Mildred, Kansas

When someone sent a picture of Mildred’s Store and an invitation to a music get together, and someone else said, I love these small towns, I was bitten with curiosity.

Where and what was Mildred, Kansas?

Where Mildred now stands was once the buffalo hunting grounds of the Osage Indians. Settlers came after the Civil War and the prairie grass was replaced with corn, wheat and oat fields that grew excellent grain. Towns sprung up.

Seeing opportunity and profit, in the summer of 1881, the KATY Railroad began the laying of tracks on a route that connected Allen County and southeast Kansas with Kansas City. Railroads then were like a deck of cards, constantly shuffled and the KATY would eventually become tth Missouri Pacific Railroad Company, but that is not part of our story.

The tracks passed undisturbed between Moran on the south (that intersected with Highway 54), and Kincaid on the north. The Mo-Pac would continue south on to Parsons, and eventually Oklahoma,but that is not part of our story.

In 1907, Mildred got a boost in the arm when Sam T. McDermott of Kansas City decided Mildred a good spot to locate the Great Western Cement Company. The town was named for the daughter of J. W. Wagner, Great Western’s president. In 1917, the cement plant closed and most of the town’s population went away. In the summer of 1944, the town’s last high school class graduated.

But Mildred’s Store continued to play on and does so today.

Randy Crowell of Gas, Kansas of Gas, Kansas give the following account:

Mildred was a company town, born and bred. In the spring of 1907 Sam T. McDermott of Kansas City found what he was looking for in Allen County. An ideal site for another cement plant. He bought 260 acres just west of the Katy Railroad tracks from John Winterbottom and Hiram Lieurance in the northeast corner of town and it was then announced that the Great Western Portland Cement Company would build a $2,000,000 plant there. The company then built Mildred to house the plant’s workers. Coal Creek was dammed to provide a water supply. A 40 acre townsite was platted. By the end of that first year a school was under construction. Twenty months later 300 men were hard at work making cement from the limestone and shale mined from the quarries.

Retail stores sprang up. Dr. R.R. Nevitt established his practice and opened a drug store. The Mildred Ledger reported community events each week. At its peak, Mildred had a population of 2,000. There were two hotels, two barbershops, an elementary school, a motion picture theater and a high school. The Great Western plant grew to employ 375.

Now all that remain are a few buildings, the ghost of a plant, Charlie Brown’s and Mildred’s Place where the old timers gather to tell stories and sing.