Smith Center: Near the Middle of Everything

Smith Center, the county seat of Smith County in north-central Kansas, was founded in eighteen seventy-one and named for Major J. Nelson Smith, a Civil War officer. The town's enduring distinction is geographic.

The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey calculated in nineteen eighteen that the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight states falls in Smith County, approximately two and a half miles northwest of the small town of Lebanon, about eleven miles east-northeast of Smith Center. A stone marker was dedicated nearby in nineteen forty. For years before the official measurement, Smith Center, Fort Riley, and Junction City each claimed the center title, but the federal survey settled it with a cardboard map balanced on a pin, and Smith County won.