Why are there two cities called Kansas City?
There is a city called Kansas City located in the state of Kansas, as one might expect. There is, however, another Kansas City, in the state of Missouri, and it is much bigger than the one in Kansas—in fact, it is the largest city in Missouri. The two cities are separated only by the state border. Why do two different, mutually adjacent cities have the same name?
A tale of two states
The states of Missouri and Kansas were both created out of the enormous area known as the Louisiana Territory, land that the United States had purchased from France in 1803. Missouri became a state in 1821. The original Kansas City—the one in Missouri—was officially incorporated in 1853 under the name City of Kansas, reflecting its location on a waterway already known as the Kansas River, after the local Kansa people (also known as the Kaw Nation). In 1861 Kansas became a state, and in 1889 the City of Kansas, over in Missouri, changed its name to Kansas City.
On the Kansas side, the amalgamation of several settlements in Wyandotte county precipitated the formation of a unified municipality. In 1886 this conglomeration of settlements was officially named Kansas City. It is not entirely clear why local officials chose to give it the same name as the larger and older city across the border. There are at least two theories. According to the first, it was an attempt to benefit by association with the Missouri city’s wealth and population growth. According to the second, jealousy played a part: The Kansans resented the fact that (in their view) the Missourians had unfairly appropriated the name of their state.
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The contemporary situation
Steady population growth and suburbanization mean that the two Kansas Citys are both now part of a highly developed urban metropolitan region. As of 2024 approximately 2.25 million people lived in the area. A common local way to distinguish the two cities is to refer to the one in Kansas as “KCK” and the one in Missouri as “KCMO.”
Kansas City is not the only example of identically named cross-border twin cities in North America, but its metro area is by far the biggest. Other examples include Texarkana (split between Texas and Arkansas) and Bristol (one in Tennessee and one in Virginia). There are also international examples: Niagara Falls (one on the U.S. side of the falls and one on the Canadian side), Sault Sainte Marie (another U.S.-Canada pairing), and Nogales (one in the United States and one across the border in Mexico).