Museum of the Great Plains

Learn about the famed Leoti/Coronado County Seat Fight of 1887.

We have a large collection of violins, Marion Bonner fossils, and pioneer and old west artifacts.

Recently the museum received a new railroad collection of Richard L. George. Richard began his railroad career as a fireman in the early 1940?s and went on to become an engineer of steam locomotives. One of Richard?s favorite engines, which he drove, was Santa Fe?s streamlined steam engine, the “Blue Goose”.

Items includes the engineer “weigh box”, which the engineer must take on each run. It is filled with many of Mr. George’s instruction manuals, train orders, souvenirs of railroad fairs, and photographs of trains. Among the collection was a train track jack, a railroad pick, many assorted railroad lanterns, and a large framed lithograph of the beautiful Santa Fe “Blue Goose”, and one of the Union Station in Kansas City.

Richard enjoyed the art of photography and took many slides and movies of trains and railroad. There are photographs of trains, wrecks, blizzards and many of the Kansas Flood of 1951. Richard made several scrapbooks of the newspaper articles of the stories of the flood, among these pages are his train orders at the time of the flood. He has written a detailed story in diary form of his involvement at this time of such terrible destruction. All of these photos, scrapbooks, slides, and footage of movies have been donated to the museum. This in itself is a fantastic “first account” piece of history.