Towanda, Kansas: River Valley, Stage Roads, and Oil

Towanda sits in the Whitewater River valley in Butler County, a name said to come from an Osage word meaning big village. The first settler arrived in eighteen fifty-eight, a California Gold Rush veteran named C.L.

Chandler who built his cabin here on his way back from the fields. By eighteen seventy, the town was a trade crossroads on the Emporia-to-Wichita wagon road and a division point for two stage lines. Then oil arrived.

In nineteen seventeen, drillers from the Gypsy Oil Company brought in a gusher just east of town on land owned by the Shumway family. The Butler County oil field that followed became one of the most productive in Kansas, helping transform both the county and the industry. Towanda itself stayed small, but the landscape around it still carries the pump-jack silhouette of that nineteen seventeen strike.