You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but a small well on the northeast corner of Yates Center’s downtown square plays a part in the town’s history. The hand-dug well proved back in the 1800s that if residents wished to locate there, they’d still have a source of water. Wells were dug, at the insistence of landowner Abner Yates, to prove there was sufficient groundwater to put a community smack dab in the middle of Woodson County. It’s why, after a pair of hotly contested elections in the early 1870s between Neosho Falls and Kalida townships, to determine the Woodson County seat, voters opted for Yates’s vision. They voted to call Yates Center the county seat, the only such designation in the state for a town that hadn’t been created yet.
Read more: The Iola Register
