Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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It was not an excess of water, as one might suppose, that gave Wetmore its name. Nor was it, as some have been led to believe, because a certain Captain Wetmore, with a number of soldiers during the Civil War chanced to camp over night at our ever-flowing mineral spring. Art Taylor says his grandmother told him that such was the case.

It has been generally understood all along that the town was named after a New York official of the railroad which came through here in 1867. Confirmed, this would seem to kill the Taylor version of it, by at least two years. The matter, I believe, was settled for all time a couple of summers back when a New York woman, returning by automobile from the Pacific coast, called at the Wetmore post office to mail some letters. She told Postmaster Jim Hanks that the town was named after her father, who was an official of the railroad—and that she had driven a hundred miles out of her way to have her letters bear the Wetmore postmark.

I have seen Wetmore grow—and slip. Compact at the time of my entry seventy-nine years ago, occupying less than a half block, the town spread out through the years to a space of one-half mile by nearly one mile—not quite solid. The town became a City in 1884, with Dr. J. W. Graham as first Mayor—and at its peak had a population 687. The population at this time—1948—is 373.