News, Events & County History

Sugar beets were first introduced as an experiment in the late 1800s. When samples by local farmers J.W. Longstreth and H.C. Nichols were sent to the Kansas State Agricultural College in 1898 for analysis and showed with high percentages of sugar, the Lakin Investigator predicted the sugar beet industry would have a healthy future in Southwest Kansas. The Investigator wasn’t wrong.

The state of Kansas put a bounty of $1 a ton on sugar beets in 1901. At that time, the crop was paying from $45 to $75 an acre, and the state’s bounty paid the freight to the refinery in Rocky Ford, Colorado. The Advocate reported that Finney, Hamilton and Kearny County had contracted for 700 acres of sugar beets, and the beets grown that year in the Deerfield neighborhood averaged a hearty nine tons to the acre. “For the first year’s work in this special crop, our farmers can congratulate themselves that they have fully demonstrated that they can grow this valuable, money making crop to advantage,” declared the Advocate.

The American Sugar Beet Company of Rocky Ford contracted with area farmers for 500 acres of beets the following year, shipping the seed to Lakin’s depot in early spring 1902 at a cost of 10¢ per pound. The company also provided implements to plant and cultivate the crop which were paid for from the first beets harvested in November. Deerfield produced 2,155.5 tons or 1057 wagonloads, and Lakin farmers yielded a 1,295 ton-crop or 772 wagon loads. A total of 150 rail cars full of Kearny County beets were shipped to Rocky Ford. Climatic conditions, the rich Arkansas Valley soil, and established irrigation ditches made Kearny County a perfect spot for growing the crop, and talk had already begun about the need for a reservoir to store the ditch water until it was needed to irrigate the beet crops.

Local businessmen, farmers and citizens organized the Lakin Industrial Club in December of 1902 to further advance the development of the sugar beet industry “with a view of seeing a factory at this place.” Kearny County was the heart of the new industry for the next few years, but then a group of Colorado investors and Garden City businessmen organized the United States Sugar and Land Company in 1905, their sights set on developing the Garden City area. The hopes of a refinery being built in Kearny County were crushed when plans were announced to build in Garden City. Completed in November of 1906, 66,000 tons of beets were processed at the factory that first year.

U.S. Sugar and Land also bought the Great Eastern Ditch and 12,000 acres of land which included the town of Deerfield and built several houses for their officials in the Deerfield area. For the next three to four years, Deerfield experienced great growth as more than 200 construction workers were employed for the company’s projects which included the construction of Lake McKinney and an electric plant to furnish power for the company’s irrigation wells to supplement the reservoir water. Under the U.S. Reclamation project, the government also built a power house near Deerfield which was eventually taken over by the sugar company along with a booster station and irrigation wells. In 1910, the Syracuse Journal reported that Deerfield “has a future before it that can hardly be beaten, the little town is steadily growing, and in time it will make one of the most progressive sites along the Santa Fe.”

In 1914, US Sugar and Land re-organized as Garden City Sugar And Land Company; then, in February 1920, the company became Garden City Company. That same year a block of 25,000 acres of company-owned land west of Garden City was turned over to tenant farmers. Hundreds of four-room houses were built on the land. In 1930, the company name was again changed and still remains today as The Garden City Company. By 1949, the corporation owned a stretch of land from Coolidge to Great Bend.

Obtaining a sufficient supply of beets for the factory became difficult after World War II so beets were introduced in the Ulysses and Scott City areas. This kept the factory going, but the extra freight to ship beets to the factory caused a heavy burden. Factory machinery had also become outdated. To keep profitable, the factory needed to be enlarged and modernized, but that was seen as an expensive and risky investment. The factory was shut down after the 1955 beet campaign and sold to the Holly Sugar Company which had no intention of ever operating the Garden City plant.

By 1972, only one Arkansas Valley sugar beet processing plant remained in operation, the American Crystal Sugar Company of Denver’s plant at Rocky Ford. The Garden City Company continued to raise sugar beets until 1974, shipping them to Rocky Ford by rail. That year, the mill closed its doors but a cooperative of sugar beet producers known as Colo-Kan Sugar Co. leased the mill from American Crystal Sugar. Decreased acreage and low prices for beets made the crop uneconomical to produce, and after four successive years of loss, Colo-Kan Sugar Co. terminated its lease following the 1978 harvest. The mill was permanently closed, effectively bringing an end to the once thriving sugar beet industry in Southwest Kansas.

SOURCES: A Brief History of “The Garden City Company” & “Sugar Factory” by W. F. Stoeckly; “The Sugar Beet Industry in Kansas” by Tiburgio J. Berber; History of Kearny County Vols. I & II; archives of Rocky Ford Tribune, The Syracuse Journal, Garden City Herald, The Evening Telegram, Garden City Telegram, Hutchinson News, Iola Register, Lakin Investigator, Advocate and Lakin Independent; and Museum archives.

How the community of Deerfield was named is a mystery. While some stories attributed the name to a herd of deer that grazed the area, others gave the credit to a Santa Fe Railroad official, and still others claimed the town was named for a community of the same name in Massachusetts. Whatever the case may be, Deerfield’s economy has always relied on agriculture.

Alva Cleveland and his sons Henry and George came to the area in 1878, homesteading the NW ¼ Sec. of 14-24-35. They have the distinction of breaking out the first farmland in Kearny County. Henry became a highly successful farmer, raised horses and cattle, and laid claim to the first chicken and turkey ranch in the county. Apparently, his father and brother went back to Wisconsin, but then Alva joined him here permanently in 1882 along with Henry’s sister, Mary Caswell, and niece, Dolly Caswell.

Brothers William P. and Dayton Loucks came to the Deerfield area in 1879, homesteading Sec. 2-24-35. Dayton stayed at Deerfield and continued to farm his land. William, who had served in the Union Army, moved to Lakin with his wife and two sons when the six months of residence required to establish ownership of the claim was up. He later deeded five acres to Deerfield Township for Deerfield’s cemetery.

Fred Harvey of the Santa Fe Harvey House chain and William Strong, soon-to-be president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, established the XY cattle ranch about 1879 with 10,000 head of cattle. The headquarters were on the north side of the river at Deerfield, but the range was south of the river extending into the Oklahoma Panhandle and Texas. During round-ups, cattle would be rounded up from as far east as Cimarron to the Hartland area. Strong sold his share to Harvey in 1882, and the XY reportedly had 40,000 cattle on the range by 1883. Several men were employed to work the ranch including Samuel Corbett who came to Deerfield in June of 1881. Corbett also started to build up his own ranch, accumulating cattle and running them with the XY’s.

Around 1881, the George Dice family moved from Harvey County and made their home in the newly built railroad section house when George was made section foreman. In March of 1882, the post office was established at the section house, and Belle Dice, George’s wife, was appointed Deerfield’s first postmaster.

The country in and around Deerfield and north to the Wichita-Kearny County line rapidly filled up with homesteaders. Praises for the up-and-coming community were sung in a December 1884 Garden City Sentinel, “Deerfield a small village on the Santa Fe Road fourteen miles west of Garden City, is located in the midst of a fine agricultural district on the North, with magnificent grazing pastures on the South, upon which thousands of cattle are held. Deerfield promises to be a town of considerable importance, Once the country is settled, and her farming resources developed; around her are gathered already men of enterprise who will push her to the front.”

On October 27, 1885, a group of men including Corbett, Dice, W.P. Spray, A.R. Jessup, E.N. Keep, and Frederick McCain filed to locate Deerfield as a village on Sec. 11-24-35. The only house inside the town limits at that time was the section house, but the men believed that Deerfield would eventually rival Lakin.

In March of 1886, McCain established a small store in Deerfield on the ground floor of a story-and-a-half house he built about 100 feet north of the railroad track. The upper story was used for living quarters, and the post office was moved there in November 1886 when McCain was appointed postmaster. McCain also built a small warehouse and coal shed along the spur of the railroad.

In August of 1886, the foundation was put down for Deerfield’s first actual store building which housed the Spray & Jessup Mercantile Co. By December, the Advocate reported an addition being made to this store owing to increasing trade. Deerfield’s first frame school building was also being built at this time.  Students began attending in October, but the building was not fully completed and dedicated until February of 1887. The school was then used for Methodist church services and Sunday school.

Township officers called for an election on November 26, 1886 to vote bonds to build a bridge over the Arkansas River for the business and convenience of the people who lived south of the river. The measure passed, and the bridge was completed the following June by Arthur Stayton of Hartland. Previous to the building of the bridge, a man by the name of McFerren was paid to ferry people across the river. By mid-July of 1887, church and Sunday school attendance reportedly doubled due to the new bridge being built.

In an effort to gain votes in the county seat election and help build up the communities of Chantilly and Deerfield, Chantilly founder Carolina Pierce proposed opening a road between the two communities in 1887 for the stage, freight wagons and other travel. In August of 1887, the Sentinel reported that the stagecoach was carrying many passengers on the diagonal road to Chantilly, and Deerfield was booming in a quiet, sure way. Although the stage line operated nearly every day through most of 1887 and 1888, when Chantilly faded away so did the line.

On September 1, 1888, a petition was signed by the people of Deerfield and surrounding vicinity asking that a depot be located there. After a tour of investigation, the railroad commissioner reported very favorably for the community, stating that the A.T. & S.F. could acquire more business owing to the large amount of crops that could be grown in the area due to irrigation. Still, the people of Deerfield had to wait. The Index reported that Deerfield’s depot was not completed until July of 1891, and Miss Ada Oliver was installed as agent.

There was little change as to population or people in the Deerfield area during the 1890s. Most irrigation farmers were raising immense vine crops such as watermelon, squash, muskmelon, pumpkin and cucumber for seed. In the mornings during melon season, the road would be lined with as many as 25 to 50 wagons loaded with barrels of melon on their way to the Arkansas River to wash seeds. A considerable amount of alfalfa, sorghum and some wheat and corn were also raised. Although rural Deerfield was considerably populated, the village of Deerfield had not changed much by 1900, but things were about to change in a big way with the introduction of sugar beets to the area.

SOURCES: Most of this information was provided by the late Foster Eskelund for History of Kearny County Vols. I and II; A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans Vol. IV by William E. Connelley; Annual reports of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; archives of The Advocate, Lakin Independent, Lakin Index, Topeka Daily Capital, Newton Kansan, Garden City Herald, Garden City Irrigator, and Garden City Sentinel; Ancestry.com; Museum archives.

Our first “Night at the Museum” was a success! Thank you to everyone who came out October 17 and joined us for an evening of history and fun! For those who didn’t make it, never fear! We plan to come back bigger and better next year! A huge shout-out to all our storytellers and helpers …. couldn’t have done it without you!

The history of the house on the southwest corner of Buffalo and Washington in Lakin harkens back to the heydays of Hartland and one of Kearny County’s earliest businessmen. Many locals associate the 209 N. Buffalo location with Leon and Leona Davis who operated Davis Funeral Home out of their residence for more than 30 years, but it was another undertaker who owned the property first.

Corporal Edmond Strong Snow, a Civil War veteran, grew up on his father’s farm in Ashtabula County, Ohio and finished his education in the Grand River Institute at Austinburg, OH. Snow enlisted at the age of 19 in February of 1863 with Company C of the 60th Ohio Infantry. Two months later, Snow found himself under fire at the bloody Battle of the Wilderness, the first stage of a major Union offensive toward the Confederate capital of Richmond. Snow’s regiment bore the brunt of much of the hard fighting that followed in Virginia until the close of the Civil War. While he personally escaped all enemy bullets, Snow was wounded when a tree fell on him.

After the war, he went to Dearborn, Michigan with the intention to study medicine alongside his uncle, but ridding his mind of the scenes of military life was impossible for Snow. He abandoned his studies and took on a variety of jobs including starting his own grocery business at Holly, Michigan. Late in the fall of 1868, he was broke and looking for a job when he spotted a “help wanted” sign in Chicago for the Union Pacific Railroad which was then in the process of constructing across the great West. He hired on to the grading outfit working all the way to Wasatch, Utah which was the end of the line. Soon after arriving there, he transferred his services to the car repair shops of the company. E.S. served as a switchman and then as a railway brakeman before becoming a freight conductor. For 10 years, Snow was a passenger conductor from Cheyenne, WY west over the different divisions but chiefly between Laramie and Green River. He was in Wyoming, Utah and Idaho altogether for 18 years.

Ed Snow moved in November 1885 to Hartland where he established a lumber yard and general merchandise business, became partner in a livery, and erected a number of buildings. The highly respected businessman was elected Hartland’s first mayor, served as a director for the Bank of Hartland and organized the Knights of Pythias there. He also started branch lumber yards at Surprise and Cincinnati, Grant County towns with fates similar to Hartland’s. While many left Hartland immediately after Lakin secured the county seat, Snow remained there but eking out a living in a dying town was difficult.

News broke in May 1895 that Snow had purchased a lot on north Main in Lakin and was moving his buildings and stock of general merchandise here from Hartland. He was open for business by the end of summer. Some of Snow’s buildings were combined to make his residence at the Buffalo and Washington location. Snow purchased the Kearny County Advocate in 1902 and dabbled for a short time in the newspaper business. In February of 1907 came the announcement that he was having an opera house erected on the southeast corner of Main and Lincoln. The concrete, fire-proof 50×100 building was to be two stories high with the top story housing Snow’s Opera House, also known as the Lakin Opera House or Snow’s Theatre. The theatre had a seating capacity of 250 and included a 14×28 stage, dressing rooms and scenery. Dances, lodge and religious meetings, graduation exercises, and festivals were held there, and local as well as traveling entertainment performed for crowds of theatre-goers. Mr. Snow’s furniture, hardware and undertaking business occupied the first floor.

His wife of 46 years, Margaret Collins Snow, passed in 1922. Edmond Snow retired the following year and traveled as much as he could until ill health prevented him from doing so. Kearny County sheriff-elect Roy Puyear and his wife moved in with Snow at his home on Buffalo Street in 1924, and Snow died in 1926. The Snows had no children, but their former home and the building which housed Snow’s Theatre still stand in Lakin. The building was and is still considered one of the best in town. According to Edmond Snow’s obituary, the structure at 122 N. Main stood as a memorial to his life and activities in Lakin. The building has housed The Agency since 1982. In recent years, the top story was renovated and an addition was built to the south to serve as the residence of The Agency’s owner, Doug Geubelle and his wife, Stacey.

SOURCES: Diggin’ Up Bones by Betty Barnes; A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley; History of Kearny County Vol. I; archives of The Hartland Times, Advocate and Lakin Independent; and Museum archives.

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