Arkalon and the Samson of the Cimarron

The town took its name from a postmaster's father. Arkalon Tenney was the father of Hosea Eugene Tenney, the first postmaster, and the Arkalon post office opened in 1888 and closed in 1929. The Arkalon News came out from April 1888 to December 1892, a one-room schoolhouse opened in 1891, and a large stockyard shipped cattle to market. Settlers found the bottomland along the Cimarron too sandy to farm and too often flooded, and by the 1920s most had left, leaving only the railroad and the stockyards behind.

What the plaque says

Arkalon and the Samson of the Cimarron Many Kansas towns originated as potential railroad centers. Three miles west of this marker Arkalon was founded in 1888 at the Cimarron river crossing of the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska railway, a part of the Rock Island. Town lots were cheap, and people flocked in by the hundreds. However, the deep sand of the area was a serious handicap to the movement of horse-drawn freight, and the town never succeeded in establishing itself as a profitable marketing point. It was sustained for some years by its large stockyards but by the 1920's most of the population had gone. The railroad, slowed by a hairpin curve and plagued by flooding on the Cimarron which brought severe damage to equipment and freight, diverted several miles of track from the town to utilize the bridge it erected here in 1939. Called the Samson of the Cimarron, the bridge is 1,269 feet long and was considered an engineering marvel of its day. It helped speed the commerce of the Southwest to its destination, and Arkalon to oblivion. Thirteen miles southwest is Liberal, established on the railroad in 1888, and the Seward county seat since 1892. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mid-America Air Museum — 14 mi
  More than 100 aircraft in a former Beechcraft plant on the old Liberal Army Airfield, where nearly a third of all B-24 Liberator command pilots trained during World War II.
• Meade State Park — 16 mi
  An 80-acre fishing lake among springs south of Meade, in country once known for artesian wells that pushed groundwater up under its own pressure, before irrigation drew the water table down.

More markers nearby

• Fargo Springs and Springfield — 11 mi
• When Coronado Came to Kansas — 12 mi
• The Lone Tree Incident — 23 mi