Wichita

PUBLISHED BY FRED HARVEY WICHITA, KANSAS
© 1914, BY FRED HARVEY
“Watch Wichita Win” is the city motto that has been adopted by Wichita and there is every proof that the community is justifying it. In 1900 Wichita had a population of 25,000; today its population exceeds 63,000, and there are good grounds to believe it will soon be a city of 100,000.
The location of Wichita was not an accident. Long before the white man came the Indians chose the junction of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers as a meeting place from which to conduct their campaigns and hunting expeditions into the Southwest territory. Before the railways reached Wichita, it was a center for the cattle trade of Oklahoma and Texas. In 1872 the first railway train entered Wichita over the Wichita Southwestern, a branch of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and the city became at once a distributing point for the Southwestern country.
Today Wichita is served by six trunk lines, reaching into Western Kansas, Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico.
The development of Wichita in the last ten years has been many-sided. Perhaps its most important growth has been in the live stock and grain markets. In 1912, 14,465 cars of grain came to the Wichita market and 10,759 cars of live stock were received at the Wichita Union Stockyards. Wichita is the largest broom corn market in the United States, parts of Oklahoma and Western Kansas being peculiarly adapted for the growth of broom corn. The city’s standing as a distributing center is evidenced by its large number of jobbing houses, with business covering Southern Kansas, Oklahoma and parts of Texas and New Mexico. There are more than a hundred jobbing houses located here. Among these, ten firms deal in agricultural implements, six wholesale grocery firms, three dry goods jobbers, three wholesale drug houses.
Surrounding Wichita is one of the great wheat districts of the world and this fact, with the city’s superior transportation facilities, is largely responsible for the milling industry. The city’s flouring mills have a capacity of 7,000 barrels a day and their product is shipped to California and to New York, to Oregon and to European ports. This branch of Wichita’s manufacturing and commercial industry is growing steadily. Eight hundred men are employed in sash and door factories. In foundries 250 men are employed.