Gray County courthouse shows marks of storied past

When you think of county seat wars, you might imagine some lively town hall meetings, a hotly contested election or some angry editorials in the local papers.
    In Gray County in 1889, things went a little farther than that. In fact, when Cimarron residents tell you how to locate the county courthouse that was the location for many of the disputes, they tell you to look for a building with sandblasted brick and bullet holes.'
    Before Cimarron was even platted, a Swiss immigrant named A.D. Wettick chose a spot along the Santa Fe Trail and near the railway and opened a general store. Wettick partnered with other settlers and created The New West, Cimarron's first newspaper. Enterprising pioneers and investors realized the country was barreling west and made plans to profit from the growth.
    County boundaries were still unofficial and when the town of Cimarron was platted in 1878, it sat in Foote County but was dependent on Ford and Finney counties for governmental operations.
    In 1881, Gray County was established and had three towns with post offices: Cimarron, Mason and New Buffalo.
    By 1887 several towns were vying for county seat designation.
    About that time, Wettick commissioned a new brick building on Cimarron's main street.

Naming the county seat
    Meanwhile, a millionaire named Asa Soule, famous for his Hop Bitters Cure-All and his Soule Canal, which he designed to irrigate southwest Kansas, was doing everything he could to get nearby Ingalls named county seat.
    On October 31, 1887, an election was held to determine the county seat. Both towns claimed victory and complained that the other town had cheated.
    The Kansas Supreme Court canvassed the votes and declared Cimarron the winner, leading the Atchison Globe to conclude "Thus peaceably ended the most desperate county seat fight in western Kansas."
    Cimarron officials quickly began to set up county offices in four rooms on the second floor of Wettick's new brick building.
    A year passed and the growth that had fueled the boom of the early 1880s ran out of steam. The economy was shriveling and an extended drought made matters worse. Dissatisfaction over the county seat elections were still smoldering.
    On January 12, 1889, 12 men from Ingalls concealed themselves in a wagon and raided the courthouse. They threatened the county clerk and stole the records.
    A posse of men from Cimarron chased after the men from Ingalls and captured the men and the records.
    The state militia had to be called in to stop the conflict.

This is where
it happened
    Marshal Allen Bailey, who is serving as president of the Gray County Historical Society, describes the accounts of the battle:
    "It would make about the best western movie you've ever seen.
    "They say over 1,000 shots were fired when the town trapped those intruders up in the county offices. There were over 300 armed Cimarron men and when they got those Ingalls guys trapped up in the offices they went in the first floor rooms and started firing up through the floor. Some of the men upstairs climbed on top of the safe — one threw a pile of thick county record books on the floor and stood on top of it. It would have been the biggest municipal battle other than the Civil War itself."
    The building has been through its share of changes over the years, but still stands on Cimarron's main street and last Saturday, the Historic Sites Board of Review of the Kansas State Historical Society voted to forward the building's nomination to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The results of the federal review will be available in several weeks, but buildings approved for listing by the state board are normally accepted by the national office.
    "That will help us out a lot," Bailey said.
    The current owners of the building, along with preservationists in Gray County, hope to save the building from decay.
    "The building is getting in structural trouble," Bailey said, "But it's pretty much the crux of Gray County history and it needs to be protected."
    According to Bailey, you can still see bullet holes in the pressed tin ceiling of the second floor and in some of the window and door frames.
    "You can just imagine someone sticking his head out the door and someone else shooting at him," Bailey said.
    The exterior brick is soft and was sand-blasted in the 1960s.
    "If you look from the right angle, you can actually see where the years of wind have slowly eroded the bricks," Bailey said.
   
A present from the past
    "The Gray County Courthouse is one of the few remaining buildings that interpret the county seat wars that drew national attention to Kansas during the late Nineteenth Century," reads the summary of the National Register of Historic Places nomination prepared by consultant Christy Davis.
    Now that the building has been placed on the national register, local efforts can begin to secure funding for its restoration and preservation.
    Then the building can play its part in telling one important chapter of the story of building the American west.
    "I'm really excited because this building is important on several levels," Kathleen Holt, a Cimarron resident who recently served as the president of the Kansas State Historical Society, told the Globe in a phone interview Thursday. "Gray County was one of only seven county seat wars that resulted in fatalities. Despite the fact that the building was sandblasted in the 1960s, which might have disqualified it from listing on the national register, I'm pleased that the review board recognized both the deterioration of the building and its historical significance and agreed with the need to preserve the structure."

Reach Don Steele at (620) 408-9910 or e-mail him at don.steele@dodgeglobe.com