Gove County KS Archives History - Books .....The Effort To Organize 1930 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ks/ksfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@gmail.com July 22, 2005, 6:11 pm Book Title: History Of Gove County, Kansas CHAPTER VIII THE EFFORT TO ORGANIZE The legislature of 1879 changed the boundaries of Gove and a number of other unorganized western counties. Just why this was done is not clear—perhaps the interests of local politicians and ambitious would-be county seat towns had something to do with it. This act dropped two rows of townships from Gove county on the west and one row on the south, and added one row of townships on the north. It reduced the county in size to twenty four miles east and west and thirty miles north and south, with an area of 720 square miles instead of 1080 as before. The Saline river was included within the new boundaries and the Smoky was given to Lane county. The county was attached to Ellis, county for judicial purposes. As long as the county was sparsely settled it got along very well without organization and without taxes; but now with the increasing populatioa naturally came a demand for a county organization. There was considerable lawlessness, which is hard to deal with in a county without government, but the school question was the big problem now confronting the settlers. An unorganized county could not levy taxes, and the new settlers had to get along without schools or contribute the money direct from their own pockets to establish them. The first meetings among the settlers were school meetings. Buffalo Park was first—theirs is still known as School District No. 1. The second was in the Hollander settlement. Grainfield established a school the winter after the town was started, but we find that six years later the town had no school building. The schools of that day must have been very primitive affairs—without equipments, having very short terms and taught in sod houses or any old makeshift of a building. It would be interesting to hear about it from some of the pupils who attended them, a number of whom doubtless, still live in the county. March 11, 1880, the board of commissioners of Ellis county made Gove county a township of Ellis county under the name of Gove township, and ordered an election March 26 to choose township officers. The order commanded the township records to be kept at Grainfield. At a caucus held at Grainfield on the 13th B. H. Ten Hagen was nominated for trustee, J. A. Lewis for clerk and A. J. Ayres for treasurer. Presumably these officers were elected, though I have failed to find an account of the election. There seems to have been some doubt of this, for in the following fall the commissioners called another election at Buffalo Park October 23, at which the following were elected: Trustee, Marion Brinker; clerk, J. H. Fosdick; treasurer, Thos. Locket. Just why a special election should be called, so close to the state and national election, is not clear. But Kansas loved elections in those days and had not yet reached the point where they could be satisfied with only one election every two years. Under the law as it stood then a population of 1500 was sufficient to organize a county. Trego county was organized in 1879 with about twice that number. By the summer of 1880 there was some reason to believe that Gove had the necessary population, and Buffalo Park started the movement for organization. Grainfield seems to have been distinctly unfriendly and to have done all it could to hinder the movement. The rivalry between Grainfield and Buffalo Park appears all through this time; Buffalo Park had a paper now, the Express, which first appeared June 3, 1880, with J. C. Burnett as editor, and the rivalry between the towns finds expression in a constant quarrel between, the Express and the Republican. A memorial praying for organization was circulated and received 254 signatures; it was presented to the governor June 29, 1880. The Buffalo Park faction circulated a petition asking for the appointment of Edmund H. Hibbard as census taker; Grainfield got into the game and circulated one for the appointment of A. J. R. Smith, editor of the Republican. Hibbard's list was the longest and he got the appointment. To complicate matters the attorney general of the state handed down an opinion that the act of 1879 changing the boundaries of Gove county had not been properly passed, and that the true boundaries of the county were those fixed by the law of 1868. In order to be on the safe side Hibbard proceeded to enumerate the population of all the territory in dispute—taking the census of the county as fixed by the law of 1868 and also by that of 1879. This brought a protest from Sheridan county, whose officials wrote the governor claiming the row of townships along the Saline as a part of Sheridan county and threatening trouble because Hibbard was taking the census there. Many settlers were leaving the county because of the drouth, and Hibbard's opponents wrote the governor that he was enumerating nonresidents and those who had left the county; the matter even reached the affidavit stage. One of the most active citizens of the county at this time was the Rev. J. Q. A. Weller, the Congregational minister at Buffalo Park, who had a voluminous correspondence with Governor St. John. He wrote the governor warning him against the Grainfield crowd. "The trouble with Grainfield," wrote Mr. Weller, "is that it is a Democratic outfit and wants to put off organization-in hopes of making this a Democratic county, which God forbid!" With so much opposition it would have been difficult to organize the county even if the census had shown the required number of inhabitants; but when Hibbard made his report showing several hundred short of the necessary fifteen hundred the whole scheme of organization fell to the ground. There was now no danger of a county seat fight and Grainfield and Buffalo Park could make up and be friends once more. The United States census of 1880 had shown a population of 1197 in Gove county. Hibbard's census was as follows: In the county as defined by the act of 1868, 1184; by the act of 1879, 1227. The four townships along the Saline had a population of 241; the six along the railroad, 670. The four townships now included in Larrabee township had a population of 23; the four in Jerome had 9; and not a single inhabitant was found in Lewis. It may be interesting to know who were in Gove county in 1880. Upon the census roll appear the names of the following who still are, or within recent years have been, citizens of the county: J. B. Beal, Geo. S. Dryer, E. H. Borah, Christian Schaefer, Andrew Christensen, Joseph Moulding, F. W. Martin, George Kriegh, J. K. Moore,. George Van Dehsen, Joseph Lengel, M. O. Wrighter, Wm. Hamilton, C. J. Ellithorpe, F. B. Strong, Charles Johnson, P. J. Gubbins, Frank Sharp, John Verhoeff, George Rhodes, John De Santos, Hiram Crippen, Jacob Hansen, A. B. Brandenburg, J. C. Houser, Alex Haney, Gus Peterson, Kryn Van Zee. Additional Comments: History of Gove County, Kansas by W. P. Harrington Gove City, Kan. 1930 File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ks/gove/history/1930/historyo/effortto10ms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.poppet.org/ksfiles/ File size: 7.5 Kb