![Cindy phillips corsicana](https://kumkoniak.com/9.jpg)
It's a low, white concrete building that Leonard Price has owned and worked in for 52 years, where cows and pigs are hauled in for slaughter and custom butchering. The only other business remaining in Haswell, L&M Processing, sits kitty-corner across Route 96 from the gas station. Last year Union Pacific, citing high costs and little return, mothballed the rail line that runs through the heart of the town. Since then, Haswell's lumberyard, bank, grocery store and cafe have all shut down, too. The school's closing a decade ago seemed to mark a turning point in the town's fortunes. Today students living on Haswell's western-most border are bused 45 miles one way to school in Eads. The old fire-department building a quarter-mile up the road is boarded up, as is the Haswell Elementary School, a building constructed in the 1960s school mold: low, clean brick lines, flat-roofed. People stop and gossip at the one convenience store/gas station, Haswell Propane, a curved metal hanger along Route 96. The 1990 census found 62 people-38 families-in Haswell, a cluster of buildings surrounded by central Kiowa County's wheat and corn fields. A steady supply of water lay underground, and so, in 1887, as the builders of the Pueblo and State Line Railroad planned their route, they made a notation on their maps to identify the spot between the closest towns on either side-Eads, 21 miles to the east, and Sugar City, 34 miles west: "Has well." The town got its name from the railroad that ran through it and siphoned grain from the white elevators that rise above Colorado's eastern plains.
![Cindy phillips corsicana](https://kumkoniak.com/9.jpg)