Haysville: W. W. Hays Plants a Town
Near Wichita, Kansas
W. W. Hays came to the open prairie south of Wichita in the eighteen seventies, and on August first, eighteen ninety-one, he formally platted over one hundred sixty acres of his own land so a town could be built.
The community took his name: Haysville. For decades it remained a rural farming settlement where truck farming supported most families, sitting quietly in Sedgwick County just beyond Wichita's southern edge. That changed after World War Two, when the suburbs began reaching south.
Haysville incorporated as a city in nineteen fifty-one, and it has grown steadily into a community of roughly eleven thousand, now entirely surrounded by the larger metro. The old platted grid that Hays drew up in the eighteen nineties still underlies the modern streets.
