Manhattan, Kansas Information

Manhattan is a town located in northeastern Kansas at the junction of the Kansas River and Big Blue River. As of the July 2005 census estimate, its population was 49,462, making it the eighth-largest city in Kansas. Manhattan is the county seat of Riley County. A small part of the town extends into Pottawatomie County. It is the principal town within the Manhattan, Kansas Micropolitan Statistical Area.

Nicknamed The Little Apple in 1977 as a play on New York City's "Big Apple," it is most well-known for being the home of Kansas State University. Eight miles (13 km) west of the town is Fort Riley, a United States Army post.

Manhattan was settled in April 1855 by the abolitionist Isaac Goodnow [1] and other New England settlers, who traveled to Kansas Territory under the auspices of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to found a Free-State town. It was originally named Boston. The new town incorporated two other small settlements already in the area, named Canton and Polistra. In June 1855 the steamboat Hartford, carrying 75 settlers from Ohio ran aground in the Kansas River near the settlement. 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.

Early Manhattan settlers found themselves in conflict with Native Americans and the town itself was threatened by pro-slavery Southerners, but the proximity of Fort Riley protected the settlement from the major violence visited upon other Free State towns during the "Bleeding Kansas" era.

The young town received an early 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.

At the same time, Manhattan was fast becoming a center of education. In 1858, the Territorial Legislature chartered the private Methodist Bluemont Central College in Manhattan. 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 establish a university in Manhattan. As an inducement, the Manhattanites offered to the state the physical plant of Bluemont Central College. 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.

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

Courtesy of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan%2C_Kansas