The Arrival of the Railroad

The Wisconsin colony was the Northwestern Colony, organized at Ripon in January 1871 with Benjamin Pratt as president. A committee of three left to scout Kansas on February 21, and on April 17 about seventy colonists, five families among them, left Ripon in a passenger coach set aside for them. They reached Fossil Station on April 19 to open prairie. That coach and three box cars furnished by the railroad served as their first houses, the Rev. A. H. Annas preached the town's first sermon in a box car, and Mrs. Annas taught its first school that July.

What the plaque says

The Arrival of the Railroad When railroads first built across Kansas in the 1860s, Plains Indians inhabited much of the central and western part of the state. They did not welcome the incursion, sensing a danger to the buffalo herds that provided them with food, shelter, and clothing. In an attempt to defend their lands, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and other tribes frequently attacked railroad workers and tore up tracks. Two miles west of this marker in May 1869, a mounted party of Indians dashed out of a deep ravine and attacked a railroad crew of seven. The railroad workers raced to their handcar and pumped desperately for home, firing their rifles as they went. Although no Indians are known to have died, two of the railroad workers were killed and four were wounded. A monument to the two who died stands in the Russell cemetery just east of here. When the railroad reached here in 1867, a construction camp and watering station named Fossil Station was established. The name was changed to Russell in 1871 when a Wisconsin colony established the town. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden — 20 mi
  A Civil War veteran's limestone log cabin in Lucas, ringed by forty-foot cement trees, Adam and Eve, and his Populist sermon on the people who crucify labor, with the builder himself in the mausoleum.
• Sternberg Museum of Natural History — 25 mi
  Fort Hays State University's museum under the old Metroplex dome off I-70, built around a family of fossil hunters who started digging in the Kansas chalk and sandstone in the 1860s.

More markers nearby

• Victoria — 17 mi