Meade, Kansas

Meade, Kansas, was established in eighteen eighty-five when the Meade Center Townsite Company laid out the town. The county was organized the same year and named for Civil War General George G. Meade, the Union commander at Gettysburg.

Meade became the permanent county seat, and within months a bank, two newspapers, and hundreds of homesteaders had arrived. The boom, like most in southwestern Kansas, was tied to the rain; when drought returned in the late eighteen eighties, many settlers left. The town stabilized around wheat farming and ranching.

Today Meade has about one thousand five hundred residents. Its main draw for travelers is the Dalton Gang Hideout just south of town, where local legend connects the famous outlaw family to a farmhouse and an escape tunnel.