Ghost Town of the Week: Week of November 2nd, 2014: Clay Center

Before getting into this town, I would like to suggest that anyone who wants to find these obscure ghost towns buy one of these.

This is a Kansas DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer. You can find them for about $20 at most bookstores.

I have been using this Atlas to find all my Ghost Towns in Kansas for 9 years. It lists most locales that are (or were recently) towns. One of these that was recently a town is Clay Center.

No, I'm not talking about the county seat of Clay County and a town of 4,000 people. This Clay Center is in the southeastern corner of Butler County, and aptly is in the center of Clay Township. Nearby the ghost town, my DeLorme Atlas also lists three locations called Pine Grove, Ophir and Wingate. Nothing appears to be left of any of these locales and it looks like they were all former oil towns that were company owned and temporary, which would explain why there's nothing left.

DISCLAIMER: I visited Clay Center in 2006, so some of this may have changed since then
Little is left of Clay Center, but one thing that immediately caught my eye was a spectacular abandoned service station on the northwest corner of the intersection of Cole Creek Road and SE 210th Street. Clay Center lies along a somewhat major county road that connects Leon with Atlanta and Burden (Cole Creek Road), as well as another one that connects Douglass with Latham (SE 210th Street), so perhaps a service station was needed back in the earlier days of automobiles in the locale.

The gas pumps are completely gone and the doors and windows have all been boarded up (with tin!) but some of the lamps are still there and the service station side, with two garages, is in better condition. I would still guess that the station has been abandoned for at least 20 years.

About 200 feet south of the intersection along Cole Creek Road is this one-room school. The school is still in good condition, but I can't imagine it's still used.

Behind the school you can still see two brick outhouses. Online research has told me that the school was used in 1945, but I have found no other information on the school. I also can't find any information on a post office that may have ran in this town. This leads me to believe that perhaps the town never was much more than the school, the service station, and maybe a handful of residents who worked in either building. There still are two occupied houses in the town, as well as a large empty lot across from the service station.