Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Bala, KS

Bala is an unincorporated census-designated place and ghost town in Riley County, Kansas, about 25 miles northwest of Manhattan.

Bala began as a Welsh colony: in March 1870 the Reverend R. Gwesyn Jones and James Hughes Jenkins bought land from the Kansas Pacific Railroad for $2.50 an acre to establish a Welsh settlement through the Welsh Land and Emigration Society of America.

The settlers first called their colony Y Bala yn Powys, after the town of Bala in North Wales, and 23 natives of Wales were already living there by the 1870 federal census.

After failing to find enough water at the first site, the settlers moved two miles west near a spring and laid out the town of Bala in 1871; its post office opened on February 24, 1871, in Rowland Davies' general store.

Bala Township was organized from the southern portion of Milford Township on July 30, 1871.

The first cheese factory in Riley County was built in Bala in 1876, and after Bala incorporated in 1878 its chief exports were livestock, cheese, and country produce shipped from Clay Center.

Bala declined after the Kansas Central Railway was built through nearby Leonardville in 1881, and a tornado almost destroyed the town in 1882; another tornado hit in 1903, and by 1910 its population was down to 100.

In 1887 the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad laid tracks 1.5 miles southwest of the village at a station named Bala City, and most of the town moved closer to the tracks.

Bala's Presbyterian Church, built in 1890, still stands in deteriorating condition, and Bala Heritage Park southeast of town preserves a stone-arched railroad bridge described as one of the largest in Kansas.

Bala faded when Fort Riley expanded to the edge of town in the 1960s — the Bala school closed in 1964 and the post office closed on March 25, 1966.