WaKeeney: The Queen City That Wasn't

WaKeeney was a real estate project before it was a town. In eighteen seventy-seven, Chicago land speculator James Keeney bought acreage from the Kansas Pacific Railway on the high plains of western Kansas. He partnered with Albert Warren, and the two men named their venture Warren, Keeney, and Company, then compressed their names into one word for the town: WaKeeney.

They platted the site in eighteen seventy-eight, advertised it across the Midwest as the Queen City of the High Plains, and held promotional celebrations to lure settlers. Hundreds came. The Kansas Governor dedicated a new limestone depot on the Fourth of July, eighteen seventy-nine.

Then the crops failed. By eighteen eighty-two the town had collapsed to five poorly patronized retail stores. The settlers who had arrived in a rush left in one as well. WaKeeney survived, slowly recovered, and today serves as the seat of Trego County with a population of about eighteen hundred. The unusual capitalization of its name, capital W, capital K, is still there, a permanent reminder of the two speculators who dreamed it into existence.