Barton County KS Archives History - Books .....The Garden Spot Of The World 1912
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Joy Fisher sdgenweb@gmail.com July 24, 2005, 4:27 pm

Book Title: Biographical History Of Barton County

THE GARDEN SPOT OF THE WORLD
By John F. Lewis

BARTON COUNTY, KANSAS, is a moderate undulating landscape affording more high
class tillable laud in proportion to its acreage than any county in the state,
except possibly two or three counties.

  The slight swells and valleys afford excellent natural drainage, and a view
over the country that is delightful. Commencing in the north part of the county
the entire distance east and west, and north and south is typical wheat, land,
out of the vast plains of buffalo grass once traversed by buffalo, but now
dotted with beautiful groves of trees, elegant farm houses and barns, with good
natural roads for vehicles and the honk honk of the farmers' automobile may be
heard any hour of the day. The soil is a dark chocolate loam, enriched by the
silts deposited by thousands of years of water overflow in the glacial period
and from the Rocky Mountains. As we go south we encounter the breaks leading
into the valleys of Blood and Deception creeks, where appears the croppings of
lime and sand-stone in sufficient quantities to afford the people with building
material, which are in evidence in the many stone houses, barns and corrals.

   The earth has not been penetrated to sufficient depth or of such frequency to
venture upon much of a geological showing of its formation, however one well
sunk within four miles of Great Bend discovered a bed of merchantable rock salt
163 feet in thickness.

   The lime stone disappears south of Blood creek, some five miles north of the
center of the county, and now comes the various hues of sand-stone that exists
in sufficient quantity to supply the demand, which continues until the Walnut
creek is reached running from east to west, a little south of the center of the
county, where is found a. rich deep black soil equal to the richest prairie soil
of Illinois or Iowa, where alfalfa is successfully grown without irrigation, and
where sheet water abounds at a depth from the surface of the ground that no
drouth or heat diminishes the supply for man or beast, nor has the time ever
been in this county that wells went dry or water had to be hauled for stock.

   The Walnut creek valley extends its width and mingles its matchless soil with
the Arkansas Valley, where in rich profusion may be seen the alfalfa, corn and
wheat fields. The endless fields of grain are so blended that the road ways can
only be marked by the fringes of trees that embellish the country with
flamboyant denial that this could ever have been the great American desert.

   Here in this vast scope of country between the Walnut creek and the Arkansas
river is a soil that has also received the rich deposit of the silts that came
from the west in the mighty currents, that swept down the Arkansas river, when
everything south of the Walnut creek was a vast body of water which grudgingly
yielded to man its rich producing qualities, and Barton county encompasses the
richest spot in the state.

   The occasional discovery of limbs, and logs of wood at depths from 15 to 60
feet are incontrovertible evidences that this land was accumulated drifts and
fills at great depth from the floods from the west, which gives assurrance of a
long lived soil in the producing qualities, continuing to rise to the surface,
replenishing the top formation much more rapidly than it can be consumed in
cropping the land.

   We now pass to the south side of the Arkansas river where we find the once
much doubted sandy land, once almost destitute of vegetation, but now rivals the
fields of all of the states of the Union. In the mighty floods once covering
this country for thousands of years, the slacked lime-stone of the Rocky
Mountains with its rich conglomerate of decomposed vegetable and animal matter
in a formation variously estimated from 25 to 60 feet deep. This rich
sub-stratum is rapidly coming to the surface with a tenacity that will soon
resist the blowing of soils by the winds, that was once much feared.

   The occasional bare patches of sand that once glared the eye with a
suggestion of desert lands, have now changed into a dark rich productive soil,
and with the tardy efforts being made by the farmers to grow fruits come results
that give promise in the near future of a great fruit country. The popular
acknowledgement that the south side of the river is the great corn belt of
Kansas brooks no contradiction, and the largest yield of wheat per acre ever
recorded in the state came from these lands. The banner vegetable production of
this country is on the south side, all admit, and had this marvelous country
been exploited with anything like the energy California has, it would have been
as notable for its wheat, corn, alfalfa, melons, vegetables and fruits as any
country in the world.

   There has been no little discussion over the amount of moisture we receive in
this country and while it must be admitted that previous to 1897 we quite often
suffered for want of rain, and the cause is now known to have been the
unobstructed heated winds by the parched uncultivated plains of Texas and
Oklahoma which are now being plowed up and planted to crops and whether
successful to the owners of said fields or not, they are the depository of rains
which once ran away like water from the roof of a house, whereas now they throw
off vapor that create clouds that are blown to us by the never varying south
winds, that give us an assurance of rainfall in normal years that no other state
can boast, and when in our feeble efforts to justly, truthfully and explicitly
exploit the beauties, excellencies and advantages of Barton County, Kansas, our
mind runs to those matchless words of Senator Ingalls, who must have had in his
mind Barton County, when he said, "Kansas is the nucleus, of our political
system," etc.

   "Kansas is the nucleus of our political system, round which forces assemble,
to which its energies converge, and from which its energies radiate to the
remotest circumference. Kansas is the focus of freedom, where the rays of heat
and light .concentrated into a flame that melted the manacles of the slave and
cauterized the heresies of state sovereignty and disunion. Kansas is the core
and kernel of the country, containing the germs of its growth and the quickening
ideas essential to its perpetuity. The history of Kansas is written in capitals.
It is punctuated with exclamation points. Its verbs are imperative. It's
adjectives are superlative. The commonplace and prosaic are not defined in its
lexicon. Its statistics can be stated only in the language of hyperbole. The
aspiration of Kansas is to reach the unattainable; its dream is the realization
of the impossible. Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.
Kansas, having vanquished all competitors, smiles complacently as she surpasses
from year to year her own triumphs in growth and glory. Other states could be
spared with irreparable bereavement, but Kansas is indispensible to the joy, the
inspiration and the improvement of the world. It seems incredible that there was
a time when Kansas did not exist when its name was not written on the map of the
United States; when the Kansas cyclone, the Kansas grass-hopper, the Kansas boom
and the Kansas Utopia were unknown. I was a student in the junior class at
William College when President Pierce, forgotten but for that signature,
approved the act establishing the Territory of Kansas, May 30, 1854. I remember
the inconceivable agitation that preceded, accompanied and followed this event.
It was an epoch. Destiny closed one volume of our annals and, opening another,
traced with shadowy finger upon its pages a million epitaphs, ending with
Appomattox. Kansas was. the prologue to a tragedy whose epilogue has not yet
been pronounced; the prelude to a fugue of battle whose reverberations have not
yet died away. Floating one summer night upon a moonlit sea, I heard far over
the still waters a high, clear voice singing:

"To the West! To the West; To the laud of the free. 
Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;
Where a man is a man if he's willing to toil, 
And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil."

   The grassy quadrangle geographers call Kansas. Her undulating fields are the
floors of ancient seas. These limestones ledges underlying the prairies and
cropping from the foreheads of the hills are the cemeteries of the marine insect
life of the primeval world. The inexhaustible humus is the mold of the decaying
herbage of unnumbered centuries. It is only upon calcareous plains, in temperate
latitudes, that agriculture is supreme, and the strong structure and the rich
nourishment imparted essential to bulk, endurance, and speed in animals; to
grace, beauty and passion in women; and in man to stature, courage, health and
longevity."

   And to properly finish the picture with the music of rhyme in quoting Walt
Mason's epigrammatic ode. 

"Kansas: Where we've torn the shackles
    From the farmers leg; 
Kansas:   Where the hen that cackles
    Always lays an egg; 
Where the cows are fairly achin',
    To go on with record breakin', 
And the hogs are raising bacon
    By the keg."


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