Chicopee, KS

Chicopee is a census-designated place in Crawford County, four miles southwest of downtown Pittsburg at the meeting of South 200th Street and East 530th Avenue. The 2020 census counted 422 residents. The community sits in the old coal country of southeast Kansas, with Crestwood Country Club bordering its northwestern corner and Pittsburg supplying the nearby urban center. Roads and former mine ground define the local setting more than a formal town grid.

Chicopee grew as a coal-mining community and had a post office that opened in 1889, closed in 1892, reopened that October, and finally closed in 1918. Those dates sketch a place whose population and services rose and fell with the mining economy. Today the CDP remains a small Crawford County settlement close to Pittsburg, with its downtown reference point, county roads, and old coal landscape still marking where the community fits. Chicopee’s story is a short post office history set inside the larger industrial history of the Pittsburg area.