Historical Marker · No. 92
Fargo Springs and Springfield
Seward County · Kansas
Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission
The election the board calls contested was crooked from the start. Commissioners from Fargo Springs drew the election districts in their own favor, and the night before the vote Fargo Springs men took control of a polling station. People voted before the polls opened and more than once. Some voters, unhappy, made their own voting booth out of a wagon, and the commissioners would not examine the wagon votes. The courts gave the seat to Springfield in 1887. Liberal, founded in 1888, beat Springfield in the next contest, and in 1890 the county records burned while still at Springfield.
What the plaque says
Fargo Springs and Springfield The importance of railroads to the early settlement and prosperity of the West is nowhere better illustrated than in the stories of two Seward county towns. Fargo Springs, founded in 1885 about three miles south of here, was the first town established in the county. The next year Springfield was located where this marker stands. In June it was named the temporary county seat but in August, after an election, the government was moved to Fargo Springs. The vote was contested and when recanvassed in 1887 the county seat was returned to Springfield. Fargo Springs ended its brief existence in 1888. It not only had lost its fight with Springfield; but more disastrously had been bypassed by the rapidly building Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska railway, a part of the Rock Island. Springfield in turn failed to get its railroad and in 1892 lost the county seat to Liberal (16 miles south). In 1897 the Springfield and Fargo Springs town- sites were officially vacated. Two towns withered and died--unhappy proof of the vital need for rail connections in the vast and then undeveloped Western frontier. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission
Where it stands
37.27265, -100.86846 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Mid-America Air Museum — 17 miMore 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 — 23 miAn 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.