By Waldo E. Gray

Anyone driving in either direction through eastern Elk County along US 160 cannot miss seeing the small green highway signs announcing the tiny unincorporated area of Oak Valley.    Located just three miles west of the Montgomery County line and six miles east of Longton, few people realize the area was once a flourishing place.

In 1871, John Johnson moved to the recently opened Howard County and settled in the Elk Valley near the confluence of Hickory Creek and Elk River. Coming from northern Kansas via Ohio, he brought with him a portable saw mill and began milling lumber from timbers cut in the ample valley forest, which included large stands of Oak. In 1875, four years after arriving, Johnson founded the appropriately named town of Oak Valley.

In 1874, one year before the town came into being; John Johnson started a flour milling operation on the Elk River producing his Snow Flake brand flour. The milling took place in a two story 28×40 foot building, which eventually had a production capacity of 60 barrels of finished flour a day. A water wheel set in the river powered the twin stone buhrs of the milling operation. His Snow Flake brand flour soon became a county general store staple received from the mill by freight wagon.

An 1874 Longton newspaper says that Johnson’s brand of flour was fast gaining a reputation as second to none in Howard County. An 1875 Elk Falls newspaper advised that one hundred pounds of flour cost $3.50. Four years later, Johnson began shipping Snow Flake out of the area via a new railroad.

After founding Oak Valley, Johnson became the first postmaster housing the post office in his log cabin. The Elk County history book has him keeping the mail in a dresser drawer until a better postal facility became available. By 1880, the post office had moved to the drug store in the business district. Johnson also had a “mineral well” on his cabin property with the water containing “great medicinal properties” that was said to cure skin disease and sore eyes.

Reportedly, a substantial red brick building housing a resort was erected to take advantage of the water’s healing properties.

The town site consisted of 20 acres with 22 platted city blocks. Sometime prior to 1882, a good part of the business district burned over night and the town had to start over. The Bank of Oak Valley opened and other businesses included a lumber yard, barbershop, hotel, livery stable, drug store, grain elevator, restaurant, the obligatory saloon, and a broom factory.

In 1879, the Kansas City, Lawrence, and Southern Railroad line came in from Independence via Elk City slicing diagonally through Cherry and Union streets on the southwest side of town headed for Longton and points west.

Business boomed allowing Oak Valley to boast of a telegraph office and an express shipping office. Oak Valley had more railroad siding capacity than Longton or Elk Falls.
Three parallel railroad tracks ran through town. Two of those tracks were sidings, one on either side of the mainline with each running almost one thousand feet starting at Mill Street and ending at Liberty Street.

These sidings handled the Oak Valley industrial and shipping output. An old timetable shows four trains a day, two each way, stopping in the town. The rail line soon became the Southern Kansas Railroad and around 1900 the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway took over.

Before moving to Oak Valley, one early resident, John Dexter, witnessed the burning of Lawrence in 1856 during the “Bleeding Kansas” days. Dexter was a witness, again, when Quantrill burned Lawrence in 1863 during the Civil War.

Oak Valley had two physicians. During the 1880s and 90s, one of those physicians, Doctor J. Berger, became known in medical circles for his work with new drugs. He prescribed Tonga, a pain remedy taken orally, to his patients and he wrote about his experiences with the drug in three national medical journals, including the Therapeutic Gazette and the Pharmacology of the Newer Materia Medica, both published in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Berger was also a proponent of a new drug, Santonine, which he prescribed for diseases of the urinary organs. He wrote about the benefits of this drug in the St. Louis Medical Journal.

Towns in Elk County and the surrounding area had uniformed baseball teams and competed against each other. The 1895 Oak Valley team went undefeated; a considerable accomplishment for area baseball and the feat was a feather in the cap for the town. Citizens celebrated the event for many years.

In 1945, one of the baseball team members, 81 year old O. C. Howard, came by rail from northern Indiana to Longton’s Brighton Hall to join in a team reunion celebrating the 50th anniversary of the undefeated year. On his way back home, someone assaulted and killed the elderly man in Chicago during a train layover.

Oak Valley became the government administrative center for Oak Valley Township, which meant it housed township offices for the managing trustees, plus a lower state court administered by a justice of the peace.

Elk County commissioners created the new township from part of Longton Township, and it is the only county township that was not a holdover from the 1875 division of Howard County.

In 1882, the town floated a bond issue and erected an $800 school built of stone. An old photograph shows 36 children attending. Township meetings and community functions also took place in the schoolhouse. A secluded and well-maintained Oak Valley cemetery holds, according to a Kansas Trails web site, approximately 530 graves.

Never incorporated and never shown in the federal census, some population data is available. One source says the 1883 population was 125. A February 21, 1960, Independence Reporter says the high population was 500 around the turn of the century.
Unlike in many other early Kansas towns of that size, though, there was never a newspaper.

The Bank of Oak Valley went under during a national business panic in 1893. Sometime after 1900, the town began a long decline. The school closed after the 1949 school year and the post office closed in 1954.

Making way for the Elk City Reservoir, the Santa Fe Railway tore up the tracks between Independence and Longton after abandonment in 1963. Around this same time, the local service station closed its doors.

Fifty people reportedly lived in Oak Valley in 1960. That same year the local saw mill was still working on an “as needed” basis. Today, there are no business establishments and only a scattering of occupied houses.

An unused water pump still sits in the middle of a street intersection and the school is still standing. Some of the city streets show evidence of once being paved. Few people live in Oak Valley now and the reported high population of 500 compares with a 2000 population of 154 in the entire 45 square mile township.

About the author …
Waldo Gray resides in Centennial, Colo., but returns to his roots in Elk at least every other month to visit his mother, Rosie V. Gray of Howard.

Waldo retired in 2002 from the old Lowry AFB in Denver where he worked in Defense Finance and Accounting. Born in Eureka, he lived in Elk County as a child and moved away with his parents when he was 4 or 5 years old, just after his dad returned form World War II.

He is an avid historian and belongs to the Elk County Historical Society, Chautauqua Historical and Genealogical Society and Grenola Historical Society.

His passion is doing research into interesting people and places in this part of Kansas which he still considers to be home.

Waldo Gray can be contacted at waldo.gray@worldnet.att.net