Wellsville: Built by the Santa Fe

Wellsville exists because a surveyor wrote his own name into the map. In eighteen seventy, railroad engineer D. L.

Wells was at work in Franklin County, and the new town platted along the tracks bore his name. Investors purchased the townsite, the first post office opened in October of that year, and by eighteen eighty-four the town had incorporated. The surrounding prairie was already in wheat, and the railroad made Wellsville a reliable shipping point.

Farmers had begun settling the broader area before the rails arrived, but it was the railroad that fixed the town's location and gave it a reason to exist beyond a farmstead. Wellsville today counts about a couple thousand residents and remains the kind of small Kansas county town that the Santa Fe built by the dozen.