Motor, Kansas
place in Kansas, United States
Motor is a ghost town in Paradise Township, Rooks County, Kansas, United States.
History
Motor was located three-quarters of a mile to the east of Codell. The town had two stores, a hotel and restaurant, a blacksmith shop, a wind driven grist mill and a saw mill. The Floreyville post office was moved to Motor and a school was established in 1879. The first school building was constructed of sod. A frame schoolhouse was built in 1886 and served the community until 1894.
In 1879, Motor failed to negotiate an agreement to establish a depot with Union Pacific Railroad. Union Pacific instead founded the community of Codell as a railroad town. Most of the frame buildings in Motor were moved to the growing community of Codell. In 1889, the Motor post office was moved to Codell, then Motor was soon abandoned.
The public source identifies “Motor, Kansas” as place in Kansas, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Motor, Kansas and place.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Motor, Kansas”, the useful work is to connect “place in Kansas, United States” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48845678. Authority coordinates are 39.194, -99.159. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1879, 1886, 1894 and 1889.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Motor, Kansas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.