Chapter 13, pages 103-105
Folsom, a former community on the present Burlington Northern railway that runs from Pacific Junction to Council Bluffs, enjoyed a unique function among Mills County's towns when it was an active commercial center: it served as a major shipping point for garden produce. Mrs. Frances Godsey of Glenwood, whose grandfather, Freelove Turner, was one of the pioneer settlers in the Pony Creek area, remembers when farm wagons loaded with onions, pumpkins, watermelons, etc., converged on Folsom as buyers from Kansas City came to purchase huge quantities of such produce. She said that Folsom was a very "homey place."
The community had its beginnings in the latter third of the nineteenth century. At first it was called Henton Station, or Henton, after F. M. Henton by whose farm home the county’s first railroad, the Council Bluffs, St. Joseph & Kansas City line ran. After a railway station was established there, a stockyards and loading facility were built and this served stockmen and farmers for many years.
Evidently the community had a loyal Democratic party nucleus among its citizens for after 1896, when Grover Cleveland was elected president of the United States for the second time, the name of the village was changed to Folsom, honoring Mrs. Cleveland’s maiden name. The town had its major period of commercial activity after that and continued to have a store until well after World War Two. In 1904 its population was listed as 50. During the late 1930’s a rendering plant for processing dead animals into industrial products was built there and operated for several years.
In June, 1895, a man named Sayers, who wore distinctive box-toes shoes and whose horse had only three shoes, stole several bushels of onions from a farmer in St. Marys township near Folsom, taking them to Omaha to sell at the farmer market. He was apprehended and convicted of the theft when authorities noted the distinctive box toed footprints left in the field as well as the horse’s footprints.
A few years later a man who lived just south of Folsom claimed to have discovered a prehistoric man in a limestone quarry site by Folsom, and exhibited this around the area, charging admission to see it. When it was shown in Malvern the editor of the paper wrote that he had seen it, and at once recognized the prehistoric man as a “hard character”, but most of the community had shunned him as he was just starting on his first grand tour around the world. Mrs. Godsey recalled the exhibit and that the owner had done a very casual job with his project, even making the supposed man out of concrete instead of using the limestone available.
The community name lives on, as nearby is one of the best of the “borrowpit” lakes that were made during the construction of Interstate Highway 29 which runs down the Missouri River flood plain just west of Folsom. This has fine sand beaches and is quite heavily used – sometimes at night as well as in the daylight hours as the Mills County sheriff has been called several times to the lake by residents of the vicinity who had reported sizable groups of “skinny-dipper” bathers using the site. Just north of the lake are the two nationally –famed “million dollar” rest stops, the high cost of which (estimated at $1,200,000) set something of a record in construction pricing, resulting from engineering errors which hadn’t considered the peculiarities of the flood-plain soil.
There is also a shallow slough by Folsom, long known as Folsom Lake, left by an early channel of the Missouri River, which is a favorite of water-fowl hunters. Thus Folsom lives on as a neighborhood even though it no longer is a commercial center.
