Alan Maish’s ancestors saw opportunity in Kansas back in the mid-1800s, when they moved from the York/Harrisburg, Pa., area and through Indiana, as did so many others from the northeastern states. Maish owns a farm that has been in his family for a few generations in Cloud County, near Concordia, Kan.

The farm is practically within a stone’s throw of a ghost town named Oneonta. The settlement was a station stop on the Santa Fe Railroad. A post office was established here in 1890, and it became a loading site for the railroad, including a grain elevator. The post office was only there for four years.

A few years ago when driving west to visit relatives, I met Maish. I was driving around the area, thought I might find Oneonta, and found Alan tending to chores, so I asked for better directions, having had no success in my search.

Maish told me there hadn’t been any traces of Oneonta since the late 1940s. Tracks of a branch of the Santa Fe run directly through the Maish farm.

Looking south toward the Maish family farm, this is the area where Oneonta, Kansas thrived for a short time in the late 19th century. (Mark Simonson photos)

"Until around the late 1940s," Maish explained, "you could still stop a train to pick up passengers at Oneonta."

Regular passenger service had ended years before. Maish told a story his father told him, how once during a snowstorm he took his sister-in-law by tractor to the pickup point that only had a sign, "Oneonta." The Maishs believe that was the last passenger pickup because the sign was taken down shortly after.

Alan Maish grew up watching the trains during the diesel locomotive era. He has always been interested in the railroad. His father wasn’t as enthusiastic, Maish said, because more than once the hot cinders from old steam locomotives’ smoke set their barn roof on fire.

How Oneonta got its name isn’t certain. But one can confidently believe it was because of the railroad influence. According to the "Biographical History of Cloud County, Kansas," nearby Concordia was a flourishing railroad center of northwest Kansas. The Burlington and Missouri, Santa Fe, Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific gave this area connection with the East, West, North and South. In November 1878, Jay Gould, a Roxbury native, became a leading owner of the Missouri Pacific & Central Branch. He controlled about half the miles of railway in that state. Gould was well-known in New York for his unsuccessful quest to take over the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad about 10 years earlier while in control of the Erie Railroad.

Given the Gould involvement, and just as other places along railroad tracks named Oneonta in Alabama and Kentucky had been named by a railroad employee, this is likely a strong factor for the Kansas naming.

According to "Kansas Place Names," many New York names were brought here with settlers. Schoharie was a candidate for a county seat in Ness County. There is a Sharon Springs in western Kansas. There is an Otego in Harper County. Not far from the former Oneonta is Jamestown. Somewhere on the Kansas map are settlements named Oswego, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Chenango, Tioga, Chemung and Otsego. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Settlers in Cloud County came from New York state and elsewhere. One early settler was Joseph D. Sexsmith, who was "born and raised in Delaware County, went to common schools and enrolled in an academic course in Andes Collegiate Institute. In 1864 he was in Company I of the 144th N.Y. Volunteers. He came to Kansas in 1869 and was city clerk of Concordia in 1899."

Moving to this part of Kansas as an early settler wasn’t like packing up the moving van and arriving in a new neighborhood. The Comanche Indians were not pleased about white men moving to their area, so there were plenty of hostilities and massacres. Maish said some settlers were massacred nearby before his ancestors moved here.

From the "History of Kansas: State and People," came one description of early life. "Slaughter of buffalo was systematic between 1830-1856. The building of the transcontinental railroad was the beginning of the end, splitting the herds to the north and south. The railroad made this hunting ground more accessible. As late as 1872 thousands of buffalo grazed the prairies."

On Monday: A group of local people stopped a controversial power line and a flood-control dam from spoiling their communities.

City Historian Mark Simonson’s column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area during the Depression and before. His Monday columns address local history after the Depression. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or e-mail him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com.