Emporia State and the Kansas Normal School

In March of eighteen sixty-three, in the middle of the Civil War, the Kansas Legislature passed the act creating the Kansas State Normal School, a college whose specific mission was to train teachers. Kansas had been a state for barely two years. The frontier was still raw. And yet the legislature was already thinking about public education.

The first class did not meet until February of eighteen sixty-five, on the second floor of a district schoolhouse. The president, Lyman Kellogg, was also the only instructor. He taught eighteen students. Two years later, at the first commencement in eighteen sixty-seven, one of the graduates was Ellen Plumb, sister of Senator Preston Plumb, and another was Mary Jane Watson, daughter of a local judge. Young women receiving credentials in a state that had barely existed when they enrolled.

For the first nineteen years, the school struggled against drought, financial neglect, and political jealousy over its location in Emporia. But it survived and grew, eventually training generations of Kansas teachers and librarians. The library science program became nationally recognized. One alumnus, William Coffin Coleman, founded the Coleman Company, the camping equipment manufacturer, after studying here. William Allen White, the celebrated newspaper editor of the Emporia Gazette, whose nineteen twenty-two editorial What's the Matter with Kansas launched a national debate, grew up in this town and embodied Emporia's unlikely outsized influence on American public life.

The school is now Emporia State University, one of the six public universities of Kansas. It sits on the banks of the Cottonwood River in the Flint Hills, in a town that has made an enduring habit of producing people of more consequence than its size would suggest.