The Big Well

In the 1880s, the young town of Greensburg needed a reliable water supply for its households and for the steam locomotives passing through. Workers dug the Big Well entirely by hand, hauling out earth bucket by bucket to create a shaft more than a hundred feet deep and wide enough to feel like a room, lined with native stone. For its time and place it was a remarkable undertaking.

The well served the town for decades before modern water systems made it obsolete. Rather than fill it in, Greensburg turned it into an attraction, and generations of travelers have climbed down its stairway to stand at the bottom and look up at the ring of daylight far overhead. It became the town's proud claim to fame, drawing visitors off the highway to a place otherwise easy to pass by.

On a May night in 2007, a massive tornado struck Greensburg head-on, leveling most of the town in minutes. The devastation was near total, and the community faced a wrenching choice about whether and how to rebuild. Greensburg decided to rebuild, and to do so with an eye toward the future, adopting green building standards and renewable energy in an effort to become one of the most sustainable small towns in the country.

The Big Well survived the storm, and its museum was rebuilt as part of the town's renewal, an energy-efficient structure that now interprets both the well and the tornado story. Visiting Greensburg today means seeing a place that turned catastrophe into a chance to lead, with wind power, efficient buildings, and a renewed sense of purpose visible around town.

The museum's other treasure is a famous meteorite long associated with Greensburg. A large stony-iron space rock found in the region became one of the best-known meteorites in the world, prized by collectors and scientists for its beauty and composition, and a specimen has long been a highlight of the town's collection.

Together the well, the meteorite, and the town's rebuilding story give the museum an unusually rich range, spanning frontier engineering, the cosmos, and the resilience of a small community. It is a lot of story packed into one modest Kansas town.

Greensburg lies at the eastern edge of the Red Hills, or Gypsum Hills, a region of red-rock buttes and mesas in south central Kansas that surprises visitors expecting only flat plains. It is ranch and farm country, quiet and open, with big skies and the distinctive rusty landforms nearby.

The wider region was long the range of Plains nations, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples, who followed the bison across these grasslands. That deep history, along with the frontier, disaster, and renewal stories layered into Greensburg, makes the town a compact and moving stop for travelers crossing south central Kansas.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.