SAUNDERS, Kan. (AP) - The little border stop greets you as you enter Kansas - along with a windshield of dust.
And it seems the dust is especially bad at Saunders, which sits right next to the Colorado border along a stretch of Highway 160 that, for miles, is nearly empty of people.
But for Minnie Watson, the whirling earth she experienced here during the 1930s was much worse than today. She and her family moved to Saunders in 1937. She was in second grade, The Hutchinson News (https://bit.ly/1xqLJwD ) reported.
Her family had left Plains, Kansas - an area still plagued by dust storms, although it wasn’t quite in the heart of it like Stanton County. In a time when jobs were hard to come by, her father had secured the position of elevator manager for the Collingwood Co.
They moved into Saunders’ single residence, which also was the elevator scale house and office.
Here, their power was from the wind, she said. While they had enough for lights and radio, it wasn’t enough, though, to power a refrigerator or washer, which they had left behind at Plains.
It took a little while for the family to adjust to the stark landscape. Upon seeing their new home, “my mother cried and cried.”
“It wasn’t quite as dusty at Plains,” Watson, 86, of Manter, recalls. “But at Saunders, it was just dirt.”
There is little information on the formation of Saunders, except that it probably formed in the 1920s when the railroad went through the county, said Katie Herrick, director of the Stanton County Historical Museum.
Even Watson, who, at 86, still works answering phones and selling advertising at the Johnson Pioneer, the county newspaper, never heard the story of Saunders’ beginnings.
Herrick said the first railroad came through Stanton County in 1923. Saunders most likely came later.
A 1923 article in The News tells of a man named Walter Saunders - the oldest engineer of the Santa Fe Railroad’s western division. He lived in Hutchinson’s Farmington addition. While towns were often named after rail employees, there is no indication the town of Saunders was named after him.
A Collingwood elevator was built at Saunders in 1928, according to a June 1, 1928, article in The News.
The article said, “Hundreds of land buyers and people looking for new locations are coming to Stanton County at this time. Never in the history of Stanton County have conditions been more favorable as they are today. Thousands of acres of new sod have been broken this year, many new farm buildings erected and the whole county has an air of prosperity. New elevators at Big Bow, Johnson and Saunders are being erected by Collingwood Grain Company. The wheat in Stanton County this year is the best in the history of the county.”
Meanwhile, it said that farm implement dealers were reporting a big sale of combines through the county. One farmer, Mr. Cessna of Big Bow, expected wheat yields to total 35 to 40 bushels an acre.
“The last of the Great Southwest is fast being developed, turning the cowman back to the west and breaking out the virgin soil for vast wheat farms,” The News reported.
As population settled Stanton County, farmers began slicing through the prairie in the teens and 1920s. But as more plows took to the treeless plains, the dust began blowing.
Historians say 100 million acres of the southern plains turned into a wasteland during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Drought, coupled by poor farming practices, choked an area of five states: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
In Kansas, Stanton County and nearby Morton County, were amid the epicenter.
Bob Sipes, a 78-year-old farmer whose father came to the county by wagon in 1902, said he was born at the family farm near Saunders during a dust storm on May 13, 1936. “The doctor stayed two days because he couldn’t see to get home.”
There never was a post office, Sipes said. At one time, though, the elevator sold tires and fuel.
He recalls hauling wheat to the elevator at Saunders when he was a boy. At that time, it was a Gano elevator at the site and a man named Brown operated it, living in the scale house.
His said his father was on the cooperative board when the cooperative decided to build a concrete facility at Saunders. It took some effort to convince patrons, he said. Sipes, too, was on the board when they decided to build new bins.
Today, however, Saunders hasn’t changed much. It still is by the railroad. And farmers still haul grain to the site, which is now a location of Skyland Grain.
And, it is still just a stone’s throw from Colorado.
“The first thing we did, we walked to Colorado,” 86-year-old Watson said of daily activity. “We were just kids. We’d jump on the railroad tracks. We get to ride the train a couple times to Walsh (Colorado) or Johnson. We’d ride in the caboose.”
She said her father eventually built a washing machine. And they found a kerosene refrigerator.
Her mother died in 1940. After that, she began to help her father at the elevator, weighing trucks and operating the gas pumps.
The family moved to California for a short time, then ventured back to Stanton County, where her father took a job as a farmhand for Fred Collingwood.
But Watson has fond memories of her time at Saunders.
“It was a fun living out there,” she said.
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Information from: The Hutchinson (Kan.) News, https://www.hutchnews.com
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