William Allen White was born on February 10, 1868 in Emporia, Kansas, the only surviving child of Dr. Allen and Mary Hatton White. A younger brother died in infancy.

​In El Dorado, the family rented “the foundry”, a rambling one-story house of many chimneys located at Central and Vine, present-day site of the post office. In 1878, Dr. White replaced this house with a large two-story house with 144 linear feet of porches.

Dr. White had a habit of continually inviting company home, much to his wife’s chagrin; they ran their home as a hotel for a few years, losing money in the endeavor. Following his death, Mrs. White ran a boarding house.

Although he started college in Emporia, William quit in 1885, thinking it wrong for his widowed mother to work so hard to keep him in school. His future career was decided when he wrote to a grocer, a dry goods merchant, and a newspaper publisher in El Dorado, seeking a job. Only the publisher, T. P. Fulton, responded with a job offer, and thus William Allen White entered the newspaper business.

As a printer’s devil for the El Dorado Democrat, he was given all the little and dirty jobs, but also gained valued experience in how a newspaper was put out. He once ran a four-line item about a regular town poker game, intimating rather broadly that “officials should do something.” Not knowing it was an ancient institution, possibly under the officials’ protection, his days as a reporter for that paper were over.

At the Democrat, he developed a desire to make journalism a career. Realizing his need for further education, he returned to college in Emporia, while working as a printer for the Emporia News, and as a compositor and later reporter for the Emporia Daily News.

In the summer of 1886, White enrolled at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, working for area newspapers as well as some work for papers in St. Louis, Topeka and Chicago. He attended four years but with only fair grades, he never completed work for a diploma.

While later working for the Kansas City Star, he met schoolteacher Sallie Lindsay. Finding that she “had brains” and shared his love of books, theater, and music, they were married April 27, 1893. He liked to talk things over with Sallie, giving her great credit as his true helper. Two children were born to the Whites: William Lindsay in 1900, and Mary Katherine in 1904, who was to die in a horse-riding accident in 1921.


Choosing to live out his life in a small Kansas town, he was fond of saying he could make any kind of a fool of himself in Emporia and it was just between himself and his subscribers. Here he was free to express himself.

In July of 1899, the Whites moved into “Red Rocks”, a house named for the red sandstone rocks quarried in Colorado. After a fire on the upper floor, the Whites turned the original Queen Anne-style home into a Tudor Revival-style. In this home, the Whites entertained people of national and international importance, including writers, artists, and seven presidents.