Braman: Where Kansas Ends and Oklahoma Begins

Braman sits five miles south of the Kansas line and exists because of a deal struck between a surveyor and a railroad. In eighteen ninety-eight, the Kansas and Southeastern Railroad built south from Hunnewell across the Oklahoma Territory border, and a surveyor named Dwight Braman offered to lay out the route for free in exchange for having the new town named after him. The post office opened in April of that year, and by January of eighteen ninety-nine the town incorporated.

By nineteen hundred, two hundred forty-nine people called it home. Kay County's economy was wheat and oil, and Braman served as a shipping point and local supply hub on the route that would eventually become the main corridor between Kansas City and Oklahoma City. The town never grew large but it held its own, a quiet border crossing where the High Plains of Kansas give way to the red-dirt wheat country of northern Oklahoma.