St. Francis

St. Francis is on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line and Farm Road 1912 some fourteen miles northeast of Amarillo in southeastern Potter County. When the Southern Kansas Railway built from the community of Panhandle to Amarillo in 1908, St. Francis began as a station on the new line. Later that year G. A. Meyer opened a general store in the community, and a post office was opened in his store. St. Francis was one of a number of Catholic farming communities in the Amarillo area, and in March 1908 Father David Henry Dunn of Amarillo celebrated Mass in a private home in the community. In January 1909 the community was dedicated, and in the spring of that year a Catholic church building was completed. By 1914 the community also had two general stores. Its post office was discontinued in 1916, was reopened in 1918, and was closed permanently after the post office building burned down later that year. The St. Francis school, which was built in the early years of the community, burned down in 1926, and in 1930 the school was consolidated with that of Highland Park. In 1926 a larger brick church was built. The Franciscan Sisters (see FRANCISCANS) started a parochial school in 1933 with some thirty-five students. The church burned down in February 1936 but was rebuilt by the summer of that year. St. Francis reported a population of twenty-five from 1936 to 1948 and of seventy from 1949 to 1964. Its population fluctuated between fifty and sixty in the later 1960s. From 1970 through 2000 the community reported a population of thirty. In 1990 St. Francis included a church, a school, a cemetery, and scattered dwellings.