A town by any other name
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
“Flush?” I asked. “What kind of name is that for a town?”
Dave and I saw the highway sign a few miles east of Manhattan while driving to a holiday dinner.
Because we had already dawdled along the way, we skipped the seven mile drive to Flush.
My sister-in-law, Nancy, is a native of Pottawatomie County and I asked her about Flush when we arrived for dinner.
“Yeah, that’s the name of the place,” she said, adding that the founder was named Floersch. The Post Office Department apparently had trouble with the spelling, so they called it Flush.
There’s not much left there, Nancy said, besides a Catholic church, its rectory and cemetery.
When I returned home, I looked up Flush in the book “Kansas Post Offices” by Robert Baughman. Flush maintained a post office from 1899 to 1927. Its first appointee was Henry J. Floersch.
This past week I’ve spent a little time with that post office book. It lists over 4,000 names for post offices that were established between 1828 and 1961. That doesn’t mean there were 4,000 communities; many towns had more than one name in their histories.
In my last column, I mentioned that 52 post offices existed in Lyon County during those years. But the 52 included name changes; there were only 46 towns.
Statewide, Olpe would surely win the identity-crisis prize.
The community began as Bitlertown on Jan. 20, 1880. Then it became Olpe. There must have been a tug-of- war over names because it flip-flopped between Bitlertown and Olpe five times between 1880 and 1887.
Towns in the 1800s didn’t have much of a shelf life. People were transient and many towns lasted only a few years. Communities often dissolved if the railroad bypassed them.
Among those post offices of days gone by was Cairo in Pratt County. Douglas County had Calcutta. For five years, Jerusalem was a post office in Johnson County, closing in 1900.
You could visit Chicago in Sheridan County. Sedgwick County once had El Paso (now Derby) and Waco (previously called Cowskin). And who knew that Valley Forge was in Smith County?
Bagdad and Key West were Coffey County towns. You’ll still find Peru in Chautauqua County and Havana in Montgomery County.
Coffey County was also home to Eclipse and Hardpan. Kingman County had a Butterfly and there was a Stranger in Leavenworth County.
In the past few years, Dave and I have visited several shadowy towns. While driving around them, we’ve joked about the movie “Deliverance.” Some places just feel like trouble -- you sense that there’s probably a methamphetamine lab in an abandoned house and a gun pointing at you through a broken window.
So I smiled when I learned that there once was a town called Deliverance.
The word deliverance usually has positive connotations and this long-gone Osborne County town had previously been called Pleasant Plain.
Dickinson County had a Haphazard, the community of Example was set in Haskell County, and in 1900, if you were looking for Success, Russell County would’ve been the place to go.
At one time, Decatur County had a Saint John — but its name changed to Hooker.
Kansas has had towns called Sun (now Sun City), Sunbeam, and Sunday. There were a couple of Sunsets, one Sunshine and two short-lived Sunflowers. The state had a Windhorst and a Zephyr.
“Kansas Post Offices” is simply a book of lists: names, dates and locations. But those lists took my imagination down dusty trails and let it wander through some of those ghost towns with the colorful names.”
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
F Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
trucann (anonymous) says...
Truly an inspired article. Keep up the good work Ms. Unruh.
January 2, 2007 at 6:21 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )