Chase County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Chase County

Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve at 11,000 acres is the only NPS unit dedicated solely to the preservation of an intact tallgrass prairie ecosystem — protecting the largest contiguous remnant of a prairie that once covered roughly 170 million acres across the central North American continent from Texas to southern Manitoba. Less than 4% of the original tallgrass extent remains today per the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, almost entirely concentrated inside Kansas's Flint Hills (where shallow chert-and-flint subsoil blocked the deep moldboard plow that turned the rest of the prairie into corn-and-soybean cropland between 1850 and 1900). The preserve is co-managed by the NPS and the Nature Conservancy under a unique cooperative agreement — the only NPS unit with that ownership structure per the NPS unit-categorization roster — and runs an active 100-head American bison reintroduction program inside the south-pasture management unit. Chase County covers 778 sq mi at the heart of the Flint Hills physiographic region, with a population of 2,572 — the eighth-least-populated county in Kansas.

Cottonwood Falls (population 873, the county seat) is one of the most-photographed small-town courthouse squares on the Plains: the 1873 limestone-block Chase County Courthouse is the oldest still-functioning courthouse in Kansas. The Flint Hills Scenic Byway KS-177 runs 47 miles between Council Grove (Morris County) and Cassoday (Butler County) through unfenced rolling-prairie cattle country, the longest open-range cattle-drive corridor on a state-numbered highway in the eastern United States. Cattle still graze in unfenced pasture along the byway under spring-burn-and-summer-grazing management practices that maintain the prairie's species diversity. The preserve has no RV campground and no developed overnight loop — the closest hookups route to Council Grove Lake (45 miles north, a Corps of Engineers reservoir with 95 RV-friendly sites accepting rigs to 40 ft) or El Dorado State Park (40 miles south, Kansas's largest state park, 1,100 sites). Dispersed-camping is not permitted inside the preserve under NPS regulations.