Nortonville, KS

Nortonville is a city in northern Jefferson County, Kansas. The 2020 census counted 601 people. The town was surveyed and platted in May 1873 by the Arkansas Valley Town Company, and John Taggart opened the first post office from a tent that same spring. The town grew on the railroad-era grid, with its early businesses serving the surrounding farm country; a local history of the period lists general stores, grain elevators, a flour mill, hotels, blacksmith shops, and lumber yards.

The town's history also includes a documented exclusionary chapter: a 1902 newspaper described Nortonville as a place where a Black person was not allowed to live, and later accounts identify it as one of Kansas's reported sundown towns. That record belongs alongside the town's present-day civic geography. Jefferson County North USD 339's elementary and middle school are in Nortonville, while the high school is in Winchester; the two communities' school districts were consolidated in 1966. The city maintains links to its public library and cemeteries, and U.S. 59 keeps Nortonville tied to the rest of northern Jefferson County. The local scoop is a railroad-founded town whose story includes both early commercial growth and a hard racial history that should be named plainly.