[4] It was based around the surveyed line of the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Gulf Railroad, in an attempt to gain an advantage over its rival.

[7] The first celebration in Girard occurred on July 4, 1868, marking Sunday school and Independence Day.

From the strip pits, slopes were run along the veins, and coal operations opened on a small scale.

[10] Today the landscape of southeastern Crawford County is covered with long strip mines now full of water and serving as fishing lakes & unfarmed wildlife habitat.

These immigrants were more often adherents of Catholicism in contrast to the generally Protestant population previously in the county.

At the time this created social tension but today Crawford county celebrates its South European heritage with the annual "Little Balkan Days" event.

Overseas, broadsides were distributed along the Mediterranean, promising prosperity in the coal fields of southeast Kansas.

Steamship companies sent agents throughout Europe to recruit workers, underwriting one-way passage.

Populist Percy Daniels, whose farm was nearby in Crawford Township, briefly owned the Girard Herald and used it to promote his views; he was elected lieutenant governor in 1892.

In 1896, Julius Wayland moved to Girard from Kansas City, Missouri and brought with him his socialist periodical Appeal to Reason.

Warren was a well-known figure on the left and managed to persuade some of America's leading progressives to contribute to the Appeal to Reason.

In 1904, Warren commissioned Upton Sinclair to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicago meat-packing houses.

After the book was published by Doubleday in 1906, the popularity of the Appeal to Reason increased, as did the attacks on Wayland and Warren.

He was convicted of violating the Smith Espionage Act and, in September 1918, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

[20] In 1915 Emanuel Julius was invited to move to Girard and write for Appeal to Reason, then the largest socialist periodical in the country.

At the suggestion of Marcet's aunt, Jane Addams of Hull House, both assumed the surname Haldeman-Julius.

At the end of nine years, the small project had become a gigantic publishing venture; Emanuel Haldeman-Julius became known as "the Henry Ford of literature".

[22] Following World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover viewed the Little Blue Books' inclusion of such subjects as socialism, atheism, and frank treatment of sexuality as a threat; Haldeman-Julius was added to the enemies list.

He was found drowned in his own swimming pool by his second wife of nine years, Sue Haldeman-Julius.

They were sold by mail order by his son until 1978, when the Girard printing plant and warehouse were destroyed by fire.

In May 2003, four people were killed and over a dozen injured by the biggest tornado in Crawford County in recent memory.

[24] The tornado touched down at 4:40 p.m. near McCune in western Crawford County, cutting a path almost half a mile wide.

It traveled by the outskirts of Girard into the small community of Ringo, into Franklin, and then by the outer reaches of Mulberry.

The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.

The paper took strong ground in favor of the validity of Mr. Joy's title to the neutral lands, and on this account its office and material were set fire to on July 14, 1871, and destroyed.

New material was obtained, and the paper, enlarged and improved, re-appeared August 13, and was later published as a nine-column folio weekly.