Burlington, KS

Burlington is Coffey County's seat in east-central Kansas, founded in 1857 and named for Burlington, Vermont, the hometown of one founder. The 2020 census counted 2,634 residents. The county courthouse and Coffey County Museum sit west of downtown on Neosho Street, so the city's civic center is easy to locate. Burlington's history also has a distinctly modern layer: Wolf Creek Generating Station sits about four miles northeast, beside Coffey County Lake, the cooling reservoir built for the plant. Burlington USD 244 schools, the municipal electric system, the library, medical center, and recreation center make the city a service center for the surrounding county.

ATTRPaulmcdonald / CC BY-SA 3.0

Katy Park holds the museum and aquatic center, and Kelley Park follows the Neosho River near the city dam. Local businesses and county offices cluster around the same small-city core, while Wolf Creek extends the city's working map into the countryside. Burlington's local scoop is that its identity runs on two scales at once: courthouse-town routines downtown and a nuclear generating station with a large reservoir just beyond town.