“A City on the Move.”
That’s the motto of the town of Ulysses, Kansas, which has about 6,000 residents. It’s named after Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president of the United States (not the Homeric hero). It’s the largest municipality in Grant County (also named for the president) and is home to about 75 percent of the county’s residents.
And that motto is to be taken literally.
Ulysses was founded in 1885 and, according to newspaper reports from that era, was well situated for growth. Not only did it sit on the east-west rail line of the time, but unlike many surrounding areas, the water table was only about thirty feet down, allowing for relatively easy access to fresh well water. (Many other areas required wells a few hundred feet deep.) By 1889, the town had a large schoolhouse, four hotels, twelve restaurants and another dozen saloons, six gambling halls, and an opera house. Nearly 1,500 people had moved to Ulysses.
Then the droughts came, turning this once-thriving boomtown, colloquially, to dust. By 1906, the town’s population hovered around 100—a far cry from its peak nearly two decades prior.
To make matters worse, the boom years of the mid-1880s were partially financed through a public debt offering. To meet the infrastructure needs of this growing city, town leaders issued municipal bonds, amassing well over $80,000 in debt. (Accounting for inflation, that’s the modern-day equivalent of more than $2 million.) As was probably common for that era, the town’s leadership didn’t use that money to dig more wells (which might have staved off a drought) or other such improvements. Instead, they pocketed the money and never paid down the debt. Bondholders were less than pleased, and the next generation of Ulysses residents paid for their predecessors’ sins via sky-high property (per one report, a 600 percent levy) and residency taxes.
Often, when things like that happen—when taxes get too high—residents move. That’s kind of what occurred in this case. But there’s a big difference: the people took the town with them.
Toward the end of 1908, Ulysses’s remaining townsfolk purchased a new area of land about two miles west of Ulysses itself. In February 1909, the people started to move. Buildings were placed on horse-drawn skids and wagons and pulled to the new location of Ulysses. One of the hotels was cut into two parts and, over the course of several days, transported to the new site. By June of that same year, all the residents had moved, as had many of the municipal buildings, and the old town of Ulysses became a bondholder-owned ghost town.
Ulysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. When he was nominated to attend West Point, the nominating congressman accidentally wrote his name wrong. Grant adopted the incorrect name, likely hoping to avoid confusion at the academy (and not, as some sources suggest, because his birth name bore the initials “HUG”). The middle initial, therefore, doesn’t stand for anything, but as his mother’s maiden name was Simpson, many sources assert that is Grant’s middle name.