Maple Hill, KS

Maple Hill is a Wabaunsee County city in the Flint Hills, with the 2020 census counting 631 residents. The name dates to Isabella Higganbotham, the area's first postmaster, who used it for the settlement in 1862. Maple Hill changed shape when the railroad arrived: a planned townsite shifted northeast onto George Anderson Fowler's land, the line was completed in 1887, and farmers and ranchers followed. For a while the town had a grain elevator, mill, stores, hotel, banks, school, churches, and a busy Main Street.

The old town story is still easy to find in the landscape. The Old Stone Church, first built in 1875 and rebuilt after a 1991 tornado, stands with the cemetery as one of the community's long-running landmarks. The Wabaunsee County Historical Society's photographs show Maple Hill from the grain elevator, with the school, blacksmith shop, telephone switchboard, and grocery wagon all part of the same local picture. Improved roads later pulled growth toward Topeka and changed the railroad town's role. Maple Hill today is smaller, but its Flint Hills setting and layered townsite still show how a rail settlement was put together.