Kanorado: Exit One

Kanorado sits exactly where its name says it does: on the line between Kansas and Colorado. The town grew up in eighteen eighty-eight around the railroad, and its first post office opened as Lamborn. In nineteen oh three the post office renamed it Kanorado, a simple blend of the two state names, which tells you everything you need to know about the place.

Kanorado holds a minor distinction: it is Exit One off Interstate Seventy in Kansas, the very first town you reach after crossing from Colorado, and it sits at the highest elevation of any city in the state. At its peak, around nineteen thirty, the town held about three hundred fifty people. The Dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties, this is some of the driest, most exposed ground in the Great Plains, emptied it quickly. Today fewer than two hundred people live here, but the grain elevators still stand, and the Kansas welcome signs still go up right at the edge of town.