Coronado Heights

The bluff is the southernmost of seven in the Dakota sandstone that rise at the edge of the Smoky Valley, about 300 feet above the farmland around Lindsborg. Swedish settlers first settled at its foot in 1869 and built their land company's first house there before moving nearer the river, and photographs show town picnics on top by 1893. The name came later. In 1915 a Bethany College professor, J. A. Udden, found chain mail at a village site on Sharps Creek a few miles southwest, the country of the Wichita people's ancestors, and another Bethany professor promoted the idea that Coronado had looked out from this hill in 1541. The Kansas Historical Society's register listing says plainly that the connection was erroneous, applied by boosters of the motoring age.

The Smoky Valley Historical Society was formed to develop the hill, bought it in 1919 from two farm families and cut Swensson Drive up the slope in 1920, with a footpath called Olsson Trail. Rain kept washing the road out. In the early 1930s Saline County found federal money, and by 1936 Works Progress Administration crews had finished the winding road, picnic areas and the small sandstone castle shelter at the summit. It joined the National Register in 2010.

The sixteen-acre park belongs to the Smoky Valley Historical Association. John Whitfield's 1988 sculpture halfway up reads "A Place to Share." A mile west of Lindsborg the association also keeps the Höglund dugout, the six-by-twelve-foot hole where Gustaf and Maria Höglund's first two children were born in 1872 and 1873.