Silkville, Kansas

	Silkville
	U.S. National Register of Historic Places
	Silkville's school house
Location	Williamsburg Township, Franklin County, Kansas
Nearest city	Williamsburg, Kansas
Coordinates	38°27′00″N 95°29′21″W / 38.45000°N 95.48917°W
Area	6 acres (2.4 ha)
Built	1870
NRHP reference No.	72000504
Added to NRHP	December 15, 1972

Silkville is a ghost town in Williamsburg Township, Franklin County, Kansas, United States.^[1] It was located approximately 2 miles southwest of Williamsburg at the intersection of U.S. 50 highway and Arkansas Road.^[2]

The settlement was founded in the late 1800s by a Frenchman named Ernest de Boissière, who believed in Fourierian utopian socialism. Silkville was a sericulture-based settlement, and remuneration was based what each settler could produce. Silkville's silk was praised at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, but loss of settlers and difficulty in selling the silk resulted in the settlement's collapse. Today, only a few buildings remain.

[GNIS-1] "Silkville, Kansas", Geographic Names Information System, United States Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior

[2] Kansas Atlas & Gazetteer (2009), p. 52.

[1]

[2]