Osborne: The Geodetic Center of North America

Osborne, the county seat of Osborne County in north-central Kansas, was founded May first, eighteen seventy-one, when thirty-eight settlers and a handful of others laid out a townsite and named it after Private Vincent B. Osborne, a Union Army veteran of the Civil War. The county seat was permanently established in Osborne in November of eighteen seventy-two.

Osborne County holds a geographic distinction that its neighbor Smith County does not: the geodetic center of North America, the precise mathematical reference point from which all survey measurements across the continent are calculated, is located in Osborne County. It is a different measurement from the geographic center, and it makes Osborne the quiet anchor of the North American coordinate grid.