Brewster: Named for the Man Who Laid the Rails

When the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railroad pushed its line through Thomas County in the summer of eighteen eighty-eight, a railroad official named Brewster was honored when the new station took his name. A post office arrived by September, a school district formed within months, and by the end of the year roughly eighty people were living in tents and sod houses around the new depot. Brewster sits near the western edge of Thomas County on the high Kansas plains, today a tiny community of a few hundred souls, the kind of place where the grain elevator is the tallest thing for miles and the railroad that started it all still runs through town.