oil gushers were drilled on rocky Shumway land at the town's eastern doorstep by Gypsy Oil Company and the Trapshooters group. Close neighbor is El Dorado, the county seat on the east, since pioneer days a prime adjunct to the Flint Hills cattle country and for more than 50 years the focal point of vast petroleum development in south- central Kansas. Its largest industries are modern oil refineries of Skelly Oil Company and American Petrofina, while the Butler County Community Junior College tops its cultural institutions. Erected by Kansas Turnpike Authority and State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kansas Oil Museum — 8.3 mi
  Butler County's ten-acre museum in El Dorado, telling how a town that envied its neighbors' gas wells hired the state geologist in 1914 and found one of the great oil fields of its day.
• Keeper of the Plains — 21 mi
  Blackbear Bosin's 44-foot steel figure on the point where the Little Arkansas meets the Arkansas, the ground where Wichita refugees built grass houses in 1864.
• Old Cowtown Museum — 21 mi
  Wichita's open-air museum of its 1865 to 1880 years, begun in 1950 to save a first church found inside a rooming house, in a city that was never sure it wanted to be called a cowtown.
• Kauffman Museum — 29 mi
  Bethel College's museum in North Newton of the Mennonites who settled the central plains in the 1870s, home to the copper plates of the 1685 Martyrs Mirror.

More markers nearby

• Indian Treaties of 1865 — 19 mi
• Turkey Red Wheat — 29 mi
• Bluestem Pasture Region — 32 mi