Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Homer, Kansas

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. Vanamonde (Talk) 21:38, 7 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Homer, Kansas

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No evidence of a current or former community at this location; it appears to have been a railroad siding/water stop with a post office. BEFORE search did not return significant coverage. –dlthewave ☎ 21:00, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Geography and Kansas. –dlthewave ☎ 21:00, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - satellite image shows nothing there. No railway siding - just a single track. About a mile from the interstate; the exit sign says "Pioneer Road" and another says "Russell next 2 exits". No mention of Homer. There is a large farmhouse 1/2 mile west of these coordinates and another one 1/4 mile east.

--A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 22:13, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - the obvious thing to do is change the article to ghost town, which I did just now. I don't know why Homer wasn't listed in the template or county articles, but I fixed them too. The google satellite view shows the location next to a "Homer Rd", thus article is useful for people to understand the source of that road name. • Sbmeirow • Talk • 02:38, 1 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

May I ask which source supports the "ghost town" label? –dlthewave ☎ 04:20, 1 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

~~Keep~~ No Opinion - Plenty of coverage in newspaper sources. It appears The Russel Record carried a semiregular column, "Homer Items", that discussed matters in the town ([1] [2] [3]). This correspondence contains some substantive information about the town (perhaps not RS as a letter to the editor of sorts). Other papers contained info about the town, including a blowout baseball game and a train timetable. Clearly meets WP:GEOLAND with WP:NTEMP in mind. AviationFreak💬 02:25, 3 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The "substantive information" in that correspondence reads:
From Homer. I have often wondered why The Record, with all its enterprise, has not established an agency and a correspondent in this city. Homer differs from other cities in many things. It has no city government, and the people do as they please. It has no city marshal and is not annoyed by crap shooters.

It has no churches and no dives. There has been a movement in real estate the last few days, but no property has changed hands. No hogs or chickens are kept within the city limits. The census enumerator reports no marriages, no deaths and no babies born during tha last census year. Tarty politics cut no figure and the Ruppenthal-Gernon contest is scarcely heard of.

The health of the city is good which may, perhaps, be attributed to the fact that there are no doctors here. City property is not high and people who wish to enjoy a quiet peaceful life should come to Homer. Having named a few of the negative virtues of the city, I will subside, leaving the positive ones for a future letter. Homer.

This seems to be tongue in cheek. The substantive information it appears to give is that there is nothing much in Homer. It certainly doesn't verify that it actually is a city or anything more than a stop. The baseball game also is quite interesting, as nearly everybody on both teams has the same surname. The baseball game article does mention a school though, Yet if the school is anything more than an extended tutoring arrangement, one would expect some record of that. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 17:11, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't considered that the newspaper is likely tongue-in-cheek; I'm not the best at reading sarcasm but that seems to fit the bill. There is a slightly more substantial mention of the school in source 2, linked above - the name of the "captain" and mention of Sunday school programming. There is a rather substantial log of "Homer Items" columns in various Russell-based papers, but these provide little information about the place itself (much more local happenings and gossip). With this in mind, I've changed my vote of "Keep" to "No Opinion" (I hope that's allowed); I feel that there's probably not enough to show a clear-cut meeting of GEOLAND, but the place seems to act like more of a settlement than your average whistle stop with a post office. AviationFreak💬 05:01, 6 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
delete I have to say this over and over: newspaper references to a place name don't automatically mean that it's a town. I can't find any evidence that there was a settlement there with houses and stores and the like, whereas there's plenty of evidence in the form of maps and aerials that there isn't anything there but a passing siding. These mentions are completely consistent with Homer being a vague locale, not a town; and we've long ago decided that station stops are not notable as such (station buildings being a different matter). Mangoe (talk) 16:35, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment (nom): Not everyone who colonised the Western US lived in a town; many were farmers who bought (or stole) a piece of land far from any settlement. If you asked them where they lived, they'd name the post office where they picked up their mail, which was often just a farmhouse or one of the tiny railroad stations that had been established at regular intervals along the tracks. Maybe there would be a church or schoolhouse nearby to serve the dispersed population. I read the newspaper correspondence as tongue-in-cheek: The writer is having a laugh at the absurdity of living in a such a non-town. –dlthewave ☎ 12:56, 6 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete- I have thought hard about this one and reviewed all the newspaper clippings provided by AviationFreak, and wish to thank them for their efforts finding them. AviationFreak is right that Homer gets a number of mentions, and although the one I quoted above seems fairly clear there was little enough in Homer, there is evidence of a school and/or Sunday School and "Lyceum" (which is not, in this instance, necessarily a school) in the vicinity. There was clearly an area with some settlement that was called Homer, and the existence of the train stop shows why the area acquired that name. Yet per Mangoe, the stop is not sufficient in itself for notability, and per dlthewave, this kind of informal community frequently existed but would lack official recognition. GEOLAND tends to be quite accomodating to place articles because Wikipedia is a Gazetteer. But it is not indiscriminate all the same. So the real question here is whether an encyclopaedic article can be written about the alleged ghost town of Homer. After much searching, I think the answer to that is no. There is simply not enough evidence that this was anything but an informal collection of dwellings in the general vicinity of a train stop. It is better treated in the Russell, Kansas article (which currently does not mention it). All the sources I have looked at have been Russell local sources, and that is the notable community here. Therefore, a useful Alternative to Deletion would be a redirect to Russell, Kansas. No article is possible about Homer, but it may perhaps be notable for a mention at that page. I would thus also be content with redirect as an outcome here. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 18:10, 6 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.