Gas, Kansas: Zinc Capital of the World for a Decade

The town of Gas, Kansas carries perhaps the most literal place name in the state. Founded in eighteen ninety-eight when natural gas was discovered beneath a farmer's land in Allen County, it was named Gas because of the resource that made it exist. Cheap energy attracted smelting operations almost immediately, and by nineteen oh-seven the town was part of a booming zinc smelting district.

A single Kansas agricultural county had briefly become an important industrial node. The population reached more than twelve hundred by nineteen ten, with a bank, two newspapers, and an opera house serving a boomtown that had not existed twelve years earlier. The natural gas eventually depleted, the smelters closed, and Gas settled into a quiet small-town existence.

About four hundred seventy-five people live there today.