Meade State Park

Meade State Park lies eight miles south and five miles west of Meade on K-23, on the High Plains just west of the Red Hills. It holds 80-acre Meade State Fishing Lake, a wildlife area of several hundred acres with campsites, a nature trail and several springs, and the springs are the reason it is here.

This part of Meade County is known for artesian conditions, which the Kansas Geological Survey ties to a buried fault to the east. Water in an artesian aquifer is held under pressure beneath rock it cannot pass through. Where that cap is broken, by a spring or by a well drilled down to the water, it rises on its own instead of having to be pumped, and sometimes shoots out. During a test in the park in 1939 to measure the artesian head, water climbed a pipe 17.4 feet above the ground. Settlers found the same thing across the county: there were flowing artesian wells, and a salt well discovered in the county was for a time a popular place to bathe.

Most of that pressure is gone. Irrigation has lowered the water table, and the flow from the springs and artesian wells around the park has diminished or stopped altogether. The lake still holds bluegill, channel catfish and largemouth bass, fishing is allowed year-round, and boats with motors may be used only for fishing and only at no-wake speed. Meade itself, on the way in, keeps the Dalton Gang Hideout, the house of the outlaws' sister Eva Dalton Whipple, as a museum.