Ulysses

At over 5,000 residents, Ulysses was much bigger than the other towns we’d visited that day. It has a cemetery, several elevators, some farm implement stores, and an interesting memorial to the town's history: A cutout silhouette of a bank on wheels.

The story behind that silhouette is a fascinating one. When Ulysses was founded in 1885, the site was about two miles east of the town's current location. Like many Kansas towns in the 1880s and 90s, Ulysses boomed for a few years, driven by county seat mania and railroad hype and speculators. It was also heavily bonded for future improvement plans that actually just improved the padding of conmen's pockets. As a result, the town, like its namesake, was deep in debt. The boom had died off, taxes went through the roof, and the once-burgeoning town was in big trouble.

Their solution? Pick up and move. The whole town. Including all the buildings. The move started in February of 1909 and continued for about three months. Family by family, building by building, the entire town was relocated about two miles to the west. The new town was carefully referred to as "New Ulysses" (for legal reasons, one assumes, since no one was left in Old Ulysses). Kind of makes you wonder who got left out to dry with all of those Old Ulysses bonds, but it's also a remarkably ingenious solution to an all but hopeless situation. If anything is more Kansan than that, I don't know what it is.

Some other things we saw in town:

• Some statues in a fenced-in walking area on the edge of town, including some dinosaurs and a huge soccer ball
• An adobe museum of Grant County and the Santa Fe Trail (there are a lot of Santa Fe Trail museums around here)
• A farmer's market in the museum parking lot
• A car wash in a bank's parking lot
• Schools
• An extension office
• Fairgrounds
• A civic center
• An airport
• A bustling downtown, with shops, a memorial, and a gazebo
• A park at the foot of the water tower