Goodland: County Seat Won by a New Town

In eighteen eighty-six, four communities in Sherman County were fighting bitterly over which would become the county seat: Itasca, Voltaire, Sherman Center, and Eustis. A man named Clark proposed a solution nobody expected: build a brand new town. In the spring of eighteen eighty-seven, the Sherman County Development Company platted Goodland just south of the county's geographic center along the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad.

The name came from Goodland, Indiana. By August of that year it had won the county seat designation and the rivals faded into the prairie. Goodland today is the last sizable city in Kansas along Interstate Seventy, a high-plains hub sitting at nearly thirty-seven hundred feet, where afternoon thunderstorms build fast and the wheat harvest runs around the clock in June.