Biohazard Cleanup Near South Beloit Beloit, KS

Beloit is the county seat and largest city of Mitchell County in north-central Kansas, sitting on the Solomon River northeast of the county's center.

Beloit was first settled in 1868 by Aaron A. Bell, who came to develop water power on the Solomon River, and the settlement was originally known as Willow Springs.

The town took the name Beloit after Beloit, Wisconsin, the hometown of early settler Timothy Hersey, who bought part of Bell's claim and built a mill dam on the river.

Beloit was platted on March 26, 1872, incorporated as a city that same year, and proclaimed a city of the second class by Governor John P. St. John in 1879.

The 2020 census counted 3,404 people in Beloit, down from 3,835 residents in 1,647 households in the 2010 census.

Beloit is home to Fort Hays Tech North Central, founded in 1964 as the North Central Kansas Area Vocational-Technical School, a public technical college governed under the Kansas Board of Regents.

Before becoming a technical college campus, the Beloit school grounds served for decades as the Kansas Industrial School for Girls, a state institution that operated there until 2009.

The Mitchell County Courthouse in Beloit, a Richardsonian Romanesque building of native post-rock limestone designed by J.C. Holland and built in 1901-1902, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

St. John's Catholic Church in Beloit, completed in 1904 in the form of a Latin cross and built around the congregation's earlier church, was said at the time of its completion to be the largest church west of the Mississippi River.

Local legend holds that Native Americans advised Bell to site the town at a particular bend of the Solomon River for protection from tornadoes, and downtown Beloit has been struck by a tornado only once, in November 1922.