The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗Frontenac was established as a coal mining town in 1886 in the Cherokee-Crawford Coal Fields in the western Ozark Plateau.
On the night of November 9, 1888, Frontenac suffered the worst mining disaster in Kansas history, when a coal dust explosion killed 44 miners.
During the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century the town was populated primarily by immigrant families from eastern and southeastern Europe, predominantly Sicilian, Italian, and Slavic people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its maximum population neared 4,000. It housed various ethnic lodges and drinking parlors despite the state's increasingly severe ban on the distribution, sale, and manufacture of alcoholic beverages.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Start Frontenac’s collection
The first neighbors to add old photos shape how Frontenac’s history is told.
0 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Famous people from Frontenac
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Frontenac, decade by decade
2000
Nothing in Frontenac is on the National Register yet
That’s true of most small towns. It doesn’t mean Frontenac has no history, only that no one has written up a nomination. The closest listed place is Hotel Stilwell in Pittsburg, 3.1 miles away.
Frontenac and the nearest listed places
How a place gets listed
Then & now
When neighbors add old photos, retakes from the same spot appear here side by side.
Stories next door
nearby towns’ historyFrom Wikimedia Commons (2). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.