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Humble beginnings
Eight years before K-State became one of the first land-grant institutions in America—and six years before Kansas statehood—the city of Manhattan was formed on July 4, 1855. And it all happened by accident.
Steamboat mishap
Twin settlements Poleska and Canton, really nothing more than small campsites of pioneers, joined with a third group to form a town called New Boston in the spring of 1855.
Meanwhile, another group of 75 settlers—native New Yorkers—had departed from Cincinnati, Ohio, aboard the steamboat Hartford for a 1,000-mile jaunt to Kansas Territory via the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, and Kansas rivers. That is, until the ship hit a sandbar.
The ship's exact destination was supposed to be further west near Junction City, but the Hartford ran aground on the Kansas River around the Big Blue River, where New Boston had just formed.
The New York passengers—who easily outnumbered the residents of New Boston and the nearby townsites of Bluemont, Shannon, and Wildcat—agreed to settle there with one condition: that the city be called Manhattan. This was about 200 years after original explorers began developing the upscale island you’re familiar with on the east coast.
Learning experience
The early settlers wanted to have Kansas join the Union as a free state and to establish a western trade post for miners headed for the gold rush.
And soon these eastern immigrants began to push for schools and then institutions of higher learning in Kansas. First Bluemont College in 1858 and then Kansas State University—then called Kansas State Agricultural College—were formed.
Check the Manhattan timeline from the Riley County historical museum
For more information about visiting K-State
Check the interactive campus map