Author: Museum Staff

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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Doctors gave James Milton Judd six months to live, and what did he do? The 24-year-old Kentuckian moved to Kansas. After a few months in Wellington, he moved to Belle Plaine where he managed a flour mill. Judd had already outlived doctors’ expectations when he and L.B. Richardson headed to Stevens County in December 1885 to settle on some claims. Their plans were interrupted by a heavy snowstorm. The train was held up at Lakin, but there were no sleeping rooms available for the two men. When the duo inquired at the Commercial Hotel, the landlady had nothing to offer them but the floor of the hotel office to sleep on. A full-blown blizzard ensued, and the men’s finances were in dire shape by the time the snowstorm was over. They decided they had to embark on some kind of business. With a loan from some friends back east, the men negotiated the purchase of the smallest business house in Lakin and opened a confectionary. Eventually the two made enough money to repay their loans, and Richardson returned back east dissolving their business in 1889. Judd continued in the confectionary business on south Main and offered ice cream, groceries, school books, stationery, cigars, ice and more until 1906. Then his new store building went up at 111 N. Main where he sold shoes, clothing, hats, gloves, magazines and more.

Judd was one of the busiest men in Lakin from the time he arrived here. He managed the Postal Telegraph and Cable Company from 1890 to 1913, was elected probate judge in 1896, and then was elected county treasurer in 1899. Because he was an expert accountant, Judd was offered the cashier position at the Lakin State Bank in 1908, a title he held for over 31 years. In 1915, he closed his shoe store, and that same year he went into business selling automobiles and farm equipment. J. M. Judd Motor Company, located on the corner of Buffalo and Waterman, was also known as the Ford Garage and was the predecessor to Lakin Motor Company. Judd also served as the mayor of Lakin, was on the Lakin City Council and school board, and was very active in many organizations. He was the Sunday school superintendent at the Lakin Presbyterian Church, and in 1937, he was elected president of Group Nine of the Kansas Bankers Association. The Nov. 11, 1937 Kearny County Advocate praised Judd, “All recognize in him the true gentleman … he looks the part in his tall, distinguished bearing and he acts it in his quiet, almost shy, kindness and respect for others.”

Judd married Isabella Craver in 1892. Born in West Virginia, “Belle” moved to Garden City in 1886 then to Lakin in 1888. She was a charter member of the Presbyterian Church in Garden but later transferred her membership to the Lakin church. Isabella always had a deep interest and took an active part in church work and the missionary society. She was also involved with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Eastern Star and Royal Neighbors. She passed in 1927.

J.M. and Isabella had two children. Son Clarence was born in 1895 but died at the age of one year and 25 days. Although born healthy, the boy became severely ill when he was cutting teeth which led to deadly complications.

Soon after little Clarence’s death, Isabella became pregnant with a daughter. Edythe Lillian Judd was born in 1897 and graduated with Lakin’s Class of 1915. She attended business college in Colorado Springs and was married there in 1927 to Ralph Stees. Stees, a veteran of World War I, had been employed by Fred Harvey of Harvey House fame both before and after the war. Ralph and Edythe made their home in Lakin, both gaining employment with the Lakin State Bank. When her father passed away, Edythe acquired J.M. Judd Motor Co. and ran the business until 1947. Like her parents, Edythe was a member of the Lakin Presbyterian Church and was also involved with Eastern Star, PEO, and the Mus-Art Club. Ralph sold real estate, served as Lakin’s mayor from 1931 until 1935, was on City Council from 1937 until 1943, and belonged to the Masonic Lodge and Order of Eastern Star. He passed in 1970 and Edythe in 1973. They had no children.

Living in Kansas must have been written in the stars for James Judd as he was born on the same day that Kansas was admitted to the Union, January 29, 1861. He lived to be 78 years old, 54 years more than doctors predicted. His and Isabella’s family home still stands on the northwest corner of Buffalo and Lincoln Streets and was once described as one of the finest residences and nicest kept within the city. According to the April 9, 1908 Advocate, J.M. Judd was the first in Lakin to install a cement sidewalk in front of his residence. Although very poor when he landed in Lakin, Judd’s work ethic and business sense led him to become one of the most prominent citizens and businessmen in town.

SOURCES: Diggin’ Up Bones by Betty Barnes; archives of The Advocate and Lakin Independent; History of Kearny County Vol. 1, and Museum archives.