Two Governments, One Town: The Kansas Community That Accidentally Incorporated Itself Twice

Most towns have one government. One mayor, one city council, one set of ordinances telling you how tall your fence can be. That's the standard arrangement, and it works well enough that most people never think twice about it.

The residents of a small farming community in central Kansas — we'll call it by the name used in court documents, Millhaven Township — did not have this luxury. For a significant stretch of the 1920s and into the 1930s, they had two governments. Two mayors. Two councils. Two tax bills arriving in the same mailboxes for the same properties on the same streets.

Photo: Millhaven Township, via images.squarespace-cdn.com

And the genuinely remarkable part? Both governments were completely legal.

How You Accidentally Incorporate a Town Twice

To understand how this happened, you need to understand how municipal incorporation worked in rural Kansas in the early 1920s. The process was not as centralized as it sounds. A community seeking to incorporate as a municipality filed paperwork with its county clerk's office, paid a filing fee, and waited for the state to confirm the registration. Notifications were published in local papers. The whole thing was designed to be accessible to small communities that didn't have lawyers on retainer.

The problem — and it was a structural problem rather than anyone's particular fault — was that Kansas's county boundary lines in this part of the state had been redrawn several years earlier, and the community in question sat almost precisely on the new border between two counties. Different residents, depending on which side of the boundary their property fell on, had different county clerks, different local papers, and different natural points of contact with state government.

In the fall of 1923, a group of community leaders on the eastern side of town decided the community was large enough to incorporate. They filed their paperwork with the eastern county clerk in October. The process moved forward. Three weeks later — apparently unaware of the eastern filing, or perhaps aware of it but uncertain whether it applied to the whole community — a separate group of residents on the western side filed an almost identical incorporation application with the western county clerk.

Both filings were complete. Both fees were paid. Both were processed without incident.

By December 1923, the same collection of houses, farms, and storefronts was simultaneously incorporated as two distinct Kansas municipalities.

Life Under Two City Halls

What followed was less a crisis than a slow-motion administrative comedy that took years to fully appreciate.

Both governments held elections. Both collected taxes — not identical taxes, but overlapping ones, calibrated to each government's understanding of its jurisdiction. Residents who lived clearly on one side of the old county line generally dealt with one government. Residents whose properties straddled the boundary, or who simply didn't know which side they were on, sometimes dealt with both.

According to county historical records and newspaper accounts from the period, the two governments initially operated in a state of polite mutual denial. Each proceeded as if it were the legitimate authority, neither eager to formally challenge the other and risk a ruling that might go the wrong way. Town meetings were held separately. Ordinances were passed independently. At one point, both governments issued contracts for road grading work on the same stretch of unpaved main road — to two different contractors.

The contractors, to their credit, worked it out between themselves.

Residents developed informal coping strategies. Some simply paid whichever tax bill arrived first and ignored the second. Others paid both, reasoning that disputing it would cost more in time and aggravation than the amount owed. A few enterprising property owners — and this is perhaps the most Kansas-appropriate detail in the entire story — argued to both governments that since neither could prove exclusive jurisdiction, they owed taxes to neither, and refused to pay either bill for several years running.

The Court Case Nobody Wanted to Decide

By the late 1920s, the situation had become impossible to ignore. A property dispute — the details of which are lost to history, but which apparently involved a fence line and a water access easement — required a court ruling on which municipal government held legal authority over the parcel in question. Neither government could agree to defer to the other. The case went to the Kansas district court.

The judge's position was, by all accounts, one of visible discomfort. Both incorporations were procedurally valid. Both had been conducted in good faith. Both had been operating as functioning governments for years. There was no obvious legal basis to invalidate either one.

The court ultimately ruled — after considerable deliberation and what historical accounts describe as "extensive correspondence with the state attorney general's office" — on the basis of filing date. The October incorporation, filed three weeks earlier, was determined to be the legally established municipality. The November incorporation was ruled a redundant filing and dissolved.

The ruling did not address the years of dual taxation. It did not require either government to compensate residents who had paid taxes to both. It simply declared one government real and the other retroactively not.

The Quiet Cleanup

The dissolution of the second government was administratively messy in ways the court ruling didn't anticipate. Officials elected under the November incorporation had passed ordinances, signed contracts, and issued permits. Some of those actions had to be reviewed individually to determine whether they had any continuing legal force. A few contracts were quietly honored by the surviving government on practical grounds — the work had already been done.

Kansas subsequently updated its incorporation procedures to require statewide cross-referencing of pending municipal filings, a reform that was apparently not considered necessary until a single community demonstrated that you could accidentally build two governments in the same location without anyone in the state capital noticing for the better part of a decade.

The Part That Sticks With You

What makes this story genuinely worth sitting with isn't the legal absurdity, although that's real enough. It's the human detail of a community that simply adapted. People figured out how to pay two tax bills, navigate two sets of ordinances, and elect officials to two governments covering the same ground — not because anyone told them to, but because that was the reality in front of them and they had farms to run.

Government, it turns out, is mostly a shared agreement. When two versions of that agreement show up at the same address, people find a way to manage.

They just maybe grumble a little more about the property taxes.