Kiowa County dead towns: Reeder, Janesville, Brenham

Greensburg resident continues search and digging around several long-dead towns

GREENSBURG - Traveling down a dirt path sandwiched between a wheat field and pasture, Ed Schoenberger abruptly motions to stop the car.

"You're now in downtown Reeder," he says as he steps out of the vehicle - facing the cold wind that whips across the wide-open prairie on this early March day.

But all around him, there is nothing here but farmland and grass. Reeder, once a bustling community where residents dreamed of a railroad, has disappeared.

Underneath the ground, however, the memory of Reeder still exists. Reeder began in 1885 but only lasted a handful of years, with the post office closing in 1891. The railroad never came, and the community eventually died with its remains buried in shallow graves below the prairie grass.

Schoenberger pulls out his metal detector and begins finding century-old trash - largely sardine cans that settlers left behind.

Reeder's tale mirrors countless towns across Kansas, including several in Kiowa County. Schoenberger has been working to preserve those memories through his research and amature archeolgoy.

Meanwhile, Schoenberger is also researching the towns of Janesville, Brenham and others, finding artifacts along the way.

Greensburg resident and historian Ed Schoenberger uses a metal detector to find items at at the townsite of Reeder. 

Sardine cans and fruit cans were common in the 1880s and are often found when metal detecting around townsites.

Pictures of Belvidere, a Kiowa County town

Beautiful View

While much of Kiowa County is flat terrain of farmland, the region in the county's southeast corner is an expanse where the sky expands across rolling waves of grass. When the wives of wealthy ranchers Iowa Watson and C.P. Fullington first saw the area, they thought it couldn't be more stunning.

Thus, the two dubbed the town site Belvidere - or "beautiful view" in Italian.

The land had once been part of the Osage Indian Trust, which totaled 8 million acres in a strip extending more than 250 miles across the southern border of Kansas, according to a Jan. 9, 1955, story in The Hutchinson News.

In 1870, Congress assigned the Osage to a reservation in Oklahoma and opened the land to settlement, according to "History of Kiowa County, 1880-1980." A post office named Glick was first established in nearby Comanche County in 1883. It eventually moved near to future town site of Belvidere.

With the railroad coming through, Watson and Fullington, both highly involved in the Greensburg State Bank, along with other interests, began to promote the little town their wives had named.

"Caught in the Boom! Property of the new town Belvidere. $100,000 worth sold in ten days," stated an advertisement in the Greensburg Rustler on May 12, 1887. The ad also said the town was on the railroad and surrounded by fine "bottom farmland."

A year later, the newspaper reported 25 new homes were under construction in the town situated in a clump of elms and cottonwoods along the Medicine River, according to the history book.

Despite its beauty, there was little potable water, Robbins said.

"You could drill a hole in downtown Belvidere and you'll probably find fluid that even a rabbit couldn't drink," he said. "The good water came a little higher."

The railroad began shipping water in tank cars, transferring it to a cistern near the depot, according the Kiowa history book. Crews drilled a well two miles east and eventually water was piped into town.