Wichita, KS
Known as the "Air Capital of the World" — title claimed in 1928 when Wichita out-produced every other plane-making city in America. Walter Beech, Clyde Cessna, and Lloyd Stearman all founded their aircraft companies here in the 1920s; the three originally partnered as Travel Air in 1925. Spirit AeroSystems — which builds 75% of every Boeing 737 fuselage — is the city's largest employer. Renamed for Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Kansas native.
Wichita has called itself the Air Capital of the World since the 1920s and is one of the only American cities that can claim the title with no asterisks. Travel Air (1925), Cessna (1927), Beechcraft (1932), and Stearman (1927) were all founded here within seven years of each other. Boeing built B-29s in Wichita during WWII. Today Spirit AeroSystems, Textron Aviation (Cessna + Beechcraft), Bombardier, and Airbus all maintain major operations on or adjacent to KICT. The Kansas Aviation Museum occupies the original 1935 Wichita Municipal Airport terminal building, just south of the Spirit factory. The Air Capital Memorial flame on the airport grounds honors the airmen and engineers from Wichita who built American aviation.
A 105,000-square-foot Smithsonian-affiliate museum on the Hutchinson Community College campus, holding the largest combined collection of U.S. and Soviet/Russian spaceflight artifacts in the world — second only to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum overall, but more comprehensive than any single museum on the Soviet side. 13,000+ artifacts. The collection includes three flown spacecraft from the first three crewed U.S. space programs: the Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule (recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic by the Cosmosphere's SpaceWorks team), Gemini X, and the Apollo 13 Command Module Odyssey — assembled piece by piece from across the country after scattering. Soviet items include a flown Vostok capsule and Voskhod hardware acquired during the 1990s after the USSR's collapse. The museum also built ~80% of the spacecraft props for Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" film. The story is local: Patty Carey, a Hutchinson civic leader, set up a used starball projector in a poultry building at the Kansas State Fairgrounds in 1962. By the late 1970s the museum was the right size in the right place to absorb post-Apollo artifacts NASA needed to disperse.
The last large intact tallgrass prairie in North America — and one of the most thoroughly extinct ecosystems on the continent. Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 170 million acres from Indiana to Kansas. Less than 4% survives today; the rest was plowed into farmland by 1900. The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, established 1996 in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas near Strong City, protects 10,894 acres — the largest single tract of unplowed tallgrass in the U.S. The Flint Hills survived because the rocky limestone subsoil made plowing impossible: the land could only be grazed, not cropped, so the original sod stayed in place. Bison were reintroduced in 2009 (a herd of about 100 today). Big bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, and switchgrass grow to 8 feet tall by late summer. The Spring Hill / Z Bar Ranch headquarters is preserved as a working ranch with an 1881 limestone barn and house. The preserve sits at the convergence point where a co-managed NPS/Nature Conservancy/private-ranch model has kept the land intact.
A 19-story, 221-foot tower at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, completed February 1956 — the only Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper ever built. Commissioned by Harold C. Price Sr. of the H.C. Price Company to house his oil pipeline business, rental offices, and apartments in a single mixed-use vertical. Wright adapted his 1928 unbuilt St. Mark's in the Bowery design for Lower Manhattan and scaled it down to the Oklahoma prairie. The structural concept is radical even today: 19 floors cantilevered from a central concrete utility core, no steel frame — Wright called it "the tree that escaped the crowded forest." Copper-panel facade, asymmetric plan rotated on a 60-degree parallelogram grid, interiors and furnishings designed as a single integrated system. Phillips Petroleum bought it in 1981, donated it to a nonprofit in 2001, which ran it as a boutique hotel and museum until it closed in August 2024 amid the owner's financial collapse. Sold out of bankruptcy to McFarlin Building LLC of Tulsa on May 5, 2025 for $1.4 million; closed for a roughly $10 million restoration, with the new owners targeting a 2027 reopening as a hotel and residences. National Historic Landmark; a UNESCO World Heritage Site candidacy was withdrawn. The tower remains visible from the Bartlesville street grid — it's the only tall thing in town.