Oxford, KS

Oxford is a Sumner County city in south-central Kansas, with 1,048 residents in the 2020 census. The town began in 1871 at a former trading post, took its name from Oxford University, and incorporated on October 17, 1879. About thirty miles south of Wichita, it sits in open farm country where the streets give way quickly to fields and the Arkansas River Valley’s broad horizons.

The Old Oxford Mill, built in 1875, keeps the town’s early industrial chapter visible, while Oxford USD 358 connects students from the city and surrounding countryside. Each September, the Oxford Watermelon Feed arrives on the first Saturday after Labor Day, with food, contests, music, and a long-running harvest-season gathering. The surrounding wheat and pasture country keeps the town’s edges open in every direction, even as local businesses fill the center. Oxford is a Kansas city where a trading post, an old mill, a school district, and a watermelon tradition still fit together, giving the small community a calendar of its own.