Emporia: Will White and the Sage of the Flint Hills

Emporia was founded in eighteen fifty-seven at the confluence of the Neosho River and Cottonwood Creek, and became the seat of Lyon County in eastern Kansas. The town is most famous for William Allen White, who bought the Emporia Gazette in eighteen ninety-five at age twenty-seven and spent nearly fifty years making it one of the most influential small-city newspapers in American history. White won two Pulitzer Prizes, was friends with Theodore Roosevelt, and gave Emporia a national platform from a building on Merchant Street.

His essay What's the Matter with Kansas, written in eighteen ninety-six in a moment of irritation with Populist politics, became one of the most quoted political pieces of the Gilded Age. Emporia is also home to Emporia State University, founded in eighteen sixty-three, one of the earliest teacher-training colleges west of the Mississippi.