Kansas county map

How Kansas’s counties are laid out

Kansas is the clearest example in the country of counties drawn on a survey grid. Apart from the north-east corner, where the Missouri River and the older territorial counties break the pattern, most counties are rectangles about 30 miles on a side, arranged in rows of roughly equal width from the Nebraska line to the Oklahoma line. The intention of the territorial legislature was that no farmer should be more than a day’s wagon ride from the county seat.

The first counties were created in 1855 by the first territorial legislature along the eastern edge, where settlement from Missouri had already begun: Leavenworth, Atchison, Doniphan, Douglas, Shawnee and Johnson among them. Counties were then organised westward in waves as the railroads pushed across the plains in the 1870s and 1880s, and the western third of the state was filled in almost all at once. Many western counties still have fewer than 3,000 residents.

The four westernmost counties on the Colorado line — Sherman, Wallace, Greeley and Hamilton — keep Mountain Time; the other 101 counties are on Central Time. County names honour Civil War generals and Union politicians (Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, Logan, Lincoln, Stanton, Thomas), early Kansas figures (Brown, Lane, Pottawatomie, Wyandotte) and, in a few cases, Native American nations that were removed to Kansas before statehood (Osage, Kiowa, Cherokee, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, Pawnee).

All 105 counties of Kansas

Five county facts

• Largest by area: Butler County, seat El Dorado, immediately east of Wichita, at about 1,400 square miles. Finney County (Garden City) in the south-west is next; it was enlarged in 1893 when Garfield County was abolished and folded into it.
• Smallest by area: Wyandotte County, about 150 square miles, wedged between the Kansas and Missouri rivers at the north-east corner. It is consolidated with its seat, Kansas City, Kansas, as the Unified Government of Wyandotte County.
• Most populous: Johnson County, seat Olathe, with about 610,000 people in 2020 — the Kansas side of the Kansas City suburbs, including Overland Park, the state’s second-largest city. Sedgwick County (Wichita) is second at just over 520,000.
• Least populous: Greeley County, seat Tribune, on the Colorado line, with about 1,200 people; it too is a consolidated city-county. Wallace, Lane, Comanche and Stanton counties are also below 2,000.
• Oldest and newest: The 1855 territorial counties of the east are the oldest; Leavenworth is usually counted first. The last counties to be organised were the far-western counties of the 1880s, with Garfield County’s abolition in 1893 fixing the total at 105. Kansas has no independent cities.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in to see the county grid. The irregular counties are all in the east: Doniphan, Atchison, Leavenworth and Wyandotte follow the bend of the Missouri River, and Johnson, Miami, Linn, Bourbon, Crawford and Cherokee run in a straight column down the Missouri border. Cherokee County at the south-east corner is the only one that touches both Missouri and Oklahoma. Ellis County (Hays), Riley County (Manhattan, home of Kansas State University) and Douglas County (Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas) are the main population centres outside the Kansas City and Wichita areas. The Arkansas River enters at Hamilton County and passes through Garden City, Dodge City, Great Bend, Hutchinson and Wichita before leaving Sumner County for Oklahoma.

Related maps

• Kansas map — cities, borders and geography.
• Blank Kansas map and printable Kansas map.
• Topeka, the state capital, in Shawnee County.
• Neighbouring county maps: Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado.
• West North Central states · the Midwest · Great Plains · Central and Mountain time zones.
• Geography: Great Plains, Arkansas River, Missouri River.
• All US county maps.