Towanda and its township lie in the valley of the Whitewater River and take their name from the Osage term for "many waters." The first settler was C.L. Chandler, a returning '49er from the California gold fields, who built his cabin there in 1858. Towanda Township was one of the first four townships that made up Butler County, the largest in Kansas. In 1870, Rev. Isaac Mooney, a frontier preacher and community builder, platted ten acres for a townsite, and the village quickly became a trade center on the Emporia-Wichita wagon road and a division point for two stage lines. Towanda gained wide fame in 1917, when giant oil gushers were drilled on rocky Shumway land at the town's eastern edge by Gypsy Oil Company and the Trapshooters group. Nearby El Dorado, the county seat to the east, had long been tied to the Flint Hills cattle country and for more than 50 years served as the focal point of vast petroleum development in south-central Kansas, with major oil refineries operated by Skelly Oil Company and American Petrofina and Butler County Community Junior College as a leading cultural institution.