Belle Plaine: Oldest City in Sumner County
Near Wichita, Kansas
Belle Plaine holds the distinction of being the oldest city in Sumner County, Kansas. Settlers from Iowa and Ohio organized the Belle Plaine Town Company on January first, eighteen seventy-one, purchasing land between the Arkansas and Ninnescah Rivers for one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. The name comes from the French for beautiful plain, a fitting description of the open Flint Hills prairie stretching in every direction.
A post office opened that April, and a subscription school followed that fall. By eighteen eighty-three Belle Plaine was a station and shipping point on the Southern Central and Fort Scott Railway. The town was once known for its apple orchards; today its agriculture runs to wheat, soybeans, pecan groves, and cattle, with a population of around fifteen hundred.
