Morehead

A national depression in the late 1880s nearly emptied the town. Recovery came in 1895 with Dr. William C. McConnell and his wife Lizzie, evangelists for the cooperative movement. McConnell organized the Morehead Cooperative Association and its stockholder-owned store, founded and edited the Morehead Searchlight — which reprinted Girard's socialist Appeal to Reason — and in 1899 helped launch the Cooperative Manufacturing Company with its creamery, cannery, windmill and plow works, and brick and tile factory. A cooperative dining hall, the New Age Restaurant, opened the same year to free farm wives from the kitchen.

A split in the cooperative movement in the early 1900s broke the experiment; the Searchlight relocated to Cherryvale, and McConnell left for Lawrence in 1911. Train stops ended in the 1930s, and Highway 169 construction in 1947 destroyed the storefronts facing Main Street. In 1994 Kansas Historical Society archaeologists spent four weeks excavating the business district under a highway-realignment agreement, recovering the jars, bottles, hardware, and doll parts of the town's commercial life. By then the McConnell house was the only building left standing downtown.