Abilene, Kansas: First Cowtown, President's Hometown
Near Abilene, Kansas
Abilene sits on the Smoky Hill River in the center of Kansas, a small city carrying an outsized portion of American history. The name comes from the Bible, from the Gospel of Luke, chapter three, verse one, and the Hebrew word it derives from means grassy plains, which perfectly describes the tallgrass country surrounding it. The town began in eighteen fifty-seven as a stage stop called Mud Creek, a place with a ferry, a trading post, and modest ambitions.
It was renamed Abilene in eighteen sixty when the county was organized. Then the Kansas Pacific Railway reached it in eighteen sixty-seven, and a livestock trader named Joseph McCoy arrived with a vision that would transform both the town and the cattle industry of the entire nation. McCoy built stockyards, a hotel, and a shipping facility and turned Abilene into the first great terminus of the Chisholm Trail.
Texas ranchers drove their longhorn cattle north to Abilene and the animals rode east by rail to the packinghouses of Chicago and Kansas City. For five wild years, from eighteen sixty-seven to eighteen seventy-one, Abilene was the wildest cattle town in the American West, and names that became legends in western history passed through its streets. Then the town made a deliberate choice to be something different, and the cattle trade moved west.
What followed was a quieter prosperity: grain farming, railroad shipping, a stable county seat on the plains. One more surprise waited. In eighteen ninety-two, a family named Eisenhower settled in Abilene, and their son Dwight, who had been born in Texas, grew up here from age two, graduated from Abilene High School in nineteen oh nine, went to West Point, commanded the Allied forces on D-Day in nineteen forty-four, and was elected the thirty-fourth President of the United States.
He came back to Abilene to be buried beside his wife and son at his presidential library, which stands here today. The cattle town and the president's hometown occupy the same ground.
