Victoria and the Cathedral of the Plains

Victoria, Kansas has two founding stories. A British colonist named George Grant platted it in eighteen seventy-three and named it for Queen Victoria. His English and Scottish settlers did not thrive.

The second founding came in eighteen seventy-five, when a party of Volga German families arrived and established a settlement called Herzog just north of the original townsite. These were descendants of Germans who had settled Russia's Volga River valley at the invitation of Catherine the Great a century earlier, and left when her successors stripped their privileges. Herzog grew larger than Victoria.

In nineteen thirteen the two towns merged under the Victoria name. Above it all rose the Basilica of Saint Fidelis, built in nineteen eleven from stone quarried by local families under a community levy. William Jennings Bryan visited in nineteen twelve and called it the Cathedral of the Plains.