Peabody, Kansas: Prairie Town Named for a Banker

Peabody, Kansas was platted in eighteen seventy-one and named for a Boston man named Peabody, a former vice president of the Santa Fe Railway. The Santa Fe Railway came through Marion County that same year, and Peabody became a small but steady wheat and cattle shipping point on the Kansas plains. In the eighteen nineties the Populist movement ran deep here, as it did across central Kansas, and local farmers rallied behind the People's Party against the railroads and grain elevator monopolies that set the prices.

Today Peabody is a quiet town of fewer than a thousand people, with a well-preserved Victorian commercial block on its main street. It sits near the Flint Hills, the tallgrass prairie preserve that survived the plow because the chert-laden soil broke steel blades.