It’s through division that the One begins to multiply.
That’s just what happened in August 1870, when a station was built near the highest point between Kansas City and the Gulf of Mexico along the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston railroad.
This Ozark Ridge not only contained the area’s high point, but was seen as dividing the watershed of the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers; hence the new town was called Divide.
Before that, the only white settlement in the area was a halfway house and tavern operated by a man named Wagner, along the mail/stagecoach route between Lawrence and Humboldt.
Given the difficulty in obtaining water, early development at Divide was slow, with only a depot/post office, cattleyard and small store coming into existence.
Moreover, according to Florence Fivecoat, most of the townsfolk were men, with the few females resigned to careers like prostituting themselves at the hotel or bar.
Indeed, “[Divide] became an ideal haunt for wanderers, wastrels, [homeless people] begging for rides on freight trains, and homeless men uprooted by the Civil War,” Fivecoat writes in “Colony Days, Vol. II.”
Gunfights over cards games or ladies were a near-everyday occurrence, and infamous bandits like Billy the Kid perhaps frequented this “Little Chicago.”
But all that was soon about to change, thanks to the arrival of a certain “colony.”
Before exploring said colony, however, let’s first take a step back in order to explore an earlier settlement close by.
Thomas Day was the first pioneer on Deer Creek in 1855, and Joseph Price arrived shortly after, whereafter they set up a joint ranching operation.
Another fellow named Jim Dorsey soon got in on the action, and together they formed a site called Elizabethtown, named for the postmistress, Elizabeth Cook.
There, miles southeast of the rise where the colony would later settle, a store was opened along with a post office, but it wasn’t to last.
The railroad never passed through Liztown, and so by 1899 it was abandoned, though not before several townsfolk met their ends.
Thus the primary remnant of Elizabethtown today is its haunting and remote Ozark #1 cemetery located on the eastern edge of a cattle pasture.
