Atchison was built on the grid, a pattern of survey lines running due north and south, east and west established by the Land Survey of 1785. This was the plan upon which most American cities were overlaid . According to David Reps in Cities of the American West: a History of Frontier Urban Planning (p 429), Atchison's planners anticipated that most businesses would develop along the streets marked above in red—Second Street, along the river and Atchison street running perpendicular to the river. Instead, C street—later named Commercial street and B Street, (falling within the blue rectangle) later renamed Main Street—became the business center. These streets lay parallel to the main railroad lines—eight of which ran through Atchison by the mid-1870s.