History of Richards a variegated picture

Richards Postmaster Charlotte Arnold is a mainstay of the small community northwest of Nevada in Vernon County. Founded in 1891, Richards had two railroads and a population of 1,600 in 1915.

RICHARDS -- This northwest Vernon County village of more than 100 people has had numerous symbols since its founding 121 years ago with the locomotives of two rail lines, the Civil War colonel it was named after, its own phone company, Hotel Richards and, most colorfully, the miniature white ponies for which a Richards stockman became nationally known.

Settled in 1891 and incorporated in 1901 along the Missouri Pacific and Kansas City Southern railroads, the town bubbled with vitality for decades, reaching a peak of 1,600 people in 1915 with two blocks of businesses, some of them two-story, according to historical records.

Enjoying an oil and gas boom to boot, it had a school for first through 10th graders, a Masonic Hall, meat market, hay buyers and warehouses, grocery stores, restaurants, lumber yard, voice and piano teachers, churches bolstered by the Chautauqua Institute for religious studies, tennis, croquet, horseshoe pitching and the Richards Reds baseball team.

The late Richards rancher Fred Wilmot, right, shows one of the miniature white ponies for which he became famous in the 1940s and '50s. With him is show grounds owner Perry Carlile of Perry, Okla., who sold hundreds of the striking animals to the parents of enchanted children. The photo was made in 1954. Submitted photo.

A nearby Richland Township resort entertained cavalry officers from Fort Scott until the fort closed in the early 1870s, but the settlement assumed a life of its own when former Union Col. Joseph Harvey Richards brought the Missouri Pacific here in his capacity as the company's general attorney.

A veteran of the Battle of Vicksburg and the Siege of Mobile, Col. Richards later co-founded Fort Scott Wholesale Grocer Co. and the Bank of Allen County at Iola, according to the Richards Progress newspaper's "Booster Edition" of Feb. 16, 1917. Richards is 16 miles west-northwest of Nevada.

Local native Shirley Winter recalls washing dishes and cleaning house for Mrs. Fred Wilmot at the Wilmot Ranch 1 1/2 miles northeast of town, where Fred Wilmot built his herd of hundreds of the charming little white ponies he sold at Perry in north central Oklahoma and throughout the nation.

Winter was a switchboard operator as a high school senior for KLM Telephone Co., which began as Mr. and Mrs. A.L. Shopper's Rich Hill Telephone before Ken Kern, James Lamble and Raleigh Mauser of Kansas City bought it in the 1950s and expanded it.

Winter, a 1958 Richards High School graduate, said the telephone company also operated under Chet Mealman and Charlie Spicer and merged in 1973 with Missouri Union Telephone.

Dorothy Robinson, a member of the Bushwhacker Museum Board of Directors in Nevada, has been in farming and ranching all her life and still is just northeast of Richards with her son-in-law and daughter, Jim and Nancy Wilson. "I grew up on a farm in Bates County and when I married Bruce Robinson, we had seven head of cattle," she said.

"Richards was at one time an outstanding town. We had banks, churches, anything you'd need. We drilled our own gas to heat buildings. The Wilmot Farm northeast of town had the largest miniature white pony herd in the United States.

"I remember the Wilmots going to show them at the American Royal (Livestock, Horse Show & Rodeo) in Kansas City. Those horses were not as big as a Shetland and were simply sold to people who wanted one.

"Fred took them to shows and had wagons they pulled. He also had a large herd of black Angus cattle."

Robinson said other prominent citizens of the '40s and '50s included grocer Harold Fritter, a Dr. Koontz, James McConaghey and the landholding Todd, Wall and Walton families.

According to the 1955 history "The Vernon County Story," Hotel Richards was built in 1900 by Alfred Comstock and the Richards Progress published by M.S. Brady.

The Progress' 22-page Booster Edition of 1917, part of Winter's artifacts collection, is a smorgasbord of historically delectable information. The inside cover sports an advertisement with a photo of the owner and staff at Hubert Cox Pharmacy, coaxing, "Drink at our fountain," and proffering "Drugs, chemicals, patent medicine, perfumes, soaps, brushes, combs" and "A complete line of stationery, paints, oils, varnishes, glass and putty."

Page 1 offers Brady's treatise on the setting, saying, "The townsite of Richards is on a high, rolling prairie, surrounded by magnificent farming country with every acre underlaid by the very best of coal.

"From Richards there can be seen on every hand productive farms with handsome houses and large barns, and in the pastures of tame grass are feeding the best-blooded stock of all kinds to be found in the West."