After an intense few days of biking and learning in the far SW corner of Kansas, Jen and I drove back across Kansas through many a windmill farm.
In recent decades, some have decided to harness the state’s namesake to produce renewable energy and new income. For a state in which wind is a constant, this development is perhaps no surprise. However, many have objected, concerned about ruining the endless horizons of the prairie.
One of the places that has resisted wind farms is the Flint Hills. It is here that Jen drops me off. My best friend from college grew up outside of Council Grove. Today, I bike the 14 miles into town to learn about efforts to keep this small Kansas community alive and vital, and how to reimagine and re-create prairie life.
After some consultation about hills and road grade, I decide to take the 1400 road.
It is rough going in parts. There are two major rocks in the area: limestone and flint. The good roads have the softer limestone. 1400 is flint. I travel slowly, not just because its large rocks are hard to navigate, but because their sharpness could easily puncture a tire.
Flint slows more than bike travel. It slowed Euro-American settlement. Only with great difficulty could one plow land riddled with hard sharp rocks. Partially for this reason, the U.S. Federal Government established a Native reservation here. In 1851, the Methodist Episcopal Church South opened a mission to purportedly “educate” the Kaw.
A failure, it closed after three years. Today the old limestone building remains, preserved as a major historical landmark. It is one of the few places where the history of Native peoples presence in Kansas is visible. This history of the Kaw is told in Voices of the Wind People performed every other year on the banks of the Neosho River. Members of the Kaw return to Kansas from Oklahoma to perform in this play written by a former director of the Kaw Mission State Historic Site, Ron Parks. I had hoped to see it performed this year, but arrived one day too late.
I did have a chance to have dinner with members of the community who are committed to ensuring that Kansans learn the histories of the violent removal of Native peoples from these lands. They told me about the Kanza Memorial Tree Project. In 2003-4, residents in the area led by Parks planted Bur Oaks along the four miles of the Flint Hills Nature Trail that leads from Council Grove to the Allegawaho Park— a park established on land that was once a federal reservation, but now owned by the Kaw.
They planted one Bur Oak for each of the 806 Kaw who lived on the land when they were forced from it to Oklahoma in 1862. Many of these trees survived the drought, and are alive and well.
History is a fraught and powerful thing. How “we” tell it and re-member (whether with people or trees) shapes not just understandings of pasts, but futures. It forms what we care about, and who “we” are.
Today in Council Grove and Cottonwood Falls, a talented preservationist, Christy Davis, is combining her extensive knowledge of architectural and Kansas history with her understanding of local politics to mobilize history to not preserve, but to re-create buildings and landscapes as spaces that sustain and build communities. I learn of her work from the Wash-o-Rama in Cottonwood Falls.
She along with architect Ben Moore restored this building on the main street, ripping out the drop ceiling and restoring the beautiful tin roof. They transformed the first floor into a laundry mat, an important service for a county in which many do not own their own washers and dryers. The upstairs is a guest house that serves the community through promoting one of the largest local economic engines: tourism.
Today I meet Christy at the site of her new project, the restoration of the Morris County Bank building in Council Grove.
The building stopped functioning as a bank 40 years ago. For some years afterwards, the front of the building was used as a law office, but for the last ten it was completely abandoned. Such buildings pose problems for small towns. For one thing, they are a hazard. If there is too much disrepair, they fall down. This is the rubble from the building next to the bank building.
It collapsed two years ago after a “façade-ectomy” weakened its structure and then a truck ran into it. In the past, towns in the region often opted to tear down these old buildings. Indeed, later in the day, I read in a February 1971 article in the Chase County Leader News that the county raised the Bank Hotel in Strong City after a fire badly damaged it. “All usable rock will be sold for land fill,” the newspaper reported. “Present plans do not call for any building, but the area will be landscaped thereby greatly improving the appearance of the main street.”
Christy and the many talented local crafts people she is working with also are improving the appearance of main street—this time before another building falls down. Today, when I arrived, a painter was transforming the terra cotta molding above these steps so that its color matched the brick.
Someday soon, these steps will lead to a guesthouse along with three rental units for those who work in town.
The doors in these units will retain this beautiful Eastlake Hardware.
I learn from Christy that Eastlake is a late 19thcentury design movement influenced by the arrival of Japanese design sensibilities to the United States. The founder, Charles Eastlake, believed that décor in homes should be made by hand or by machine workers who took pride in their work.
Further evidence of pride in handcraft that remakes communities appears at the final project Christy shares with me today: a dry wall being constructed outside the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.
The Dry Wall Conservancy in partnership with the Preserve are restoring the limestone wall that once stood here. The builders are both from inside and outside the U.S.. Neil, the master waller who is leading the project, is from Edinburgh. Some on his team are from the local towns, and are new to dry walling.
The idea is to leave the skills in the community. Over the last decades, small towns in Kansas have seen sharp declines in population and falling incomes and infrastructure. However, with a willingness to address fraught histories that excluded too many, and new visions of belonging that include more, sunflowers are returning and communities are rebuilding.
