Trails and Treasures Home Page  Road Trips  Across America 2004 Searching for Fred Harvey

Hutchinson, Kansas

Hutchinson started as a Santa Fe Railroad town.  The town was platted in November 1871 by C. C. Hutchinson, in preparation of the railroad arriving in 1872.  In 1887 salt was discovered just a few hundred feet below the surface and within a year, more than a dozen salt mines were in operation, including Carey Salt and Morton Salt.

The Santa Fe built the Bisonte Hotel in 1906.  It was designed by Louis Curtiss of Kansas City and operated by Fred Harvey.  The hotel closed in 1946 and was later demolished.

In addition to postcards of the hotel and station, Fred Harvey issued cards featuring the Soldiers Monument, YMCA, First National Bank, Convention Hall, First Christian Church, St. Teresa Catholic Church, Main Street, Kansas State Reformatory, the Carey and Morton salt plants, and the paper bag factory.

The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, a Smithsonian affiliate, is located in Hutchinson.  The focus here is on space, and the museum has some very famous and unique items such as the Apollo 13 Command Module.  (The only airplanes are an SR-71 Blackbird and a T-38 astronaut training jet.)  The exhibits are exceedingly well-designed and informative; I especially enjoyed the ones on German rocketry and the Space Race.  (The museum has the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts in the Western world.)  The museum also has a planetarium and IMAX theater, and I was the only person at the shows I attended.

Geocaches: F-1 Rocket Engine at the Cosmosphere and Train Trex #5 (Reno County Museum).