Hiawatha, Kansas Hiawatha, Kansas Hiawatha (Ioway: "Hári Wáta" pronounced ) is the largest city and county seat of Brown County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,172. Hiawatha was founded in 1857, making it one of the oldest towns in the state. John M. Coe, John P. Wheller, and Thomas J. Drummond were instrumental in organizing the city, and the site was staked out February 17, 1857. B.L. Rider reportedly was responsible for naming Hiawatha, taking the young Indian's name from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Song of Hiawatha". Hiawatha became the Brown County Seat in
The Song of Hiawatha the time, and the mutilated score was not revised and recorded until 2009. The other instance was the poem's connection with Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" (1893). In an article published in the "New York Herald" on December 15, 1893, he said that the second movement of his work was a "sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera ... which will be based upon Longfellow's "Hiawatha"" (with which he was familiar in Czech translation), and that the third movement scherzo was "suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where