On September 16, 1861, Albert Freeman Waugh left the comfortable civilian world of Sheboygan Falls, Wis., and enlisted in Company H of the 1st Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Private Waugh was shot through the knee at the Battle of Perryville in October 1862, spent six months recovering in a hospital, and returned to Sheboygan Falls in 1863 crippled for life. Even though he had been gone barely two years, he no longer felt at ease in his hometown. After several years of trying to reclaim his old life, he gave up. In 1872, he “took by force” his family and moved to Kansas, claiming that the “stumps and stones” in Wisconsin made farming impossible, an excuse his son described decades later as “perfectly invalid at the time it was given.”
Over his wife’s objections, Waugh relocated the family near the brand-new town of King City in McPherson County, Kan., where a colony of Union Army veterans and their families had been established in 1871. The colony had first been organized in meetings at Ashtabula, Ohio, and was also known as the Ashtabula Soldier’s Colony. It was one of the first of several colonies that would spring up on the western frontier, offering those who had served in the war an opportunity to start anew.
The idea of “colonies” was not a new or novel concept. Dozens sprang up across Kansas in the 1870s organized around religion, geography, or country of origin, with the idea of providing mutual support in an uncertain environment. Similar colonies appeared in western Minnesota, the Dakotas, Colorado, and Nebraska, but soldier colonies catering to Union veterans were exceedingly rare, with less than 10 dotted across the northern Great Plains. Soldier colonies were an efficient and cost-effective mechanism for organizing and relocating veterans to the frontier after the Civil War. But they were far more
