Driving across Kansas by Ted Cable & Wayne A. Maley

Author:Ted Cable & Wayne A. Maley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700624157
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2017-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Collecting buffalo chips (Kansas State Historical Society)

38 Brewster

The town of Brewster was founded in 1888 and was named after L. D. Brewster of Illinois. He was a director of the Rock Island Railroad, which passed just south of town. Without the railroad, the town would not have survived.

36 Mountain Time Zone

A sign on the county line road bridge here indicates it is time to turn back the clock. You have entered Sherman County (named in honor of General William T. Sherman, a prominent officer and Civil War hero) and left the central time zone. From this point west, you will be on mountain time, one hour earlier than before the bridge.

Like most everything else in western Kansas, the time zone idea is linked to the railroad. In 1883, there were about 100 different railroad times across the United States. Various localities had set their own time, declaring it was 12:00 noon when the sun was directly overhead. Yet when it was noon in New York City, it was only 11:55 in Philadelphia, 11:47 in Washington, DC, and 11:35 in Pittsburgh. The railroad officials tried to make their passenger schedules simpler and established their own railroad time for all towns along each route, but even this caused confusion. So the railroads agreed to establish four time zones across the United States, each centered on a meridian of longitude, 15 degrees apart. By 1884, a similar pattern of twenty-four time zones was established worldwide.

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