Belleville | Craineville
| Cuba | Freedom
Township | Munden |
Scandia | Tabor
Homesteading in Republic County
Craineville
"The First Excelsior Colony reached
Republic County early in the year of 1870. Their settlement was
made on Rose Creek, in Liberty Township. This group was comprised
of eight men, one woman and a six weeks' old baby. They were Andrew
Glenn, Alex Monroe, Dan McKensie, Thomas Benson, J. J. Wilkes,
Fred Thornton, Sidney E. Pearce, and Alfred burns. Andrew Glenn's
wife, Elizabeth and their daughter, Jessie, completed the party.
They set out for Kansas from New York
City on the last day of December, 1869. The group was not formed
previous to starting, but on the first day on the train.
Two men, both Scotch, had been to Kansas
as spies and were giving lectures in the City Hall on the opportunities
afforded in the Kansas territory. These men, McCliment, a trusmith,
and McKensie, a jeweler, told of the small cost of a homestead
($14.50), the amount of cane that could be grown on a quarter
acre of land and the great quantity of molasses that could be
made from this cane. The ease of growing the crops and the immensity
of the harvests were also emphasized.
Andrew Glenn and Thomas Benson had
been friends and had worked together in the Jacques and Mooney
Stone Yard in New York City, but the group as a whole met for
the first time on that first day of the yard, bound for a new
country. An oral agreement was made that they settle as a group.
The trip out took nearly a week.
The farms were numbered and the numbers
were drawn from a hat. Junction City was the nearest land office
at the time. The first thing to be done was to file for the claims
and take out the first naturalization papers, so Tom Riley of
Riley Creek, was hired to take them in a wagon to attend to these
matters.
On their return a dugout was started
so that they might have some place to live for the rest of the
winter. This was dug back into the bank and was on the Wilkes
claim.
These men knew very little of farming.
When a group of them purchased a team of oxen, none of them knew
how to hitch it up. They were all tradesmen. Mr. Glenn was a stone-cutter
and so were Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Benson. Pearce was a painter and
had been a sailor for a number of years. McKensie was a jeweler
and Fraser a bricklayer.
The group was evenly divided as to
nationality. Glenn, McKensie, Burns, Fraser and Monroe were Scotch.
Wilkie, Wilkes, Thornton, Pearce and Benson were English. Andrew
Glenn was from Fifeshire, Scotland, and his wife from the north
of Scotland. Fraser was from the north of Scotland and his wife
from the lowlands. J. J. Wilkes and his wife were from Stowonthewold,
Gloucester, England. Wilkie was from Wigan, Lancashire, England,
and his wife, Elizabeth, from Airdrie, Scotland.
This group has not retained its identity
as have the other group settlements, perhaps because it was so
small. At one time a post office and store were in the community
but were soon discontinued. This small village was known as Craineville.
The English community of today is north
and west of this old Scotch-English settlement and is composed
of people who came much later."*
Map
Sources
*Ida Lucretia Smith, “A History of the
National Group Settlements in Republic County, Kansas” (M.S.
thesis, Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1933), 28-29, 29-30, 31,
34, 38.
Smith, Ida Lucretia. “A History
of the National Group Settlements in Republic County,
Kansas.” M.S. thesis., Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1933.
