Edgerton, Kansas: Born When the Railroad Moved On

Edgerton came into being because a neighboring town was abandoned. Lanesfield, about two miles north, had been a mail stop on the Santa Fe Trail since the eighteen fifties, serving stagecoaches running between Westport and Santa Fe. Named for free-state senator James Henry Lane, it had a hotel, two churches, and roughly a hundred residents at its peak.

Then the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad laid its tracks in the early eighteen seventies, and the line passed Lanesfield by. The railroad instead created a new station stop just to the south, and settlers moved their buildings and businesses down to meet it. That new stop became Edgerton.

Lanesfield's stone schoolhouse, built in eighteen sixty-nine, still stands as a museum today, the last structure left in a town that the railroad erased in under five years.