On July 11, 1871, J. Hout Minnich and John Hufbauer filed a town plat for El Paso in Sedgwick County, Kansas. It established streets from Madison to Kay and from Water Street to Georgie Avenue, and business boomed.
El Paso Cemetery sits on a slight hill in the center of Derby but was once surrounded by farmland and was about a mile southeast of the growing settlement. In 1878, the cemetery opened, 9 years after the Garrett family staked a claim near the bank of…
Alexander and Margaret (Dickson) Garrett were the first settlers to put down roots in what was first El Paso and was renamed Derby, Kansas. In 1869, the area was considered Indian Territory (Osage Trust Lands) and had many transient traders, trappers…
In 1869, Fred Gerteis homesteaded this land. In 1900, he traveled back to Germany to get his 23-year-old nephew, Albert Lauber, to help work the land by promising the farm eventually would become his. After Albert Lauber returned to Germany to get…