Dearing, Kansas
When I was fourteen and asked my grandmother what she knew about our family history, she had her older sister Vera write down what she knew. When I read through Aunt Vera’s one-page paper I saw Dearing, Kansas listed as their mother’s birthplace. This was long before there was an internet to turn to for more information, but even now, Dearing doesn’t have much of a presence on the internet. I’ve since learned it is not actually Melissa J. Patchett’s birthplace. She was born on a farm in Fawn Creek Township, Montgomery County in December 1876. Dearing did not yet exist. Later, it was the closest hamlet near her father’s homesteaded farm and became the place to say she was “from.”
Beginnings
Montgomery County was Osage Country. It was opened to white settlement in 1870 after the Osage were forced off their land in 1869. It is located in Southeast Kansas and borders Oklahoma, which was then the I.T. - Indian Territory. Dearing is about five and a half miles northwest of Coffeyville. It began as a little stop on the railroad tracks.
A Wisconsin land speculator, Robert Lamont, bought quite a bit of land in the area. In 1886 he sold a portion of his land to the D.M. & A. Railroad (Denver, Memphis and Atlantic), in part for a depot. Evidently he’d hoped to name the station Lamont, which meant he hoped to be the founder of a town with his name. This dream ended with the sale. There was already another Lamont on the MoPac (Missouri Pacific) line, of which the D.M. & A. was affiliated. A small item in the Coffeyville Weekly Journal on June 16, 1887 announced that the station would now be known as Dearing. On June 23 the editor wrote, “Lamont is no more. Dearing is now where Lamont used to be.” Why Dearing? Was there a railroad employee with that name? The editor did not explain. The newspaper used the spelling Deering alternating with Dearing.
In June the newspaper reported, “the material for building the new V.V., I. & W. extension is all being shipped to Dearing, and it makes business lively at the new burg. Those wishing information about lots in the town site of Dearing can write the railroad officials or Robert Lamont in Peshtigo, Wisconsin.”
In this time of railroad and town-building, it was common for railroads to enter into agreements with private parties who platted and sold the townsites. Railroad surveyor engineers determined town locations, then turned over their data to townsite agents who hired surveyors to stake out plats. Railroad towns were meant to be nothing more than trade centers, and the railroads had an interest in controlling growth by limiting the number of stations at seven- to ten-mile intervals, discouraging independent promoters. After all, from the perspective of the railroad companies, the purpose of the town was simply to funnel business to the railroad. (1)
The “country correspondent” column for Dearing started in September 1887 under the name “Dearing Spats,” soon changed to “Dearing Dots.” In October the correspondent, “Joe” said, “The atmosphere about Dearing is blue with Rail Road talk.” By December 15, Joe wrote that the construction train had been making repeated visits to the junction of the V.V., I. & W. with rails and ties to build an extension. When the workman finished in the area they were working on, he wrote, “Ho! For Dearing. The county surveyor is expected here this week to lay off and plat the town site of Dearing, according to contract. That is all we have to say about our boom at present, but before another twelve months we expect to blow like a whale. Joe.”
Joe closely followed the progress of the railroad construction and clearly expected Dearing to blossom into a major city. In November the Coffeyville paper reported on some rumors as to why the extension had not been completed. But as the months progressed, there were encouraging signs. In December the Dearing Scale Company had its scales up and running - important for shipping grains and so forth. In January 1888, the newspaper editor said, “Dearing is jubilant over the establishment of her post office, with A.J. Andrews as postmaster and M.M. Phillips as deputy.” In February J.J. Smolley, “is talking of laying off lots in his addition to the townsite of Dearing.” Yet Joe felt frustrated, and he was sure he knew who was to blame.
“Dearing is not building up very fast. Fact is, the owner of the townsite don’t know how to start a town or don’t know a good thing when he has it,” he wrote in April. “There is no one here to sell lots or see after the townsite, and no house for the accommodation of travelers. Persons looking up locations go on to the other new towns that are offering inducements.” Oddly, less than two weeks later he was crowing about Dearing’s signs of growth. “Talk about railroad towns! Dearing is coming to the front; the citizens cannot sleep nights for the whistle of the locomotive.” He added that, “Pie parties and box suppers are all the rage in these parts lately.”
But maybe his earlier sharp words spurred the Lamonts to take action. In May Joe announced that, “Mrs. R. Lamont and part of her family are expected in Dearing this weekend and will make this their home. She will attend to the selling of town lots until the arrival of Mr. Lamont.” May was also a banner month in that telegraph wires were installed between Dearing and Independence, and the first baby was born in the new town. In June the Lamonts broke ground on a house that the newspaper said would be the first building on the town-site.
Early in the new year of 1889 a discouraged Joe said, “Under the circumstances perhaps it would be advisable to move the little hamlet of Dearing over to Coffeyville. Its railroad boom has burst.” In February, though, a new blacksmith shop and wagon shop were complete and a few houses were under construction. Once again Joe expressed optimism. “This kind of weather don’t interrupt the boom of this go-ahead city.”
A Long Lull
“Joe,” or whatever his name really was, stopped writing the country correspondent column for the Dearing area, and some years in the 1890s, there was no mention of Dearing in the Coffeyville papers at all. Ellen Lamont, wife of the erstwhile town promoter, Robert Lamont, died of consumption at age 47 in 1891. J.J. Smolley, the man who platted what became known as the Smolley addition, died in an accident when his horse got scared by a train and reared up, throwing J.J. headfirst into the street from his buggy.
Meanwhile, in 1898 my great-grandmother, Melissa Patchett, married Clyde Barbour, her neighbor’s nephew. They moved to a farm outside Lenapah, I.T., another tiny railroad town. Her father Enos Patchett still lived on his homestead in Fawn Creek Township just outside Dearing.
The new century opened with a few big events for Dearing. Gas and oil wells were discovered in 1900, providing what was thought to be an endless supply of cheap fuel for industry. In 1901, an electric car line was surveyed from Coffeyville to Dearing. That year, Dearing-area residents went to the county school superintendent, then the county commissioners requesting a graded school. They proposed consolidating three little districts into one large one, with the school in town. (A district was then one schoolhouse.) An opposing party of people from the other districts hired an attorney and the matter went to court.
By 1904, they had the school. The Coffeyville Journal sent a “roving reporter” out to do a profile of the town. He took the train and filed the following report:
“The crops all along the way were looking very fine indeed and nature generally was clothed fresh and beautiful in garments of green. Onion Creek flows a few hundred yards from the depot. A very handsome new school building stands alone in a beautiful grove on the southside of the railroad, the rest of the village being on the north side. The depot is at the foot of Main Street and is in charge of R.J. Nelson, than whom no more pleasant or obliging a railroad employee exists. He has held the position for 12 years.
“The general merchandise store of W.F. Lugenbeal is first in line from the depot. In this building is the post office. On the same side farther north is the general merchandise store of H. L. Towles & Co. while on the opposite side of the street is the blacksmith shop of John Orr. The residence portion of the village is mainly on West Main street. Dearing is a rather pretty place and the expectation is someday to be a suburb of Coffeyville, connected on the streetcar line. The town is fully expecting the street car from Independence and is quite hopeful of reasonable expansion. There is no hotel in the meantime at Dearing.”
He mentioned that the Christian Church members had raised a considerable sum towards building a church and the United Brethren met at the school house. Nearly twenty years after Robert Lamont dreamed of a Lamont, Kansas, Dearing was still a little village with only a blacksmith shop, two general stores, a school and a few houses. A year later, The Coffeyville weekly newspaper started a section called "Deering Department" and noted the opening of the Deering Restaurant by R.J. Nelson, which also offered a few rooms lodging. Gas street lights were added to the town with H.L. Towles leading the way with a light outside his store. Soon, the long awaited boom arrived.
Boom Times At Last
Dearing acquired a nickname. The headline in 1906 explained: “Deering, the Smelter City. Former Quiet Village Now a Scene of Great Activity.”
Robert Lanyon was a British-born industrialist who operated a zinc smelter in Illinois. In 1877 he came to southeast Kansas looking for more new smelter possibilities. He and his brother, and two of his nephews, ended up building smelters in nearby Pittsburg. The smelters burned coal to heat their furnaces; it took about four tons of coal to smelt one ton of sphalerite, the zinc ore found in what came to be known as the Tri-State Mining District. It was highly dangerous work and produced an enormous amount of pollution.(2)
When oil and gas was discovered, communities offered free or very cheap gas to companies. There were large zinc mines nearby. So it was that in September 1906 the Coffeyville newspaper reported that seventy men were at work building the Lanyon Smelter in Dearing, which would be four blocks of furnaces employing 200 men. The reporter noted that two years ago there were nothing but wooden stores and houses that “straggled” away from the depot on the only street facing north. Corn fields abutted the street. “Timber and bushes grew up to the back of the houses …and a little ways north of the depot the street became a country lane running between fields of grain.” Now, six blocks from the depot a real town site was laid out – 80 acres platted, streets graded, and 35 houses under construction. Timber was being cleared and tents, temporary shanties and cooking camps were everywhere. The smelter site stretched over 40 acres. Dearing was still hoping to get a hotel, and an interurban line to Coffeyville.
By March 1907 the first carload of zinc was shipped out of Dearing. A new two-story school accommodating 300 students was built at a cost of $22,000. Dearing finally got its interurban connection, with cars leaving in either direction every 20 minutes, from 6:20 a.m. to 10:20 p.m. Six passenger trains steamed into town daily. Clyde White City, an amusement park, rushed into existence, opened for the July 4th weekend. There was a roller coaster with over 300 electric lights, bowling, billiards and dancing, among other attractions. The newspaper said 7,000 people attended on opening weekend, some from Lenapah. I wonder if Melissa and Clyde were among them. They had five children then, ranging from eight-year old Russell to five-month old Vera.
A 1908 booster piece in the Dearing newspaper described the continued growth of the booming town:
“Dearing is in the south central part of Montgomery county, Kas., about three miles north of the Oklahoma line. It is situated in the center of a region abounding in oil, gas and coal. It is also in good farming country.
The townsite is on a gently sloping wooded hill on the north side of Onion creek. A fine natural growth of trees makes it a pleasant place to live.
The growth of Dearing has been remarkable. Eighteen months ago the population was less than 100. Now it is over 1,000 and growing all the time.
The Smelting Industry
The chief industry of Dearing is the plant of the American Zinc, Lead and Smelting Co. This enterprise was located here in August 1906. The company purchased 480 acres of land and platted Lanyon’s 1st addition, 160 acres. Residences were built on this ground and at the same time the erection of the smelting plant was begun. A smelter of four blocks was built and put into operation. The fifth and sixth blocks are about completed, and the size of the plant will be increased. At its capacity 300 men will be employed.
About a year and a half ago Lamont’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd additions were platted and put on the market. The 1st edition sold in ten days. Buildings are now on all of these editions and work still goes on.
Dearing has a bank, several stores, a hotel and boarding places. Nearly all lines of business are represented. The Dearing News is published weekly and does job printing.
The United Brethren and Christian denominations have each a church building here.
A two story brick school building was completed last year and will accommodate 300 pupils.
Natural Gas Field
There are unlimited quantities of natural gas in this vicinity, this being one of the best fields in the oil and gas territory. There are several oil wells half a mile north of town and several gas wells within the town limits. This gas affords a wide field for new industries, and it is not improbable that many will find a location here. Among the first will be a large brick-making plant. Beds of the best shale are found just east of town.
Railroad and Interurbans
Dearing is on an east-west through line of the Missouri Pacific railroad, with two passenger trains each day. It is also a junction point of a north and south line of the same road, with connections south and east and two daily passenger trains each way. These lines afford good facilities for travel and transportation.
Dearing is also on the Independence-Coffeyville interurban line, with a car in each direction every hour.
The town has local and long-distance telephone connections.
An amusement park, with modern attractions, is visited by large crowds of people every day and evening from early spring until fall.
There was a hotel, the Delmar House ($4.50 a week), pharmacy, men’s clothing store, a restaurant called the Gold Mine, a livery, lumber company and the Dearing State Bank. There was a barber shop, a harness and shoe shop, a grocery, a lumber store and a new furniture store. A young doctor, George Pearn, opened an office. The newspaper, The Dearing News, started November 1, 1907. By this time, my great-grandfather Clyde’s cousin, Harry Barbour, was assistant postmaster. Harry’s brother Jesse was a clerk at the furniture store. Clyde’s aunt Alice operated a boarding house in Dearing for a few years in this time period. The town incorporated in 1909.
It all vanished as fast as it appeared. The dazzling lights of Clyde White City darkened; the park closed in 1909. By September, its buildings were torn down with the lumber taken to Coffeyville for reuse. The smelter plant, which employed 400 men, closed in the fall of 1913. Also that year Robert Lamont, one-time Dearing promoter, was killed by a train in Arkansas where he was living with his son. He was “quite deaf” and was walking on the railroad tracks. The Dearing school population, first through eighth grades, dropped to 128 in 1914 from 228 the year before. Parts of the smelter opened again for a few brief periods in the next few years, but the company sold off the employee homes in “Smelter town.”
The smelter that briefly brought prosperity, opportunity and jobs left a mess. In 1914 a Dearing farmer sued the American Zinc, Lead and Smelter Company for damages for two years of crop failure due to the quantities of sulfurous acids, gasses and vapors from the smelter half a mile from his farm. He was right; the smelter produced high amounts of acid rain. There are former smelter sites in southeast Kansas where the ground is so contaminated that no plants have grown for nearly a hundred years. Some locations are now Environmental Protection Agency hazardous waste Superfund sites.(3) The Dearing site was remediated in the early 2000s with contaminated soils capped.
The boom and bust that rolled in like a tide and washed away just as quickly may have been unusual. But a historian said bluntly, “Most railroad towns were failures. They did not have secure enough standing to survive the technological changes that began making small towns obsolete after 1920; this was especially true of the great number of towns founded in the last wave of American railroad building between 1905 and 1915.”(5) After the bust, the few remaining members of my family left.
Today, Dearing has a tiny town hall in a former garage. The population was 382 on the 2020 census.
Notes:
John C. Hudson.
Junge and Bean.
Ibid.
Kansas Department of Health and Environmental Remediation.
Junge and Bean.
This was written as part of an A to Z Family History Challenge. The challenge was created by other family history/genealogy bloggers a few years ago to inspire people to write one post a week. I’ve also seen one that called for writing a post a day, except Sundays, for the month of April. These aren’t designed to be deep in-depth time-consuming research endeavors (but they can be – and I love doing research). The original idea was doing something quick, maybe posting a photo of a broach inherited from a grandmother and writing about it. Some bloggers came up with themes, one being places of importance in family history. I liked that idea. So most of my A to Z Challenge will be places, and of course why they matter in my family tree. This is “D is for Dearing (Kansas).”
Hudson, John C. “Towns of the Western Railroads,” Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. 2 No. 1 (Winter 1982), pp. 41-54.
Junge, Aspen and Rick Bean. “A Short History of the Zinc Smelting Industry in Kansas,” Kansas Department of Health and Environment Bureau of Environmental Remediation, 28 Dec 2006. https://www.kdhe.ks.gov/DocumentCenter/View/6569/A-Short-History-of-the-Zinc-Smelting-Industry-in-Kansas-PDF
“Dearing Smelter,” Kansas Department of Health and Environment Bureau of Environmental Remediation, Identified Site List Information, https://keap.kdhe.ks.gov/BER_ISL/ISL_PUB_Detail.aspx?ProjectCode=C306300340
Newspapers:
“Another Big Hen On. Movements to Secure Additional Railroad Facilities,” Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 16 June 1887, p. 3.
Blue with railroad talk: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 20 Oct 1887, p. 3.
Robert Lamont discusses selling land to railroad: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 27 Oct 1887, p. 3.
Rumors: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 3 Nov 1887, p. 2
Scales: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 15 Dec 1887, p. 2.
New Post Office: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 19 Jan 1888 p. 2.
Smolley Addition: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 23 Feb 1888, p. 2.
Dearing not building up fast: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 19 April 1888, p. 3.
Train Whistle: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 28 April 1888, p. 1.
Telegraph Wires, first baby, Mrs. Lamont: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 31 May 1888, p. 2.
Lamont House: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 7 June 1888, p. 2.
Railroad Boom Busted: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 7 Feb 1889, p. 3.
Houses Going Up: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 21 Feb 1889, p. 2.
Blacksmith and Wagon Shop: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 24 June 1889.
Ellen Lamont’s Death: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 13 Mar 1891, p. 4.
J.J. Smolley’s Death: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 18 Oct 1899, p. 1.
Oil Wells: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 10 Aug 1900, p. 6.
Electric Line: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 30 Aug 1901, p. 2.
“Dearing, Kansas. Snapshot by the Journal’s Field Man,” Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 3 June 1904, p. 6.
“Deering, the Smelter City. Former Quiet Village Now a Scene of Great Activity,” Coffeyville Daily Journal, 1 Sept 1906, p. 1.
“Shipped Its First Car. Deering Smelter Getting Under Full Headway,” 15 Mar 1907, p. 6.
“Dearing; Its Location and Prospects,” The Dearing News, 31 Jan 1908, p. 1.
“Sweet Taters Ruined. Farmer Near Dearing Holds Smelter Responsible and Sues Company For $1,435,” The Sun (Coffeyville, Kansas), 2 May 1914, p. 1.
Copyright by Andrea Auclair © 2024
Comments
Post a Comment