Topeka, Kansas "Topeka"
Topeka, Kansas Flag of Topeka, Kansas Flag Official seal of Topeka, Kansas Topeka (/to pi k /; Kansa: To Pee Kuh) is the capital town/city of the U.S.
State of Kansas and the seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, positioned in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States.
As of the 2010 census, the town/city population was 127,473. The Topeka Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Shawnee, Jackson, Jefferson, Osage, and Wabaunsee counties, had a populace of 233,870 in the 2010 census.
The name Topeka is a Kansa-Osage sentence that means "place where we dug potatoes", or "a good place to dig potatoes". As a placename, Topeka was first recorded in 1826 as the Kansa name for what is now called the Kansas River.
Topeka's framers chose the name in 1855 because it "was novel, of Indian origin and euphonious of sound." The mixed-blood Kansa Native American, Joseph James, called Jojim, is credited with suggesting the name of Topeka. The city, laid out in 1854, was one of the Free-State suburbs founded by Eastern antislavery men immediately after the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Bill.
In 1857, Topeka was chartered as a city.
Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned Plessy vs.
Navy have been titled USS Topeka after the city.
See also: Timeline of Topeka, Kansas and History of Kansas In 1803, most of the territory for undivided day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2.83 cents per acre.
About 60 miles (97 km) west of Kansas City, Missouri, three half Kansas Indian sisters married to the French-Canadian Pappan brothers established a ferry service allowing travelers to cross the Kansas River at what is now Topeka. During the 1840s and into the 1850s, travelers could reliably find a way athwart the river, but little else was in the area.
In the early 1850s, traffic along the Oregon Trail was supplemented by trade on a new military road stretching from Fort Leavenworth through Topeka to the newly established Fort Riley.
In 1854, after culmination of the first cabin, nine men established the Topeka Town Association.
Holliday, an "idea man" who would turn into mayor of Topeka and founder of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad.
Topeka was a free-state center amid the enigma in Kansas Territory between free-staters and southerners, who for a long reconstructioncontrolled the legal government of Kansas.
After southern forces barricaded Topeka in 1856, Topeka's leaders took actions to defend the free-state town from invasion.
After a decade of abolitionist and pro-slavery conflict that gave the territory the nickname Bleeding Kansas, Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 as the 34th state.
In fall 1864 a stockade fort, later titled Fort Simple, was assembled in the intersection of 6th and Kansas Avenues to protect Topeka, should Confederate forces then in Missouri decide to attack the city.
Besides being used as the Kansas statehouse from 1863 to 1869, Constitution Hall is the site where anti-slavery pioneer convened in 1855 to write the first of four state constitutions, making it the "Free State Capitol." The National Park Service recognizes Constitution Hall - Topeka as command posts in the operation of the Lane Trail to Freedom on the Underground Railroad, the chief slave escape passage and no-charge trade road.
Although the drought of 1860 and the ensuing reconstructionof the Civil War slowed the expansion of Topeka and the state, Topeka kept pace with the revival and reconstructionof expansion that Kansas appreciateed from the close of the war in 1865 until 1870.
Lincoln College, now Washburn University, was established in 1865 in Topeka by a charter issued by the State of Kansas and the General Association of Congregational Ministers and Churches of Kansas.
In 1869, the stockyards started moving westward from Topeka, where general offices and machine shops of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad fitness were established in 1878.
Topeka, however, doubled in populace during the reconstructionand was able to weather the depressions of the 1890s.
Home to the first black kindergarten west of the Mississippi River, Topeka became the home of Oliver Brown, the titled plaintiff in Brown v.
In 1960, the Enumeration Bureau reported Topeka's populace as 91.8% white and 7.7% black. At the time the suit was filed, only the elementary schools were segregated in Topeka, and Topeka High School had been fully integrated since its inception in 1871.
Furthermore, Topeka High School was the only enhance high school in the town/city of Topeka.
Highland Park High School became part of the Topeka school fitness in 1959 along with the opening of Topeka West High School in 1961.
A Catholic high school Assumption High School, later retitled Capitol Catholic High School, then in 1939 again retitled, to Hayden High School after its founder, Father Francis Hayden also served the town/city beginning in 1911. Topeka has struggled with the burden of ethnic discrimination even after Brown.
New lawsuits attempted unsuccessfully to force suburban school districts that ring the town/city to participate in ethnic integration with the inner town/city district.
Even to this day, with inflation factored in, the Topeka tornado stands as one of the most costly on record.
In 1974, Forbes Air Force Base closed and more than 10,000 citizens left Topeka, western the city's expansion patterns for years to come.
During the 1980s, Topeka people voted to build a new airport and meeting hall and to change the form of town/city government.
Downtown Topeka horizon at evening from the Kansas River (2005) In 1989 Topeka became a motorsports mecca with the opening of Heartland Park Topeka.
In the early 1990s the town/city experienced company expansion with Reser's Fine Foods locating in Topeka and expansions for Santa Fe and Hill's Pet Nutrition.
Voters also allowed a quarter-cent revenue tax for a new Law Enforcement Center, and in 1996 allowed an extension of the revenue tax for the East Topeka Interchange connecting the Oakland Expressway, K-4, I-70, and the Kansas Turnpike.
During the 1990s Shawnee county voters allowed tax measures to grew the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library.
In 2000 the people again voted to extend the quarter-cent revenue tax, this time for the economic evolution of Topeka and Shawnee County.
Planning is under way to continue to redevelop areas along the Kansas River, which runs west to east through Topeka.
In the Kansas River Corridor through the center of town, Downtown Topeka has experienced apartment and condominium loft development, and facade and streetscape improvements.
On the other side of the river, Historic North Topeka has benefited from a primary streetscape universal and the renovated Great Overland Station, regarded as the finest representation of classic barns architecture in Kansas.
On March 1, 2010, Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten issued a proclamation calling for Topeka to be known for the month of March as "Google, Kansas, the capital town/city of fiber optics." The name change came from Ryan Gigous, who wanted to "re-brand" the town/city with a simple gesture. This was to help "support closing accomplishments to bring Google's fiber experiment" to Topeka, though it was not a legal name change.
Lawyers advised the town/city council and mayor against an official name change. Google jokingly announced that it would change its name to Topeka to "honor that moving gesture" on April 1, 2010 (April Fools Day) and changed its home page to say Topeka. In its official blog, Google announced that this change thus affected all of its services as well as its culture, e.g.
Abraham Lincoln Statue in Topeka park Topeka is positioned at 39 03 N 95 41 W, in north east Kansas at the intersection of I-70 and U.S.
It is the origin of I-335 which is a portion of the Kansas Turnpike running from Topeka to Emporia, Kansas.
Topeka is also positioned on U.S.
U.S.-40 is coincident with I-70 west from Topeka.
According to the United States Enumeration Bureau, the town/city has a total region of 61.47 square miles (159.21 km2), of which, 60.17 square miles (155.84 km2) is territory and 1.30 square miles (3.37 km2) is water. In 2007, Forbes Magazine titled Topeka as one of the dominant U.S.
Cities in terms of having the greatest variations in temperature, precipitation, and wind. Topeka lies in the transition between a humid continental (Koppen climate classification Dfa) and humid subtropical climate (Koppen Cfa), with hot, somewhat humid summers and cool to cold, fairly dry winters, and is positioned in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 6. Over the course of a year, the monthly daily average temperature ranges from 29.7 F ( 1.3 C) in January to 79.0 F (26.1 C) in July.
Climate data for Topeka Regional Airport, Kansas (1981 2010 normals, extremes 1887 present) Blacksmiths at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway shops in Topeka, 1943 Being the state's capital city, Topeka's biggest employer is the State of Kansas employing about 8,400 citizens , or 69% of the city's government workers.
Southwest Publishing & Mailing Corporation, a lesser employer, has its command posts in Topeka.
Other primary companies based in Topeka include: Topeka is sometimes cited as the home of Pentecostalism as it was the site of Charles Fox Parham's Bethel Bible College, where glossolalia was first claimed as the evidence of a spiritual experience referred to as the baptism of the Holy Spirit in 1901.
The First Presbyterian Church in Topeka is one of the very several churches in the U.S.
Grace Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas is a large Gothic Revival structure positioned in the city.
Topeka also has a claim in the history of the Baha'i Faith in Kansas.
Not only does the town/city have the earliest continuous Baha'i improve in Kansas (beginning in 1906), but that improve has roots to the first Baha'i improve in Kansas, in Enterprise, Kansas in 1897.
Topeka is home of the Westboro Baptist Church, a hate group as stated to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The church has garnered around the world media consideration for picketing the funerals of U.S.
They have sometimes successfully raised lawsuits against the town/city of Topeka.
Kansas State Capitol, with murals by John Steuart Curry, including the portrait of John Brown towering over "Bleeding Kansas" and the Kansas prairie, and topped with the sculpture of an American Indian titled Ad Astra (from the state motto Ad Astra per Aspera, meaning "To the Stars Through Difficulty".) Heartland Park Topeka, a primary drag racing and road racing course just south of the city.
Topeka High School Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library Topeka Zoo, famous as the place of birth of the first golden eagle chick hatched in captivity and as the first zoo in the country to have an indoor precipitation forest.
Potwin Neighborhood, originally its own town, Potwin has now been surrounded by the City of Topeka, though it still maintains its own mayor and traditions, including the Easter brunch and 4 July Parade.
Topeka Road - Runners Ice hockey North American Hockey League CW Porubsky's Deli & Tavern's chili "has been a lure to north Topeka since (...) 1951". The restaurant has been called "a landmark as momentous as the state Capitol" for many Kansans. In 2009 a documentary short film, Transcendent Deli, was made about the restaurant, focussing on its chili and pickles. In 2014 Travel + Leisure titled it one of America's Best Chilis. Main article: Media in Topeka, Kansas Topeka is the home of a daily newspaper, the Topeka Capital-Journal, and a bi-weekly newspaper, The Topeka Metro News.
Additionally, most of the Kansas City stations furnish at least undertaking B coverage of Topeka.
KANU-FM in Lawrence (in the Kansas City market) serves as Topeka's NPR member station as well.
The Chief Executive Officer of the City of Topeka is City Manager Jim Colson. The City Manager is responsible to the City Council of Topeka.
The City Council consists of the Mayor and nine members propel from separate districts inside the city.
The town/city council members select the Deputy Mayor from amongst themselves who chairs the Committee of the Whole and represents the City of Topeka at official functions when the Mayor is unavailable.
Although Topeka experienced enigma with crime in the 1990s, the city's crime rates have improved in the past decade.
Topeka's crime rates are decreasing.
Researchers credit good communication between law enforcement agencies, informed media outlets, and strong improve involvement for Topeka's success.
Topeka was one of four cities, along with Chicago, Tampa, and El Monte, California, to be studied.
Overall, crime in Topeka was down nearly 18 percent in the first half of 2008, compared with the same reconstructionof 2007.
Topeka police reported a 6.4 percent drop in crime from 2007 to 2008, including momentous reductions in company robberies and aggravated assaults and batteries, as well as thefts. On October 11, 2011, the Topeka town/city council agreed to repeal the ordinance banning domestic violence in an accomplishment to force the Shawnee County District Attorney to prosecute the cases. Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor said that the DA "would no longer prosecute misdemeanors committed in Topeka, including domestic battery, because his office could no longer do so after county commissioners cut his budget by 10 percent." The next day, Taylor said that his office would "commence the review and filing of misdemeanors decriminalized by the City of Topeka." The same day it was announced that 17% of the employees in the District Attorney's office would be laid off. Topeka is served by four enhance school districts including: USD 450 Shawnee Heights (Serving extreme east and southeast Topeka) Topeka is also home to a several private and parochial schools such as Topeka Collegiate and Cair Paravel-Latin School.
Hayden High School, a Catholic high school is also positioned in Topeka, as well as Cornerstone Family Schools, a non-denominational Christian organization that offers junior and senior high school athletics to home school families in the northeast Kansas area.
Topeka has a several colleges, universities and technical schools including Washburn University, Friends University, Washburn Institute of Technology (Formerly Kaw Area Technical School), and the Baker University School of Nursing.
The now defunct College of the Sisters of Bethany and Bethel Bible College both once called Topeka their home.
Topeka has two primary hospitals, Stormont-Vail and St.
Both are positioned in central Topeka.
Topeka is also home to the Colmery-O'Neil VA Medical Clinic.
I-70, I-470, and I-335 all go through the City of Topeka.
I-335 is part of the Kansas Turnpike where it passes through Topeka.
Major roads inside the town/city include NW/SW Topeka Blvd.
Topeka Regional Airport (FOE) formerly known as Forbes Field is positioned in south Topeka in Pauline, Kansas.
Manhattan Regional Airport (MHK) positioned in Manhattan, Kansas is the next closest commercial airport; Kansas City International Airport (MCI) in Kansas City is the closest primary airport.
Philip Billard Municipal Airport (TOP) is positioned in the Oakland region of Topeka Passenger rail service provided by Amtrak stops at the Topeka Station.
Current service is via the Chicago-to-Los Angeles Southwest Chief amid the early morning hours and makes intermediate stops at Lawrence and Kansas City.
The Kansas Department of Transportation has asked Amtrak to study additional service, including daytime service to Oklahoma City. Freight service is provided by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe barns and Union Pacific Railroad as well as a several short line barns s throughout the state.
Greyhound Lines provides bus service westward towards Denver, Colorado, eastward to Kansas City, Missouri, southwest to Wichita, Kansas. Local transit service is provided by the Topeka Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Water and sewer: City of Topeka Main article: List of citizens from Topeka, Kansas Official records for Topeka kept at the Weather Bureau Office from June 1887 to July 1946, and at Topeka Regional Airport since August 1946.
Topeka Capitol Journal Online a b c d e f Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) details for Topeka, Kansas; United States Geological Survey (USGS); October 13, 1978.
"Topeka - Directory of Public Officials".
"City of Topeka - Office of the City Manager".
Topeka's Roots: the Prairie Potato Barbara Burgess King, Dick (2005) "Topeka" rooted in spuds.
Riniker, "How United States Army Leaders at Fort Leavenworth Performed Peacekeeping Operations in Territorial Kansas" (MMAS thesis, U.S.
"Kansas - Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Cities and Other Places: Earliest Enumeration to 1990".
Topeka to be Google, Kansas, Topeka Capital-Journal, March 1, 2010 "Station Name: KS TOPEKA MUNI AP".
"Monthly Averages for Topeka, KS".
"Topeka's Roots: the Prairie Potato".
Giles, Thirty years in Topeka: A Historical Sketch, (Topeka, 1886) Potter, Industrial Conditions in Topeka, (New York, 1915) Decker, Municipal Administration in Topeka, (New York, 1915) Kansas : A Cyclopedia of State History, Embracing Events, Institutions, Industries, Counties, Cities, Towns, Prominent Persons, Etc; 3 Volumes; Frank W.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Topeka, Kansas.
Wikisource has the text of the 1879 American Cyclop dia article Topeka.
Topeka, Kansas at DMOZ City of Topeka at the Wayback Machine (archived March 28, 1997) Topeka City Map, KDOT Municipalities and communities of Shawnee County, Kansas, United States County seat: Topeka Auburn Rossville Silver Lake Topeka Willard
Categories:
Cities in Kansas - Cities in Shawnee County, Kansas - County seats in Kansas - Populated places established in 1854 - Topeka, Kansas - Topeka urbane region - 1854 establishments in Kansas Territory
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