Santa Fe Trail Center

The Fort Larned Historical Society, founded in 1957 to open the fort to visitors, started with a small curio shop and a few displays at the post. The museum it grew into now spreads across ten buildings on ten acres on K-156, two miles west of Larned and four from the fort. Inside, the galleries begin with a full-size mounted bison and move through the Plains nations, the trappers of the mountains and the Southwest, and the Santa Fe Trail trade to a 1919 frame house and a brick-paved main street.

The grounds hold the town's history. There is a reproduction sod house and a dugout, the Frizell depot of the Santa Fe railway, a limestone cooling house, and the L'Dora one-room schoolhouse. The Johnson Street CME Escue Chapel was the first church built by Larned's African American congregation, about a century ago. Larned itself began in April 1872 with a building from the fort: Henry Booth, the fort's postmaster and later its sutler, floated the old sutler's mess house down the Pawnee River, and it served in turn as church, school, saloon and post office.

The research library holds more than 3,500 books, and the archives are the official repository for Pawnee County records, with more than 700 linear feet of papers, some 7,000 photographs and 2,300 magic lantern slides of trail sites, dust storms and county businesses. The museum has no trail ruts of its own; the staff will direct you to the nearby sites, including Pawnee Rock ten miles east.