Cottonwood Falls, KS

Cottonwood Falls is the county seat and largest city in Chase County, Kansas, on the south side of the Cottonwood River south of Strong City. The 2020 census counted 851 residents. The city sits in the Flint Hills, with the river, limestone, tallgrass prairie, and Kansas 177 shaping its surroundings. Chase County USD 284 serves local students. The courthouse stands on Broadway, where county offices and the city’s older commercial streets meet.

The Chase County Courthouse was completed in 1873 from local limestone and walnut, and remains the oldest Kansas courthouse still in use. The river dam and falls nearby began as a cottonwood-log structure built for a mill in 1860; later versions powered early electricity. That combination of county government, river water, stone, and prairie gives Cottonwood Falls a compact but legible town center. The city remains small, but people from across Chase County come here for courthouse business, schools, history, and the roads that cross the Flint Hills. Cottonwood Falls is a Kansas county seat with the river at its feet and a nineteenth-century courthouse above Broadway.