Matfield Green: An Englishman's Flint Hills Village

Matfield Green carries the name of a village in Kent, England, a name settlers brought to the south fork of the Cottonwood River in the Flint Hills of Chase County. Other settlers filled the surrounding tallgrass. By the early nineteen hundreds, Matfield Green had grown to about three hundred fifty residents and held a bank, a hotel, a flour mill, and a lumberyard.

Then the automobile and the highway began pulling trade toward bigger towns, and the population collapsed to just a few dozen. Today it is one of the smallest incorporated cities in Kansas, a handful of houses in an ocean of bluestem grass, sitting in the Flint Hills, often described as the largest remaining tract of native tallgrass prairie in North America.