History and lore
Washington Marlatt grew up on an Indiana farm, went to college at eighteen, and became a licensed Methodist preacher. In 1856 he came out to Kansas Territory, walked from Leavenworth to Manhattan and took up a claim. Three years later he was one of the three founders and the first principal of Bluemont Central College, which grew into Kansas State Agricultural College, now Kansas State University. He became a prosperous farmer and stock raiser with 500 acres in Riley County, and wrote hundreds of newspaper pieces on farming and frontier life.
He came to Kansas, by the university’s account, to help keep slavery out of the new territory, and chose Manhattan because a college was planned there. He was also president of the Manhattan Town Association. His wife, Julia Bailey, came out in 1859 to assist at the college, and they were married in the college building in 1861. Three of their five children graduated from the college their father had helped to start, and their son Frederick later taught entomology there.
The family’s homestead in Manhattan still stands. Its limestone house, built about 1856, is said to be the oldest standing stone home in Riley County and was home to the college’s first teachers. When the old Bluemont College building was torn down, Washington bought its stone and built a bank barn on the farm, setting the carved “BLUEMONT COLLEGE” blocks above its west door. Kansas State University now owns the homestead, which is on the Register of Historic Kansas Places, and an interpretive marker was placed there in July 2023. The university’s Marlatt Hall, built in 1964, is named for him.
His 1918 biography traces the family back through colonial New Jersey and Staten Island to French Huguenot settlers, and says his great-grandfather Abram moved to the Martinsburg area of Virginia about 1758 and his grandfather fought in the Revolution. Three of his children became well known: Charles Lester Marlatt, the entomologist, and Abby Lillian Marlatt, the home economist, and his granddaughter Abby Marlatt was a civil rights leader in Kentucky.