This was the connecting link of civilization the valley was now to the outside world. New people, with new business life came; the old inhabitants were awakened from their peaceful slumber of contentment, and a new era, a greatness only dreamed of by far-seeing few, began to be a reality. Land content to be worthless waste became valuable town lots in the new towns springing up along the new highway built in the track of the one made by the prairie schooner a half-century before.
The real history of the new town of Bayard began with the building of the Alliance-Guernsey Branch of the Bayard and Morrill which ran its first trains in 1899 and 1900. At that time the old town site moved over practically bodily. A few of the early homesteaders who had taken up land and living in the vicinity of Bayard for the two decades preceding the establishment of the new town site were: Fred Benton. W. P. De Vault, W. W. Vannatta, W. T. McKelvey, R. F. Durnell. F. A. Comstock, W. L. Thomas, Jas. Webster, J. T. Montgomery and S. H. Osborne.
During 1920, the Bayard Transcript secured the services of an excellent, trained writer and reviewer, Evans Hilton. Mr. Hilton made a review and survey of the facilities and opportunities of the town of Bayard and vicinity. Measuring Bayard not only as a single town or city, but taking the broader view of its wonderful trade community and territory, he pictured the entire project in splendid terms. Much of the history of the community is woven into this graphic series and while the entire product is much too long for reproduction in this work, we feel it should not be lost to posterity. Neither should this work be confined to the narrow limitations of the newspaper file, kept in two. or three places, but given fuller