For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America was inhabited by nomadic Native Americans.

In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2.83 cents per acre.

Senator from South Carolina, Andrew Butler (1796-1857), who was one of the authors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and a strong advocate of Kansas becoming a slave state.

[7] The original branch line connected Florence, Burns, De Graff, El Dorado, Augusta, Douglass, Rock, Akron, Winfield, Arkansas City.

In 1887, the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway built a branch line north–south from Herington to Caldwell.

[8] This branch line connected Herington, Lost Springs, Lincolnville, Antelope, Marion, Aulne, Peabody, Elbing, Whitewater, Furley, Kechi, Wichita, Peck, Corbin, Wellington, Caldwell.

In 2010, the Keystone-Cushing Pipeline (Phase II) was constructed north to south through Butler County (near Potwin, Towanda, Augusta, Douglass), with much controversy over tax exemption and environmental concerns (if a leak ever occurs).

[11] In an unusual technical glitch, a farmstead about 4 miles northeast of Potwin became the default site of 600 million IP addresses (due to their lack of fine granularity) when the Massachusetts-based digital mapping company MaxMind changed the putative geographic center of the contiguous United States from 39.8333333,-98.585522 to 38.0000,-97.0000.

[15] Sources: National Atlas,[16] U.S. Census Bureau[17] Butler County is part of the Wichita, KS Metropolitan Statistical Area.

[26] † means a community is designated a Census-Designated Place (CDP) by the United States Census Bureau.

The cities of Augusta and El Dorado are considered governmentally independent and are excluded from the census figures for the townships.