Last updated: October 10, 2026
Place
Iowa, Sac, and Fox Mission
NPS Photo
Quick Facts
Location:
1713 Elgin Rd, Highland, KS GPS 39.836970 -95.229515 (about 1.5 mi east of Highland)
Significance:
The Iowa, Sak, and Fox mission operated as a school, training farm, school, and orphanage between 1845 and 1866. It stood beside the California Trail and was often noted in emigrant diaries.
Designation:
Historic site on the California National Historic Trail.
MANAGED BY:
Amenities
2 listed
Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Parking - Auto
When the federal government relocated the Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes from their Missouri homelands to a reservation in northeastern Kansas in 1837, a Presbyterian couple established a mission there. The mission sought to discourage tribal ways while providing a basic education and teaching Native children Christianity, industrial and homemaking skills, and farming.
In 1845, the original log schoolhouse was replaced by a 3-story, 107-foot-long brick-and-limestone building funded by the Iowa Tribe, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Presbyterian Mission Society. Emigrants traveling west along the California Trail from St. Joseph, Missouri, often remarked on the mission in their journals.
John Edwin Banks stopped on a Sunday morning in May 1849 to hear a Sunday sermon and “was much pleased to hear the Indian children sing.” It was, he wrote, “a scene I shall always remember with much pleasure.” Joseph Warren Wood, also crossing the trail that season, noted that his party “passed a missionary establishment, where there was fields cultivated & I saw some of the most beautiful wheat I ever saw….” A third Forty-niner, Gordon C. Cone, described the building as “a fine structure three stories high and built of brick.” Cone reported that the school at that time served some 30 students.
In 1854, the government reduced the size of the reservations and opened the newly acquired lands to white settlement. As the reservation boundaries shifted, the mission became too far away for the children to walk to school, and it soon closed for lack of students. The building next housed the Indian Orphanage Institute, which closed in 1866. A couple years later, new owners demolished about 60 percent of the building and used what remained as a barn.
The surviving structure, now only 46 feet long, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2021, after decades of management by the Kansas Historical Society, the state returned the mission building and 10 acres of surrounding land to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. Today, the tribe operates the site as the Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum. Nearby, a 30-yard wagon swale runs east of the mission building.
The Iowa, Sac, & Fox Mission site lies about 1.5 miles east of Highland, Kansas. The entrance is on the west side of Elgin Rd, north of its intersection with 240th Rd.
Site Information
Location (1713 Elgin Rd, Highland, KS GPS 39.836970 -95.229515 (about 1.5 mi east of Highland)