Discover 15 hidden attractions, cool sights, and unusual things to do in Lawrence (United States). Don't miss out on these must-see attractions: Watkins Museum of History, Spencer Museum of Art, and Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics. Also, be sure to include University of Kansas Natural History Museum in your itinerary.
Below, you can find the list of the most amazing places you should visit in Lawrence (Kansas).
Table of Contents
Watkins Museum of History
The Watkins Museum of History is a museum in Lawrence, Kansas that is managed by the Douglas County Historical Society. It provides programs and public events, educational resources and activities, and changing exhibits about the heritage of Douglas County.[1]
Address: 1047 Massachusetts St, 66044-2961 Lawrence
Spencer Museum of Art
Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. The Spencer Museum of Art is an art museum located on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence, Kansas. The museum houses collection that currently numbers more than 47,000 artworks and artifacts in all media. The collection spans the history of European and American art from ancient to contemporary, and includes broad holdings of East Asian art. Areas of special strength include medieval art; European and American paintings, sculpture and prints; photography; Japanese Edo period painting and prints; 20th-century Chinese painting; and KU’s ethnographic collection, which includes about 10,000 Native American, African, Latin American and Australian works.[2]
Address: 1301 Mississippi St, 66045-7500 Lawrence
Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics
University department in Lawrence, Kansas. The Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, often shortened to the Dole Institute, is a nonpartisan political institution located at the University of Kansas and founded by the former U.S. Senator from Kansas and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. Opened on July 22, 2003, Dole's 80th birthday, the institute's $11.3 million, 28,000-square-foot facility houses Dole's papers and hosts frequent political events. The institute is officially bi-partisan and has sponsored on-campus programs featuring prominent politicians of both major parties. The institute sponsors the Dole Lecture, which is given in April and features a prominent national figure addressing some aspect of contemporary politics or policy. The institute awards the annual Dole Leadership Prize each September, which includes a $25,000 cash award. The Presidential Lecture Series features the nation's leading presidential scholars, historians, journalists, and others including former Presidents, cabinet officers, and White House staff members who discuss the nation's highest office in ways that combine scholarly rigor with popular access. The archives hosted an exhibit in 2017 entitled "The League of Wives: Vietnam’s POW/MIA Allies & Advocates." In 2017, Elizabeth Dole gifted her career papers to the Dole Institute Archive and Special Collections.
The current director of the institute is Audrey Coleman. Director Emeritus is Bill Lacy, who worked as a strategist on both Sen. Dole's 1988 and 1996 presidential campaigns and his 1992 senatorial campaign. Steve McAllister, the former dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, served as interim director from October 2003 to September 2004, prior to the arrival of Lacy. Richard Norton Smith, a presidential historian, was the founding director of the Dole Institute and held the position for two years. Lacy took a temporary leave of absence from the institute to work on the presidential campaign of former Senator Fred Thompson and returned to his role as director in the spring of 2008.[3]
Address: 2350 Petefish Dr, 66045 Lawrence
University of Kansas Natural History Museum
Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. The University of Kansas Natural History Museum is part of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, a KU designated research center dedicated to the study of the life of the planet.
The museum's galleries are in Dyche Hall on the university's main campus in Lawrence, Kansas. The galleries are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays. Dyche Hall has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since July 14, 1974; it was listed for its connection with Lewis Lindsay Dyche and for its distinctive Romanesque style of architecture. The exterior is constructed of local Oread Limestone, while the window facings, columns, arches, and grotesques are carved from Cottonwood Limestone. Dyche Hall is also the site of one of only three Victory Eagle statues in Kansas, once used as markers on the Victory Highway.
Among its more than 350 separate exhibits, the museum is famous for its Panorama of North American Wildlife, part of which represented Kansas in the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, and was the impetus for the funding and construction of Dyche Hall and its Natural History Museum between 1901 and 1903. Modeled after a church in France, Dyche Hall was designed to house the Panorama in the "apse" of the entrance gallery. The museum is also renowned for Comanche, the only survivor on the U.S. Cavalry side of the Battle of the Little Bighorn; for its extensive exhibits of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, and other fossils from the Kansas Chalk; and most recently for its newest displays of mammalian skulls, the parasites of sharks and rays, and the pre-Columbian archaeology of Costa Rica.
The Biodiversity Institute, with more than 10 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, and archaeological artifacts, is one of the world's leaders in collection-based studies of systematics, evolution, phylogenetics, paleobiology, past cultures, biodiversity modeling, and in providing digital access to collection-based biodiversity data biodiversity informatics, including deploying these data for forecasting environmental phenomena. The Institute's collections, faculty-curators, staff and students are housed in six buildings across the KU campus, with the most recent expansion occurring in 2006–2007, when the Division of Entomology, along with parts of the ornithological and mammal collection, were moved to a new facility on the university's West Campus.[4]
Address: 1345 Jayhawk Blvd, 66045-7593 Lawrence
Lied Center of Kansas
Performing arts theater in Lawrence, Kansas. The Lied Center of Kansas is the main performing arts center at the University of Kansas, and one of three performing arts dedicated centers on the campus. The space serves the university as a venue for student functions, academic speakers, and School of Music performances; all free to students. In addition, the Lied Center is a community participator and engages local secondary and primary schools in experiential learning through the performing arts. Commercially, the Lied Center offers an annually updated program of artists, musicians, and theatrical acts from around world.[5]
Address: Lawrence, 1600 Stewart Drive
Clinton Lake
Reservoir in Kansas. Clinton Lake is a reservoir on the southwestern edge of Lawrence, Kansas. The lake was created by the construction of the Clinton Dam, and the 35 square miles of land and water is maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.[6]
St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church
Church in Lawrence, Kansas. Saint Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church is a historic church at 900 New York Street in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. It was built in 1910 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.
It is mainly a one-story building 43 by 90.5 feet (13.1 m × 27.6 m) in plan. It has two crenelated towers, one 34 feet (10 m) tall and the other 26 feet (7.9 m) tall.[7]
Address: 900 New York St, Lawrence
Lawrence Public Library
Public library in Lawrence, Kansas. The Lawrence Public Library is a public library located in Lawrence, Kansas. It serves the City of Lawrence, and, through its membership in the Northeast Kansas Library System, all of the citizens of the NEKLS multi-county regional library system. The library was originally established as a subscription-based library in 1854, but changed to a free public library upon the donation of a new building by Andrew Carnegie in 1904. The Carnegie library was the main headquarters of the NEKLS and the main library in Lawrence until 1972 when a new modern library replaced it.[8]
Address: 707 Vermont St, 66044-2371 Lawrence
Lawrence Arts Center
Art center in Lawrence, Kansas. The Lawrence Arts Center is located in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. It is a regional hub for visual and performing arts, contemporary exhibitions, film, and lectures. These programs are strengthened by fully developed curricula in ballet and modern dance, theater performance, and visual arts that observe National Core standards. It employs over 120 teaching artists, and hosts entrepreneurship, professional development and artist-in-residencies for artists across disciplines. It enrolls 10,000 students annually, offers a robust financial aid program and greets over 200,000 visitors and audience members each year.[9]
Address: 940 New Hampshire St, 66044-3042 Lawrence
Douglas County Courthouse
The Douglas County Courthouse in Lawrence, Kansas is a three-and-a-half-story stone building built in 1903.
It was designed by noted 19th-century architect John G. Haskell in association with another architect, Frederick C. Gunn.
It is a Richardsonian Romanesque work.
Its "dominant feature" is a six-story-tall square clock tower, with four minarets and a pyramidal roof topped by a metal finial. There is also a smaller octagonal stair tower with an eight-sided roof, topped by another finial. Windows in the stair tower alternate on the five visible sides of the tower.[10]
Address: 1100 Massachusetts Street, Lawrence
University of Kansas
Public university in Lawrence, Kansas. The University of Kansas is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and several satellite campuses, research and educational centers, medical centers, and classes across the state of Kansas. Two branch campuses are in the Kansas City metropolitan area on the Kansas side: the university's medical school and hospital in Kansas City, the Edwards Campus in Overland Park, a hospital and research center in the state's capital of Topeka, and a hospital and research center in Hays. There are also educational and research sites in Garden City, Hays, Leavenworth, Parsons, and Topeka, an agricultural education center in rural north Douglas County, and branches of the medical school in Salina and Wichita. The university is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".
Founded March 21, 1865, the university was opened in 1866, under a charter granted by the Kansas State Legislature in 1864 and legislation passed in 1863 under the State Constitution, which was adopted two years after the 1861 admission of the former Kansas Territory as the 34th state into the Union. Disputes over Kansas' establishment as a free or slaveholding state prior to admission to the union prompted an internal civil war known as "Bleeding Kansas" during the 1850s.
Enrollment at the Lawrence and Edwards campuses was 23,958 students in fall 2021; an additional 3,727 students were enrolled at the KU Medical Center (KUMC) for an enrollment of 27,685 students across the three campuses. The university overall (including KUMC) employed 4,776 faculty members (faculty, faculty administrators, graduate student employees and librarians) in fall 2021.
Kansas's athletic teams compete in NCAA Division I sports as the Jayhawks, as members of the Big 12 Conference. They field 16 varsity sports, as well as club-level sports for ice hockey, rugby, and men's volleyball.[11]
Address: 1502 Iowa St, 66045-7576 Lawrence
Plymouth Congregational Church
United church of christ in Lawrence, Kansas. Plymouth Congregational Church of Lawrence, Kansas is an affiliate of the United Church of Christ that was established in 1854, months after the Territory of Kansas was opened to settlement. The present-day church building, built in 1870, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The architect was John G. Haskell who was among the architects of the Kansas State Capitol.[12]
Address: 925 Vermont St, 66044 Lawrence
Bailey Hall
Building in Lawrence, Kansas. Bailey Hall, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, was built in 1905. The architect was John G. Haskell who was among the architects of the Kansas State Capitol. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. As of 2013, the building is home to the Communication Studies department.[13]
Address: 1450 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence
U.S. 40 and 59 Bridges
The U.S. 40 and 59 Bridges are twin multi-beam girder bridges over the Kansas River at Lawrence, Kansas. The west bridge carries two lanes of southbound traffic, connecting to Vermont Street, while the east bridge carries two lanes of northbound traffic from Massachusetts Street. Both bridges converge on the north end to become North 2nd Street. The east bridge is also the third bridge to be built at this location.[14]
Prairie Park Nature Center
Visitor center, Park, Nature and wildlife, Relax in park, Museum
Address: 2730 Harper St, 66046-5084 Lawrence