Kansas built its first roadside history sign in 1938, and in 1940 the governor authorized fifty more. By late 1941 there were fifty-six, and Kirke Mechem, secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, had written the inscriptions himself. That November the Society's own quarterly printed fifty-five of them word for word. Those fifty-five now have permanent pages at TreeAlive, placing their 1941 text on georeferenced maps from the periods they commemorate.
55Marker pages
82,000+Historical map sheets
Kirke Mechem, Kansas Historical Quarterly (November 1941), Kansas State Historical SocietyCredited on every page
Every dot is a live page. Click one to preview it or add it to a road trip; many dots hold several markers each; click a busy spot to zoom in. Prefer a list? Browse all 55 markers by county.
TreeAlive maps family trees. When a visitor's ancestors lived in Kansas, the markers standing near those places surface automatically alongside their family's journey:
Hollenberg Pony Express Station · near where a family homesteaded in Washington County in the 1870s · the ranch house four miles north, built in 1857, is believed to be the only original and unaltered Pony Express station
When a marker stands near a place in your own tree, you have a personal reason to go see it. Open the live demo tree, choose the Crossings tab, and turn on Historical Markers to see the experience working (the demo family’s markers are in Pennsylvania; a Kansas family sees Kansas’s).
Browsing all 55 markers by county.
Scan: Hollenberg Pony Express Station marker