Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Victoria, KS

Victoria is a small city in Ellis County in northwestern Kansas, about 9 miles east of Hays, covering just 0.60 square miles along the North Fork of Big Creek.

Victoria began as a Kansas Pacific Railway station in 1873 and was named in honor of Queen Victoria; the townsite was platted in 1880.

In 1873 Scottish entrepreneur George Grant led a colony of about 30 young Scottish and English nobles and 'remittance men' to Victoria, and the thoroughbred Aberdeen Angus cattle he imported — some from Queen Victoria's own herd — are credited with establishing the Angus breed in the United States.

Grant's aristocratic ranching colony mostly collapsed after his sudden death in 1878, and Grant himself is buried in front of the little stone St. George Episcopal church he had built in 1877, the first church in Ellis County.

In 1875-76 Volga German immigrants from villages near Saratov, Russia, founded the settlement of Herzog just north of the station — the first Volga German village in Ellis County — and the German-Russian settlements around it were so distinctive that Kansans nicknamed the area 'Little Russia.'

Victoria and Herzog merged and incorporated under the single name Victoria in 1913.

Victoria is world-famous for the Basilica of St. Fidelis, known as the 'Cathedral of the Plains' — a massive native-limestone Roman Catholic church built from 1908 to 1911 that stretches 220 feet long and towers over the prairie town of about 1,100 people.

William Jennings Bryan gave St. Fidelis its 'Cathedral of the Plains' nickname during a visit in 1912, and in June 2014 the church was formally dedicated as a minor basilica.

St. Fidelis Cemetery holds more than 100 traditional German iron-cross grave markers, the most of any cemetery in the Volga German settlements of Kansas.

The 2020 census counted 1,129 people in Victoria, down from 1,214 in 2010, when the census recorded 496 households in the city.