24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near North Anthony Anthony, KS

Anthony is the county seat and largest city of Harper County in south-central Kansas, just a few miles north of the Oklahoma state line.

Anthony was founded on April 6, 1878, when a town company organized in Wichita laid out a 320-acre townsite near the center of Harper County.

The city was named for George T. Anthony, the seventh governor of Kansas, who was in office at the time and had been given authority to locate the county seat.

In the 1879 county seat election, Anthony beat Harper City even though 2,960 ballots were cast in a county with only about 800 legal voters, a notorious episode of frontier ballot stuffing.

Anthony was incorporated in 1879 and grew up at the crossing of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad and the Missouri Pacific Railway.

The 2020 census counted 2,108 people in 922 households in Anthony, down from a peak population of 2,947 in 1930.

The Harper County Courthouse in Anthony, completed in 1908 and designed by architect George Washburn, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A vein of fine salt some 400 feet thick lies beneath Anthony, and a salt plant there was historically reported to turn out about 50,000 barrels of salt a year.

Anthony showed its progressive streak early, adopting a commission form of city government in February 1909, and it boasted municipally owned waterworks and electric lighting plants.

The city's early growth was knocked back when the Oklahoma Land Rush of April 22, 1889, drew away roughly half of Anthony's population almost overnight.