Researching the history of your neighborhood

Sept 28 is National Good Neighbor Day and the library is partnering with the City of Topeka to celebrate. One of the ways that you can commemorate the day is to know more about the history of where you live. The Topeka Room at the library has several excellent resources to help you learn more about your neighborhood. If you aren’t sure the name of your neighborhood or subdivision, you can find it on the Shawnee County Appraiser’s website. Simply enter your address here and it is listed with the rest of your property data.

Discover our vertical files of local history

A great starting point for any research project involving Topeka and Shawnee County history is our vertical files. Here you can find newspaper clippings, photographs and ephemera related to more than 2,000 subjects. We have information on 27 individual neighborhoods, as well as neighborhoods in general.

Some of the neighborhood associations in the older areas of the city produced their own newsletters. The vertical files contain newsletters from Tennessee Town, Westboro, Potwin, Elmhurst and Berkshire Villas. These not only have articles about the history of the neighborhood, but they also contain information about what the various neighborhood associations were doing to keep everyone connected.

Shawnee County Historical Society Bulletin

The Shawnee County Historical Society Bulletin was published between 1947 and 2009. It is an amazing resource for all things Shawnee County history. Each issue contains well-researched articles on a wide variety of topics.

Many of the articles are related to the history of neighborhoods in Topeka. For example, you can learn more about the various historic sites in and around Holliday Park, which is one of seven historic districts in Topeka listed on the National Register. Or you can learn about the various neighborhood grocery stores that were in Elmhurst. You can also learn more about people who lived in your neighborhood through written reminiscences of people who grew up there.

Reconnaissance Surveys and Neighborhood History Books

In the early 2000s the City of Topeka partnered with the Kansas State Historical Society to undertake several reconnaissance surveys of various neighborhoods and areas in Topeka. We have these reports for Collins Park, Old Town, Monroe, Ward-Meade, North Topeka and the original town area in the Topeka Room. 

Each of these reports contains a detailed history of the areas, as well as inventory forms on properties found within the bounds of the survey.  These reports can be great for not only looking into neighborhood histories, but also into house histories.

People have written books about the history of a few of the neighborhoods in Topeka. We have copies of the histories of Elmhurst, Oakland, West Hills and Westboro.

More history research

If your neighborhood isn’t represented in the Topeka Room, talk to our staff about how you can help us begin developing a file!