THE Forgotten King Engine of Southeast Kansas
During the turn of the 20th century — as well-established Kansas City engine manufacturers such as Weber, Bauer, and Witte were producing their engines — several now forgotten southeast Kansas engines were being produced a hundred miles to the south. The most prolific of the manufacturers was Ulysses S. King (often referred to as U.S.), who was likely drawn to the area by the zinc and lead mining industry.
King was born in Iowa in 1866, and appears to have moved to the Parsons, Kansas, area by 1884. A 1900 news article noted his 20 years of experience “working at the bench,” which would put the beginning of his career as a machinist somewhere around 1880. King spent the early years of his career as a machinist in the zinc and lead mines of the tristate mining district of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. He received at least some of his education as a machinist in Manhattan, Kansas, where he began classes in 1890. The early to mid-1890s were spent in Joplin, Missouri, where he began experimenting with gas engines around 1894 and was a “wellknown machinist” of the Joplin Foundry & Machine Works by February 1896.
Mention of King is next found during mid-April 1898 in a story noting plans by King and his partner, J.H. Jackson, to erect a foundry and machine shop at Midland, Kansas — an apparently short lived company town about three miles west of Cherokee, Kansas — to
