I would hope that everyone knows about Warrensburg's sesquicentennial celebration this year. The WHS Art calendar is out, the special cookbook is selling rapidly, and several downtown windows have sesquicentennial-related displays. One of the busiest weeks in the year-long celebration is coming up rapidly.

The sesquicentennial committee will be represented at the home show this weekend, and again at the taste of Warrensburg event on Tuesday. On Saturday, April 9th, one of the major events will be held, with people demonstrating various aspects of life when Warrensburg was incorporated.

There's a little history to be considered. We all know that Warrensburg was the County Seat way back in 1840, when the Old Courthouse (now part of the Johnson County Historical Society museum complex) was built. So why did the founders wait 15 years before incorporating the city?

I've found one important clue – a lot of cities in Missouri are celebrating their sesquicentennial this year, just as we are. I also found in the 1881 "History of Johnson County" an indication that the legislature had passed a specific law authorizing it. My deduction is that certain types of cities were not authorized before that law was passed, probably in 1854. So now Warrensburg is joined by Windsor, Nevada and many others, in whooping it up in 2005.

If I can find one fault so far, it's with the sesquicentennial website. Some of the pictures, which once took minutes to load, have finally been resized, but the site is still not accessible from non-Microsoft browsers. Just 11 days before the first really big public event, the site has no details about it. The pages don't even have the type of coding that make them attractive to the search engines. What a waste!