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 his "Hiawatha" (c.1874) a visionary statement superimposed on the fading light of the sky. Toward the end of the 19th century, artists deliberately emphasized the epic qualities of the poem, as in William de Leftwich Dodge's "Death of Minnehaha" (1885). Frederic Remington demonstrated a similar quality in his series of 22 grisailles painted in oil for the 1890 deluxe photogravure edition of "The Song of Hiawatha." One of the editions is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dora Wheeler's "Minnehaha listening to the waterfall" (1884) design for a needle-woven tapestry, made by the Associated Artists for the Cornelius Vanderbilt