Treece: The Kansas Town Left Behind at the State Line

reece sits in the far southeast corner of Kansas, right on the Oklahoma line. Just across it is Picher. For most of the 20th century, they were two halves of the same mining boom. Treece got its post office in 1917. The towns sat in the Tri-State Mining District, where lead and zinc were dug from under the prairie. At their peak, Treece and Picher together had more than 20,000 residents, and the region’s lead went into bullets in both world wars. When the mines closed, they left behind mountains of chat, gravel waste still laced with lead and zinc, some piles up to 200 feet tall. Underground, the abandoned mines flooded. Treece became part of the Cherokee County Superfund Site. Picher, just across the state line, got a federal buyout, and its residents moved out. Treece, a few hundred yards away, didn’t. The two towns fell under different EPA regions. Picher’s office in Dallas approved a buyout, while Treece’s office in Kansas City resisted, saying it had already cleaned yards and removed the main ways children were exposed to lead. Treece’s roughly 100 remaining residents were stuck in houses nobody would buy. Local and state officials kept pushing. In October 2009, Congress authorized the EPA to buy out Treece. Sixty-six families sold their homes, and 12 renters were relocated. On April 5, 2012, a Kansas law dissolved the town, and it was removed from the state map. One couple refused to leave. Timothy Busby lived there with his wife Della until his death in 2016.