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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

There is consensus that an article should not exist at this title. There are several conflicting suggestions as to where to merge or redirect to. I would consider "no consensus", resulting in an effective keep of the article which nobody seems to favour, to be a poor option. I have therefore slightly arbitrarily decided the closure should be to redirect to Freedom Township, Ellis County, Kansas as it seems to have slightly more support than others, but nothing should be taken as preventing editors from retargeting if it transpires that there's a better choice, nor from merging any content they may wish to merge. Stifle (talk) 09:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Easdale, Kansas

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Easdale, Kansas (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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A blatant example of a 4th class post office not being a town, as it geolocates onto a farm that is still there. And no, redirecting to Pfeifer, Kansas is a bad idea as they are not the same place. Mangoe (talk) 05:31, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, PhantomSteve/talk¦contribs\ 08:54, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: In the Hayes Free Press of Oct 10, 1900 it makes a reference to A.N. Horn selling his home to "Jim Grippen of Easdale".[1]. A few other stray references to Easdale like that in the late 1870s until about 1900 also exist. A 1905 atlas of Ellis County shows a Jas Grippin and Wm Grippin with land around the geographical location we have for the former Easdale post office.[2] When this article was created in 2018 it was not correct to term it a "small settlement" based merely on the existence of a post office; but us veterans on these AfDs are aware that midwestern U.S. post offices were set up in many places in the 1800s that never became towns. The article got worse in 2021 when edited to say it was a "ghost town". In my opinion, "ghost town" is way over-used on wikipedia on articles on little place names like this, it really should be used for abandoned settlements that have or had some remaining buildings and infrastructure. I know Pfeifer, Kansas is not understood to be the same place (but I don't know where the GPS coordinates for Easdale first came from?), but that article's discussion of Easdale makes a decent case for a redirect there. And the 1887 newspaper mentions say the post office name was changed, not moved (though perhaps it was moved).[3]. Apparently the Easdale PO was in Rush County when it was established in 1878.[4][5] There seems to have been a border change between the counties of Rush and Ellis at some point.[6] --Milowent • hasspoken 16:47, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Let me add, I found this 1963 article in the Hays Daily News on the history of Pfeifer, and it describes the community as moving in 1884 to its current location. It says the former location was "in Section 25-14-17 of Freedom Township". You can find the township map of 1905 here[7]. Pfeifer is plainly now in the northwest corner of Section 36, as depicted in the 1905 map here [8]. The new location definitely seems to be south of the original location, since Section 25 is north of 36. The settlers (who were Volga Germans) first came in 1876, so it seems no surprise that the Easdale PO was established as needed in the area by 1878, and it made sense to move/rename the PO by the time that happened in 1887. "Easdale", of course, it not a German name, but a Scottish island. Before the Volga Germans started arriving in Ellis County in 1876, a George Grant is said to have brought over 300 Englishmen starting around 1872, but a "grasshopper scourge" in 1874 caused many to leave, and eventually the Volga Germans took their place.[9] The first postmaster of the Easdale PO was "Rollo A. Burnham", not a German name.[10] A "James A. Maine" took over late in 1878.[11] Looks like he was still there in 1885.[12] So it makes sense that a name like "Easdale" wouldn't stay on when a German majority took over the area.--Milowent • hasspoken 18:05, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ellis County, Kansas#History has the grasshoppers already, notice. And the coördinates come from two GNIS computer database records. The first set is the coördinates in the article at hand, which is a "locale". The second set is an "Easdale, see Pfeifer", which is a "ppl" and repeats the (different) coördinates for Pfeifer. Alas, the same person who gave us the false ghost-townery in Special:Diff/1058765611 and other articles is the same person filling these Kansas articles with every-article-has-the-same-boilerplate-junk-history at Special:Diff/721974070 and the like. Uncle G (talk) 10:14, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • I can find the second set of coordinates which matches Pfeifer at nationalmap.gov, but not a link for the coordinates used on this article in a GNIS search. The original citation upon creation was just to "http://geonames.usgs.gov", and searching "Easdale" there only leads to the Pfeifer reference you note. I was just wondering where it came from, because I've run across this issue before.--Milowent • hasspoken 13:16, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • That's far from original. That's just a WWW interface that the USGS set up to access the computer database. Not everything is "a link".

          Back in the 1980s, this database was available on magnetic tape and was even printed out on paper, bound, and sold in book form. Ironically, Google then digitized the books, so it's possible to find out what the feature classes, which were squashed a few years ago, used to be years ago. This has confused several people in past AFD discussions who don't realize that what's available on a WWW site was once available as this "National Gazetteer of the United States", being exactly the same thing and exactly as bogus, before the World Wide Web was invented, because the GNIS was invented in the 1970s.

          Things to remind yourself about the reliability of GNIS data: It's a government computer database that is an index to where words occur(ed) on government maps, mostly maps as they were in the 1980s. Like other government projects it was ambitious but was de-funded before the all-important fixing-the-errors-from-state-sources phase of the original plan kicked in. The "historical" records were dropped from the database tables quite a while ago. More recently, all of the feature classes, which used to make distinctions amongst cemeteries, locales, populated places, flats, tanks, summits, gaps, and so forth, were largely squashed.

          For an article that explains the rural post offices, see the one that I cited in Bulloch County, Georgia#Further reading a couple of days ago. It does a fair job of explaining, with that county as a case study, how actual history happened, and thus why a lot of this "ghost town" and "unincorporated community" synthesis that people do, in desperation at trying to flesh out crap from the GNIS, is utter tripe. Rennick has documented an entire state full of examples of how post offices moved around with people's private homes and stores that they were run from.

          Schools were the same, and there was no rule that school districts were coterminous with post office service areas. Adding them together to make places is synthesis, just as the still fake ghost-townery of Monroe, Kansas (AfD discussion) is. This is "settled" land, but these were and are rural places without population centres. "At Monroe" is how the mail is delivered and (when it's a store) the general store supplies are shipped.

          And in several of the midwestern states the "communities" were the (civil, not survey) Townships. (In Rennick's state they were the Creeks.) The Townships were the legally recognized populated places, for people wanting that rule, with census figures and legal authority. The Fifth Biennial Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture doesn't give a population figure for Easdale post office, because the post offices aren't the legally recognized populated places despite what the desperate Wikipedia synthesizers and false ghost-townery writers think; nor does it give populations for the 44 school districts that it mentions; but it does say that 451 people lived in Wheatland Township in 1885, which you wouldn't know from our every-article-in-Kansas-is-the-same crappy boilerplate article on the place.

          Equally as sad as the Monroe ghost-townery synthesis is the fact that if Kansas editors had been any good at this then rather than a bland sweep of boilerplate across loads of Kansas articles we would have for years now known a lot more about the Germans from the Ellis County, Kansas#History article, and it wouldn't be lopsidedly placed in Pfeifer, Kansas (because, for starters, they didn't just settle in Pfeifer), and we'd even know a tiny bit about Hog Back, Kansas (AfD discussion) and why it's not a settlement (the German settlers choosing not to settle it), because it's all in Francis S. Laing's history of the German-Russian Settlements in Ellis County, Kansas.

          Uncle G (talk) 21:09, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thanks for taking the time to set out all that background info, Uncle G. Re the last point, I'm sure others have noticed this too, but I think there's a bias in wikipedia towards including more historical details in smaller geographical unit articles. Moving details into county and state and regional articles requires a more deft understanding of historical context. E.g., knowing that these immigrants weren't really Russian, as some sources may say. The bias towards calling things "ghost towns" that aren't isn't a wikipedia-only problem. Indeed, the 1971 article[13] I just cited in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mendota, Kansas-- which is definitely a moving rural post office -- calls it a "ghost town". I understand the frustration of folks like you and Mangoe, we are fighting inherently irrational human behavior here which seeks to imbue place names with more history and meaning than perhaps they deserve. For the mercy of whoever closes this discussion, i'm not saying "Easdale" should be kept. I'm just interested in confirming the GNIS data and seeing whether that's where the first location of Pfeifer (which also wasn't really a town) was.--Milowent • hasspoken 16:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    "confirming the GNIS data and seeing whether that's where the first location of Pfeifer".
    Recognizing that not every GNIS point was a village does not mean one has to interpret that GNIS data is full of error. The choice of some locations, like Easdale, does seem to be based on local primary sources at the time the point was set. Want to feel old? Try having living memory of landmarks that GNIS points were set on, but destroyed later, and have editors thereby question veracity. Yes, any truth of a GNIS point does not inherently convey WP notabilty.
    Living memory is not RS, but I feel there is room for improvement in bedside manner. Consider that the postmaster of one of these village post offices took care of me after my mother died, and Dad would say I would call her "Mom". Fr. Burkey wrote on Easdale as a post office that served early Pfeifer, but was then replaced by the Pfeifer post office, which once "really existed", even if maybe no one in Pfeifer today can remember where it was. Careful saying Pfeifer is not a town, people live there on platted streets; it is at least a village with a beautiful Fencepost limestone cathedral. Let us be careful in the tone and words we use as we necessarily delare locations as non-nontable.
    I see ECHS maps an Easedale Cemetary. About a year ago I was going over the perenial Hays Daily News Autumn lists of 1800s cemeteries; so I might go back and look what was said about Easedale Cemetery, if anything. What I recall was that some of these prairie cemeteries were family plots and others were just where a wagon load of travelers died, and the typical caretaker was some old man with no realtionship to those buried. I make no suggestion now that "Easedale Cemetery" had any connection with "Easedale PO", or any settlement.
    Regarding any merge, I would suspect, though, that Easdale, as a topic, is closer to Pfeifer than to Ellis County. IveGoneAway (talk) 14:28, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. The little we know about this place simply validates that it was a PO, and barring a surplus of Stella-Rondo-type family dynamics in the surrounding areas, no one lived at this PO.
JoelleJay (talk) 04:25, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: - This was a real place, it is listed on the Kansas state Map: https://www.macpl.org/atlases/1903/Kansas%20State%20Map.pdf 😎😎PaulGamerBoy360😎😎 (talk) 18:06, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We know it was a place, 😎😎PaulGamerBoy360😎😎, i.e, a post office in someone's house. But if this is your inclusionist method to cause Mangoe and Uncle G to have a stroke and stop nominating articles like this, it may work.--Milowent • hasspoken 20:16, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That aside, from a geologist perspective, I honestly enjoyed this map for the canals around Dodge; I did not know that. And I had not thought of South Fork Pawnee River as an old channel of the Arkansas. Thanks. IveGoneAway (talk) 01:24, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: Not a town, sure, but a known community in the papers 1880 to 1904. Several mentions of meetings at the Easdale school house, mostly a hotbed of Socialists ... (so they called my Republican grandad).

To be fair, I never knew of Easdale until this week, but then, I had never been in Pfeifer until last April. The first election I remember was Dad taking me with him when he voted at one of the sister schools to Easdale. I make no claim of notabilty, but I acknowledge the community of that time. IveGoneAway (talk) 05:26, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment Just adding what I've learned since I voted. Studying other of the post offices since has made it clear that in a lot cases the newspaper mentions are simply using the post office as a point of reference, and when people write into the paper from these postal places, they are simply denoting where they get their mail. It's not necessarily where they live.James.folsom (talk) 18:35, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, in the sense of "in the vicinity of". In the case of the many classified adds mentioning Easdale, it is really the closest thing to an address. With the dozens of post offices in the county, I don't need to speculate that people would want to walk further than the closest one. The presence of a post office and school do not prove the existence of even a rural community, just that there were enough people around. Interestingly, the Pfeifer farm plots were originally laid out "Russian style", 44 feet wide by 1/2 mile. But across the river, more Jeffersonian quarter sections. Just another tempting suggestion of different groups of settlers. When you get to Victoria/Herzog, there is a big cemetery of hallowed ground for the Catholic parishioners and a tiny one across the road for "everyone else". I see the same thing comparing the Easdale tiny cemetery with the Pfeifer cemetery, a mere two miles apart. Well, don't underestimate the difficulty of crossing the Smoky Hill. No RS for any of this, just fascinating to me. Even in my lifetime though, there was strong coercion in rural EL CO to not sell land outside each parish membership, the same with marriage. Easdale might have been squeezed out, eliminating the need for a separate PO and grocery store and non-parochial school. I know editors have suggested that Easdale was an early site of Pfeifer and/or that the sites merged, but thinking about the parochial communities of the time, I am prone to disagree. I might be wrong. The "Meders of Easdale" were original Easdale settlers; Meders own the old Easdale section today. IveGoneAway (talk) 20:11, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    FWIW I am chatting with a historian who's family founded Victoria, Kansas. As completely German-Catholic the countryside and the town is today, he had to remind me that the founding name is not. Queen Victoria directly funded the original Protestant settlement there. Ahhh, Meder is an English/Irish name and Easdale is also English. IveGoneAway (talk) 21:14, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Replying to OP Mangoe: I propose Merge with Victoria, Kansas instead of Pfeifer on the basis (to be confirmed) that Easdale was a part of the British Victoria Colony of 1873 and was and still is separate from the 1876 Volga German Pfeifer parish. Easdale settlers were in part if not wholy British and the location is proximal to the Victoria Colony founder ranches; Grant's Villa and the "Scotty" Philip Ranch. The Meder family was among the orginal Easdale settlers, still holds the land, and is a name consistent with the colony. We have names of the Easdale settlers and I have asked for comparison with the registered British colonists. IveGoneAway (talk) 00:30, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, I'll go out on a limb and infer that Easdale and Norfolk were nostalgic post office names for the British colonists who concentrated their "estates" on the low ridge between the Smoky and Big Creek. The number of Victoria colonists was capped just over 200 and they had no real interest in town building, apparently. After the collapse of the British colony, the German villages had little need for little post offices or one-room Protestant schools on the prairie. What is on the EL CO page is good enough, probably. IveGoneAway (talk) 16:54, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting to discuss potential Merge targets.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, The WordsmithTalk to me 22:31, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Merge/Redirect to Ellis County, Kansas based on a preference for redirecting rather than outright deleting post offices/rural areas rather than deleting them outright when usage of the name as a place can be demonstrated. I think the county is the best target for a redirect because the relationship between Easdale and the neighboring communities of Pfeiffer and Victoria hasn't been confirmed by an sources that I can see. Probably worth a line in the county article; something like, "In the 1880's a rural post office and school were located at Easdale about 8 miles south of Victoria and 2 miles north of Pfeiffer." Eluchil404 (talk) 02:14, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Out of curiosity, why the county and not Wheatland Township, Ellis County, Kansas? Jbt89 (talk) 17:49, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Two reasons, first because Uncle G had mentioned the county article above in the discussion, and second because when I made the comment I was not aware that Kansas counties had named townships with articles that might be an option for a redirect. I have no objection to the township as a target, my primary goal is to help create a consensus to preserve the limited sourced info while removing the incorrect appearance that this was ever a formal settlement or ghost town. Eluchil404 (talk) 00:20, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Eluchil404 You can't find a connection between the Easdale PO, school, store, and cemetery and Pfeifer because Pfeifer had their own school, store, and cemetery (especially) and really wanted no connection at that time.
    The evidence of association of Easdale with the Victoria Colony is largely geographic. The Victoria Colony was a concentration (between the Smoky and Big Creek) of estates from Norfolk, to Grant Villa, to Easdale, to Philip Ranch. The south boundary of the Victoria Colony was the Smoky Hill River. source The Duke of Norfolk was a sponsor of the Victoria Colony. George Grant might be from the Grants around Easdale, Scotland. ... the point being, Norfolk and Easdale were born and died with the colony, not Pfeifer, not EL CO.
    @ Jbt89 Two reasons, first, Easdale was in Freedom Township, two, township boundaries in this county are wibbly-wobbly over time ...
    Here is a good map of the remnants of the colony shortly before the Easdale school and PO closed. There's that railroad that ATSF advertised as building through Easdale.
    Ellis Co Townships have been significantly restructured recently. I could dig into that with over time.
    I have some name lists now, but I can't work with them over this weekend.
    IveGoneAway (talk) 02:49, 10 February 2024 (UTC) 15:32, 10 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to Freedom Township, Ellis County, Kansas. Most of the above discussion of the Victoria colony seems like original (though sensible and relevant) research, so I don't think a merge with Victoria, Kansas makes sense. It has convinced me that Easdale (the post office and associated rural area) likely has a different origin than Pfeiffer, though, so any merger or redirect should go to an article about the surrounding countryside (the township being the obvious candidate), not the town of Pfeiffer. I've gone ahead and added a history section to that article and given it a couple sentences about the Easdale post office, so deleting this article won't cause the information in it to be lost. Jbt89 (talk) 03:41, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    You might add the home of the Victoria Colonist's founder, George Grant's Villa, to the Freedom Township article. By RS, it is in Section 8 of Freedom Township. More notable to the township than either Duck Creek or Eagle Creek, and critical to the British colonists there, Big Creek clips the township (Grant's Villa faces Big Creek). There is also the Norfolk "hamlet".
    Merging Easdale with Freedom Township is practical, as the least resistance path. I don't deny that as presented the establishment of the Easdale PO by the Victoria Colonists is "OR", I did say it is circumstantial and needing confirmation, and I have not added it to any article. I do have some citations to support it, but failing a colonists name, even Grant's, on the post office application, there is no certainty that the Victoria Colony founded that PO. (Even then there is some synthysis, I suppose.) IveGoneAway (talk) 18:38, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Good stuff. Adding it to the Freedom Township history section now. Jbt89 (talk) 06:33, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually, (after another 3 mile hike-think) this is the best redirect target, thanks. If I ever get into the Grant Folder in the basement of the Hays Public Library and come up witha few more solid RS, and want to change the redirect, that would be a good problem. IveGoneAway (talk) 21:38, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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