Williamsburg: Founded on Sac and Fox Land

Williamsburg, Kansas sits on land that was once part of a large tract of former Sac and Fox land, reported as thirty thousand acres or more, which one early account says was resold to the Kansas Pacific Railroad. William Schofield acquired the townsite from that transaction and platted the community in eighteen sixty-eight, naming it after himself. He is also credited with bringing a railroad branch from Ottawa to the new town, giving Williamsburg its commercial reason to exist.

A post office opened in April of eighteen sixty-nine. The town was officially spelled Williamsburgh with an h until eighteen ninety-four, when postal rules trimmed it down. It never grew very large, sitting today at well under five hundred residents, but it anchored a stretch of Franklin County prairie that settlers from the East were filling fast in the years right after the Civil War.