Carson County Square House Museum

The Niedringhaus brothers of St. Louis, who ran the N Bar N Ranch here, had lumber hauled by ox-cart from Dodge City in the mid-1880s to build a square frame house with a lookout walk on its roof. In 1887 a railroad official lived in it while the Southern Kansas Railway was laid toward the new town of Panhandle City, and it later housed a banker, a judge, an innkeeper and a sheriff. It is the oldest house in Panhandle, and the county bought and restored it as its museum in 1965.

Panhandle itself was platted in January 1888 as the end of that railroad, and it became the shipping point for the ranches around it, with as many as 65,000 cattle in the loading pens at once. Early settlers earned cash hauling buffalo bones to the tracks to be shipped east for fertilizer. The oil and gas boom of the 1920s more than tripled the town by 1930, and its debts for paving and water lines nearly bankrupted it in the Depression.

The museum has grown into a complex of twenty-one buildings and galleries. Its exhibits and a full-size diorama run from mammoth hunters more than 12,000 years ago to the 1920s oil boom. Outside are the 1912 Conway Community Church, a 1928 Santa Fe caboose, a windmill and a half-dugout, and inside are wildlife dioramas, a ranch bunkhouse with a chuck wagon, a commerce building of re-created shops and two art galleries.