The story
Welcome to Wakarusa
Wakarusa began in 1852 as a village called Salem in the woods of southern Olive Township. A town meeting in 1859 gave it a Kansas name said to mean “knee deep in mud,” and today it is known for its spring maple syrup festival.
For ten years after Olive Township was organized, Deahl (1905) says, its only meeting places were log schoolhouses. In 1849 a post office called Mount Olive opened in Harvey Bly’s log cabin about two and a half miles north of the present town. In 1852 Messrs. Holdeman, Smeltzer and Pletcher platted a village where Wakarusa stands and named it Salem, and the Mount Olive post office moved there.
There was already a Salem in Indiana, and the mail went astray. Chapman (1881) says the name was changed in 1859. Deahl and Weaver (1916) tell how a town meeting chose the name after Mr. Woolverton proposed Wakarusa, the name of a place in Kansas where he had lived; they report that it meant “knee deep in mud,” which suited the boggy ground. Wikipedia calls the meaning uncertain, citing Baker’s From Needmore to Prosperity.
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William Moon was the first settler on the site, near the “fish pond,” and Thomas Inks and Jackson Woolverton were the first merchants. The Lutherans built the first church in 1866, and Chapman counted Methodist, Lutheran, Christian and Baptist churches by 1880, along with a stave and heading factory, a saw and planing mill built in 1866, wagon shops and nearly four hundred people. The first public school was built about 1856.
The town grew without a railroad until the Wabash line opened in 1893. Wakarusa was incorporated as a town in 1898, and by 1916 Weaver found about 1,200 people, two banks, the Wakarusa Tribune (founded 1893) and a new brick town building of 1915. The Maple Syrup Festival began in 1969, and the town’s historical museum keeps the old Wabash depot. The 2020 census counted 1,998 people.
