Anyone Familiar With the 106th Kansas County?

[W. Gray]

Most folks grew up learning that there were 105 counties in Kansas.

Nevertheless, after all the counties in Kansas had been organized, there were 106.

The 106th was Garfield County created by the legislature in 1887. After approval by the governor to organize, the folks there could not make up their minds where to put the county seat and they immediately underwent a county seat conflict causing some involvement by the Kansas National Guard. The issue went to the Kansas Supreme Court.

Even though the legislature created it, the Supreme Court ruled that Garfield was illegally organized because its area was less that the 432 square miles required by the Kansas Constitution, therefore the county was illegal.

The Garfield area was annexed by Finney County, giving that county its unusual shape.

[evanstrail]

I was actually planning to post something here about the defunct county of Madison (1855-1861) that was comprised of parts of present day Greenwood and Lyon counties, but there is ambiguity as to its exact borders and the fact that the location given for the town that is stated as being its county seat, Columbia, may or may not have actually been within Madison County.

Anyway, reason I decided to post anyway is that in researching the above matter, I came upon a website on the history of Madison, the town, which has some info on the Howard Branch ATSF, and its conversion from narrow to standard guage.  Don't know if you have seen this, Waldo, and I can't speak to its accuracy but here it is:

http://skyways.lib.ks.us/orgs/madison/historyofmadison.htm

About half way down the page, a little below the pictures of the schools is a section on the railroads.

[W. Gray]

Howard Branch was originally scheduled to be narrow gauge.

The track into Madison and maybe into Eureka from Emporia was built as narrow gauge, for the Kansas City, Emporia & Southern RR but was entirely re-gauged on one Sunday, August 3, 1879.

Supposedly, the grading into Howard was built as narrow gauge but the track was subsequently installed as standard gauge. I am assuming the line from Madison into Severy was also graded for narrow gauge with the rails subsequently being standard gauge.

Narrow gauge was cheaper to build and cheaper to operate so the intent for the "milk can" runs was narrow gauge. But someone apparently figured the costs for the hand transfer of freight and transfer of passengers probably was going to cost more than operating standard gauge.

By the way, there were 32 counties in Kansas (including the western part of Kansas Territory) that no longer exist and not all of them were organized.