Editing Council Grove, Kansas (section)

== History ==
[[Image:Stouffer's Railroad Map of Kansas 1915-1918 Morris County.png|thumb|left|1915-1918 Railroad Map of Morris County.]]
[[File:2018 West front of house -1.jpg|alt=This is the oldest stone home on the Santa Fe Trail and houses the Trail Days Cafe & Museum.|thumb|Historic Rawlinson-Terwilliger Stone Home, 803 West Main Street (2021)]]
{{See also|History of Kansas}}

Council Grove was a stop on the [[Santa Fe Trail]].  The first European-American settler was [[Seth M. Hays]], who came to the area in 1847 to trade with the [[Kaw (tribe)|Kaw tribe]], which had a reservation established in the area in 1846.  Hays was a great-grandson of [[Daniel Boone]].

The Main street in Council Grove is the old Santa Fe Trail. The Rawlinson-Terwilliger Home, 803 West Main Street, is the oldest stone home on the Santa Fe Trail and houses the Trail Days Cafe & Museum.

A post office was established in Council Grove on February 26, 1855.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.kshs.org/geog/geog_postoffices/search/page:1/county:MR/sort:County.county_name/direction:asc | title=Kansas Post Offices, 1828-1961 | publisher=Kansas Historical Society | accessdate=15 June 2014}}</ref>

In 1858, the town was officially incorporated by the legislature.<ref>{{cite book|title=History of the State of Kansas: Containing a Full Account of Its Growth from an Uninhabited Territory to a Wealthy and Important State|url=https://archive.org/details/historyofstateof00andr|year=1883|publisher=A. T. Andreas|page=[https://archive.org/details/historyofstateof00andr/page/803 803]}}</ref>  Hays also opened a restaurant in 1857, the Hays House, which is said to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant west of the [[Mississippi River]].

The town has 15 sites listed on the [[National Register of Historic Places]].  One is the Post Office Oak.  Travelers left their mail in this designated tree to be picked up by others going in the right direction. [[General Custer]] of the [[United States Army]] slept here with his troops during the [[American Civil War]], under a large tree known now as the Custer Elm. 
 
The [[National Old Trails Road]], also known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, was established in 1912, and was routed through [[Herington, Kansas|Herington]], [[Delavan, Kansas|Delavan]], Council Grove.

In 1943, German and Italian prisoners of [[World War II]] were brought to Kansas and other Midwest states as a means of solving the labor shortage caused by American men serving in the war effort. Large [[internment]] camps were established in Kansas: [[Camp Concordia]], Camp Funston (at [[Fort Riley]]), Camp Phillips (at [[Salina, Kansas|Salina]] under [[Fort Riley]]). [[Fort Riley]] established 12 smaller branch camps, including Council Grove.<ref>[http://www.gentracer.org/powcampsKS.html List of Prisoner Of War (POW) Camps in Kansas]</ref>