Fort Hays State University
public university in Hays, Kansas, United States
Fort Hays State University (FHSU) is a public university in Hays, Kansas, United States. It is the largest university in western Kansas, and the fourth largest of the six state universities governed by the Kansas Board of Regents, with a total enrollment of approximately 15,100 students.
History
Founded in 1902, FHSU began as the Western Branch of Kansas State Normal School, now known as Emporia State University. It has been known as Fort Hays Kansas Normal School and Fort Hays State Normal School. It was located on the grounds of Fort Hays, a frontier military outpost that was closed in 1889. The university served the early settlers' needs for educational facilities in the new region. The first building closer to Hays was completed in 1904, at which time the university moved to its present location. The modern campus is still located on a portion of the former military reservation from the fort. FHSU was first to be founded as an agricultural based school but was then determined to be a normal school. The normal school was supposed to be supported in part by the agricultural experiment station.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fort Hays State University” as public university in Hays, Kansas, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as public university in Hays, Kansas, United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q591426. VIAF identifies the subject as 126760598. The Library of Congress control number is n82123556. Authority coordinates are 38.873, -99.343. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1889 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fort Hays State University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.