Emporia: The Sage of the Flint Hills

Emporia was founded in eighteen fifty-seven in the Lyon County tallgrass prairie, four years before Kansas joined the Union as a free state. The town had a newspaper before it had paved streets: the Kansas News started publishing on July sixth, eighteen fifty-seven, launched by Senator Preston Plumb to promote the place. But Emporia's lasting claim to national notice came in eighteen ninety-five, when a twenty-seven-year-old journalist named William Allen White bought the struggling Emporia Gazette for three thousand dollars.

The following year he published a fiery editorial called What's the Matter with Kansas, attacking the Populist movement, and it was reprinted in papers across the country overnight. White spent the next fifty years in Emporia, winning a Pulitzer Prize and earning the nickname the Sage of Emporia. The Gazette remained in family hands for more than a century after he bought it.