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Christopher Boan is a lead writer at BetKansas.com specializing in covering state issues. He covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years.
What Big Kansas Cities Are Most Forgotten?
With a Census population of just under 3 million people, it’s easy to understand how residents of the Sunflower State could forget about certain cities in Kansas each year, though some of the locales that locals blanked on this year were quite the surprise.
Topping the list of forgotten cities in Kansas in 2025 was Johnson County’s Lenexa, which scored the lowest of any metropolitan area in the state in a recent survey, with only 26.9% of respondents correctly remembering that the home of 57,434 people, ranking ahead of other forgotten places like Shawnee, Salina and Olathe statewide.
National Kansas Day is coming up on January 29, 2025. To celebrate this momentous occasion, BetKansas.com took a brief beat from Kansas sports betting and wondered which big Kansas cities tend to be forgotten the most. Using a quiz on Sporacle.com, we found the top 10 most forgotten populous cities in Kansas. We took the top 10 biggest cities and ranked them based on the percentage of quiz takers who remembered the city.
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Top 10 Most Forgotten Populous Kansas Cities
Rank | City | % Guessed Correctly |
1 | Lenexa | 26.9% |
2 | Shawnee | 29.8% |
3 | Salina | 38.2% |
4 | Olathe | 45.2% |
5 | Overland Park | 55.0% |
6 | Manhattan | 56.4% |
7 | Lawrence | 61.1% |
8 | Wichita | 80.1% |
9 | Topeka | 89.9% |
10 | Kansas City | 95.6% |
Which Kansas City Was The Most Forgotten This Year?
While Lenexa was Kansas’ lowest scoring city when it came to survey responses, at 26.9%, other places in the Sunflower State that were right up there were Shawnee (29.8%), Salina (38.2%), Olathe (45.2%) and Overland Park (55.0%).
Rounding out the top 10 in Kansas for the year were the state’s two main college towns, in Manhattan (56.4%) and Lawrence (61.1%), which finished sixth and seventh overall, while Wichita (80.1%), Topeka (89.9%) and Kansas City (95.6%) finished off the list for 2025.
At the end of the day, no Kansas city scored as lowly as Lenexa, though, with the Kansas City suburb that was incorporated in 1907 finishing with the fewest number of correct guesses on the most recent Sporacle.com survey of cities in the state.
Also of interest: What Are Kansas’ Top 5 Cheese Products?
USA Today photo by Evert Nelson.
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