Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Zeandale, KS

Zeandale is a census-designated place in Riley County, Kansas, located approximately 6.8 miles east of Manhattan at the intersection of Tabor Valley Road and the K-18 highway, which is also called Zeandale Road there.

Zeandale was named by J. H. Pillsbury, who settled the township in 1855, and its name is said to combine the Greek word zea, meaning corn, with the English word dale — a name often rendered as Corn Valley.

Settlement in the area began in 1854 with help from the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and Zeandale gained a post office on June 29, 1857, which operated, with an interruption from 1868 to 1884, until it closed for good on December 31, 1944.

Zeandale's first schoolhouse, built in 1862, was made of hewn logs in a hexagonal shape, after a private school taught in Mrs. Pillsbury's home in 1858 and a public school held on Abner Allen's farm in 1859, and an old brick school in town later served as a community center.

Zeandale is home to Zeandale Community Church, established in 1896 as a Christian Church associated with the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement and re-established in the 1950s as a non-denominational community church, and the community's rural volunteer fire department got a new building in 2002.

The town grew slowly despite the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad once running through it — it had only 26 residents in 1880 and about 75 people in 1910 — and Legends of Kansas describes it today as a ghost town near the Kansas River whose railroad tracks are gone.

The 2020 census counted 62 people in 30 households in Zeandale, spread over about 1.4 square miles at a density of 45.5 people per square mile, with a median age of 41.0 years.

Zeandale is part of the Manhattan Metropolitan Statistical Area, and it nearly grew by a factor of four in 2005 when a Manhattan developer promoted land around it for the growing Manhattan market, but Riley County zoning regulations blocked the subdivision and any incorporation.

The community is served by Wamego USD 320 public school district, headquartered in Wamego, and Zeandale Township — transferred from Wabaunsee County to Riley County in 1871 and crossed by the Kansas River — counted 360 people in the 2020 census.