Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Knob Noster, MO

Knob Noster is a city in Johnson County, Missouri, located on U.S. Route 50 about nine miles east of Warrensburg and roughly 60 miles east of Kansas City.

The town was laid out in 1856 by William A. Wortham and incorporated by an act of the legislature on December 14, 1859, though its post office dates back to 1846.

Knob Noster's unusual name comes from the prominent knobs — isolated mounds rising from the prairie near town — and surveyor David Wolfe Eaton derived the second half from Latin, reading the whole name as 'Our Knobs.'

The town moved to its present site when the Pacific Railroad was built through the area.

Knob Noster had 2,782 residents at the 2020 census, living in 1,197 households.

Thanks to its military population, Knob Noster is strikingly young — the median age at the 2020 census was just 28.2 years.

The arrival of the air base transformed Knob Noster: its population leapt from 585 in 1950 to 2,292 in 1960, an increase of nearly 292 percent in a single decade.

Whiteman Air Force Base lies about a mile south of Knob Noster and is the only operational base for the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, flown by the 509th Bomb Wing.

The base began in 1942 as the Sedalia Glider Base for training glider pilots and was renamed in 1955 for Second Lieutenant George A. Whiteman, a Sedalia native who was one of the first American airmen killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Knob Noster State Park, southwest of town along Missouri Route 23, was developed in the 1930s with help from the National Park Service and the Works Progress Administration and officially became a state park in 1947.