My great-great grandfather was a frugal man by necessity. He had no money and even less luck. His parents named him James Philip Norris, but he soon lost the “James” entirely. As a working farmer with a family, Philip Norris was already carrying enough of a load. He had no interest in lugging around an extra name.
In 1857, he was scratching out a living in Kentucky when his wife Mary Ellen suddenly died at age 31, leaving him with six young children. Philip couldn’t afford the luxury of an extended grief period. So after only 43 days, he married his second cousin Mariah Norris. The toddlers already knew her, and marrying someone with the same initials as his first wife meant Philip wouldn’t have to waste money on new monogramming.
After the war, Philip and Mariah decided to move the entire family to California. They made it as far as Tonganoxie, Kansas, where tragedy struck again. The family got stranded by a Kansas blizzard, and were forced to take shelter until spring. But Mariah passed away before the warm weather arrived, and Philip’s dreams of California died there, too.
Public records show Philip’s place of residence changing multiple times after that. But he was always categorized a “widower” and “farmer.” He died in 1883 in Neosho County in southeast Kansas, and was buried in Ladore Cemetery. My wife and I decided to take a day trip and find his grave.
We couldn’t find a town called “Ladore” anywhere on the Kansas map. As we dug deeper, the reason became obvious. Ladore was founded in 1867 and became a boom town overnight, but vanished just as quickly. The rapid rise and fall were both tied to the railroad.
In the late 1860s, it was rumored that the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway — known as the Katy — planned to build a major rail hub somewhere in Southeast Kansas. Nobody knew exactly where. But a few speculators thought they did. So they started buying up land in Neosho County, on the banks of the Labette Creek.
An innkeeper named James Roach constructed the first building. A post office, a church and a general store soon followed. When the Katy Railway started building a junction of two lines near the handful of stores, the town’s population exploded. What had been just a bare patch of land a few months earlier was now a town with a thousand citizens. They called it Ladore.
The town soon had schools, saloons, hotels, restaurants and pretty much everything else a thriving town needed. Everything, that is, except for law enforcement. The first railroad track came to Ladore in May 1870, bringing a flood of immigrants and settlers. But it also brought grifters, con men and thieves. Crime began to spread. Public drunkenness was on daily display. Citizens were held up at gunpoint on Main Street in broad daylight.
An ‘outrage’ and a lynching
On May 10, 1870, the situation got much worse. Seven desperados rode into Ladore looking for trouble. They drank up most of the whiskey in town, then began beating local citizens and taking their possessions. At around 7 p.m., the gang went to James Roach’s inn and demanded rooms for the night. Roach refused them because they were drunk. So they beat him unconscious with their revolvers, then grabbed the inn’s two teenage chambermaids and dragged them off into the woods. There, as one newspaper later reported, the outlaws “committed a frightful outrage against the two girls.”
One of the girls got away during the night and ran back into town. By first light, a posse of 300 local men had captured six hungover desperados. The seventh suspect had been killed during the night in an internal gang dispute. Five of the remaining six outlaws were positively identified by the two girls as the offenders. They couldn’t identify the sixth man, so he was released into the custody of the citizens he had robbed the day before. Exactly how the angry mob dealt with him is unknown. But his five outlaw friends all met their ends before sundown. They were all hanged from the same branch of a big hackberry tree, less than 24 hours after their crime.
The lynching made newspaper headlines from as far away as London. Ladore was labeled “the meanest town in Kansas.” Maybe it was the bad publicity that killed Ladore’s future. Maybe it was the way Ladore landowners had inflated their prices, hoping to make a fortune selling real estate to the railroad. Or maybe it was because another small community in that corner of Kansas promised to name their town after Levi Parsons, president of the Katy Railroad.
Town moves on
We may never know. But just a few weeks after the lurid headlines, Katy began building their big rail hub in the newly-named town of Parsons, just five miles south of Ladore. The grand new Parsons station was completed a year after the lynching.
This abrupt turn of events might have spelled financial ruin for a less resilient group of merchants. But the speculators in Ladore treated the situation as no more than a temporary setback. If the railroad wouldn’t come to their town, they’d take their town to the railroad. Merchants jacked up their saloons and hardware stores, put them on skids, and moved them five miles south to Parsons. The boomtown of Ladore quickly became a ghost town.
We learned all of this before heading to Neosho County to look for my great-great grandfather’s grave. But it still took us awhile to find the Ladore Cemetery. It’s out in the middle of a section of wheat fields at the dead end of a dirt road. The cemetery is the only remaining evidence that a thriving town once stood here. There are no abandoned buildings, no crumbling foundations, no signs of civilization at all. Just a good-sized graveyard that is surprisingly well-tended.
Finding great-great grandpa
We searched among the old gravestones for over an hour with no success. Finally, my wife yelled “Found him!” from halfway across the cemetery. I could see that she was staring down at the ground as she called out. Great-great Grandpa Philip’s stone marker had snapped off at the base and had toppled over onto its back. The headstone was almost completely buried beneath decades of dirt and buffalo grass.
We pried the headstone up out of the ground and dusted it off. The name and the dates were all correct. This was, in fact, my great-great grandfather’s final resting place. I could see that someone had attempted to set his gravestone back upright again with some construction adhesive. But it hadn’t worked. So we headed back home to get some steel posts and masonry screws to make a more permanent fix. It wasn’t the prettiest repair job that’s ever been done in a ghost town cemetery. But it was the kind of practical, no-frills solution that a guy like Philip would have appreciated. And his face was back in the sunlight again.
By the time Philip died in 1883, the town of Ladore would already have been pretty much gone. But I suspect that’s the very reason why he’s buried here, in such an obscure place. There’s not a lot of demand for burials in a ghost town, so the plots would’ve been cheap. And great-great Grandpa Philip was always a frugal man. That probably also explains the inscription on his tombstone. Instead of “Philip Norris”, the stone identifies him simply as “P. Norris.” The stone carver probably charged by the letter.
Joe Norris is a writer and former Wichita marketing executive. He can be reached at joe.norris47@gmail.com.
