Pretty Prairie

In the fall of 1872, forty-six-year-old widowed Mrs. Mary Collingwood, with visions of great opportunities on the free lands of western Kansas, sold her Indiana farm; with two new covered wagons, four horses, $2,200, and her six sons and three daughters, she left for the prairies of Kansas The next spring she bought fourteen yoke of oxen and had her five oldest sons break the prairie. In the spring sun, the prairie looked so beautiful that she called the place Pretty Prairie. She gave the name to the Post Office she established in the front of her house.