Collyer: The Preacher's Veterans Colony

In eighteen seventy-eight, a New York Unitarian minister named Robert Collyer placed an advertisement in a Chicago newspaper proposing to start a colony for Civil War veterans on the Kansas plains. That spring, a scouting committee stepped off a train at a small railroad stop in what would become Trego County, filed homestead claims, and began constructing a colony house where the arriving families could shelter together until they built their own homes. Many families eventually settled under that roof.

The town that grew from the colony was named for the preacher who had set it in motion. Collyer today is a small Trego County community on Interstate Seventy, its origins in a minister's classified advertisement still quietly remarkable.