Although the book, "Haddam's Hundred" written by Dora Hoffman Brown is out of print this webmaster quotes Dora Hoffman Brown's words to give internet viewers some historical insight into a pre-Haddam era.

"In the mid 1850's there was not a vestige of civilization in that part of Kansas now known as Washington County. For untold ages it (Kansas) had been covered with a waving sea of wild grasses. Vast buffaloes had for numberless years wandered almost unmolested across it and its solitude had been broken only by occasional bands of nomadic savages in search of prey or plunder.

Kansas was a part of that section of country which old geographies had designated as 'the great American desert,' a barren waste incapable of agricultural production and uninhabitable. But it was not destined to always remain unknown."