Place:Manhattan, Riley, Kansas, United States

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Manhattan is a city and county seat of Riley County, Kansas, United States,^[1] although the city extends into Pottawatomie County. It is located in northeastern Kansas at the junction of the Kansas River and Big Blue River. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 55,045.

The city was founded by settlers from the New England Emigrant Aid Company as a Free-State town in the 1850s, during the Bleeding Kansas era. Nicknamed "The Little Apple" as a play on New York City's "Big Apple",^[2] Manhattan is best known as the home of Kansas State University and has a distinct college town atmosphere.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Native American settlement

Before settlement by European-Americans in the 1850s, the land where Manhattan sits was home to Native American tribes. Most recently, from 1780 to 1830 it was home to the Kaw people (also known as the Kansa).^[3] The Kaw settlement was called Blue Earth Village (Manyinkatuhuudje).^[3] It was named after the river the tribe called the Great Blue Earth River, today known as the Big Blue River, which intersected with the Kansas River by their village.^[3] Blue Earth Village was the site of a large battle between the Kaw and the Pawnee in 1812.^[3]

The Kaw tribe ceded ownership of this land in a treaty signed at the Shawnee Methodist Mission on January 14, 1846.^[3]

1854: Polistra and Canton

The Kansas–Nebraska Act opened the territory to settlement by U.S. citizens in 1854. That fall, George S. Park founded the first Euro-American settlement within the borders of the current Manhattan. Park named it Polistra (some histories refer to it as Poliska or Poleska).

Later that same year, Samuel D. Houston and three other pioneers founded Canton, a neighboring community near the mouth of the Big Blue River. Neither Canton nor Polistra ever grew beyond their original founders.^[3]

1855: Free-Staters

In March 1855, a group of New England Free-Staters traveled to Kansas Territory under the auspices of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to found a Free-State town. Led by Isaac Goodnow, the first members of the group (with the help of Samuel C. Pomeroy) selected the location of the Polistra and Canton claims for the Aid Company's new settlement. Soon after the New Englanders arrived at the site, in April 1855, they agreed to join Canton and Polistra to make one settlement named Boston.^[4] They were soon joined by dozens more New Englanders, including Goodnow's brother-in-law Joseph Denison.

In June 1855, the paddle steamer Hartford, carrying 75 settlers from Ohio, ran aground in the Kansas River near the settlement. The Ohio settlers, who were members of the Cincinnati-Manhattan Company, had been headed twenty miles (32 km) farther upstream to the headwaters of the Kansas River, the location today of Junction City. After realizing they were stranded, the Hartford passengers accepted an invitation to join the new town, but insisted that it be renamed Manhattan, which was done on June 29, 1855. Manhattan was incorporated on May 30, 1857.^[4]

Early events

Early Manhattan settlers sometimes found themselves in conflict with Native Americans, and the town was threatened by pro-slavery Southerners. Manhattan was staunchly Free-State, and it elected the only two Free-State legislators to the first Territorial Legislature, commonly called the "Bogus Legislature."^[3] However, nearby Fort Riley protected the settlement from the major violence visited upon other Free-State towns during the "Bleeding Kansas" era. This allowed the town to develop relatively quickly. On January 30, 1858, Territorial Governor James W. Denver signed an act naming Manhattan as county seat for Riley County.^[3] Ten days later, on February 9, 1858, Governor Denver chartered a Methodist college in Manhattan, named Blue Mont Central College.^[3]

The young city received another boost when gold was discovered in the Rocky Mountains in 1859 and Fifty-Niners began to stream through Manhattan on their way to prospect in the mountains. Manhattan was one of the last significant settlements on the route west, and the village's merchants did a brisk business selling supplies to miners. Manhattan's first newspaper, The Kansas Express, began publishing on May 21, 1859.^[3]

In 1861, when the State of Kansas entered the Union, Isaac Goodnow, who had been a teacher in Rhode Island, began lobbying the legislature to convert Manhattan's Blue Mont Central College into the state university. The culmination of these efforts came on February 16, 1863, when the Kansas legislature established Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University) in Manhattan. When the college began its first session on September 2, 1863, it was the first public college in Kansas, the nation's first land-grant institution created under the Morrill Act, and only the second public institution of higher learning to admit women and men equally in the United States.^[3]

By the time the Kansas Pacific Railroad laid its tracks west through Manhattan in 1866, the 11-year-old settlement was permanently ensconced in the tallgrass prairie. Manhattan's population has grown every decade since its founding.

20th century

The town was named an All-American City in 1952, becoming the first city in Kansas to win the award.

21st century

In 2007, CNN and Money magazine rated Manhattan as one of the ten best places in America to retire young. In 2011, Forbes rated Manhattan No. 1 for "Best Small Communities for a Business and Career."

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