More work than expected getting Whiskey back on the road today. Her front tire would not hold air. But Paul, the wonderful bike shop manager at Sunflower Outdoor and Bike in Lawrence, got her fixed and rolling again.
The delay means I don’t have enough time to travel the backroads to Tonganoxie. However, I see enough to make me want to come back. These lands are home to the University of Kansas experimental prairie lands.
In 1956, John D. Rockefeller gave two KU professors, E. Raymond Hall and Henry S. Fitch, money to buy a farm to experiment with different methods of managing prairie: burning; grazing; mowing; or leaving the land alone. Forty years of research later, ecologists concluded that burning and mowing are best for restoring prairie. I was tempted to turn north on E 1600 Road to see for myself but I ran into a grounds manager for the township, who recommended against it.
“It’s wild back there.”
While that piqued my curiosity, he convinced me to take the next road over, which he promised was half as steep. One thing everyone—except those who live here—get wrong about Kansas is that it is flat. Even taking the low road, I gained 1000 feet of elevation, and most of it on gravel.
The grounds manager grew up about 100 miles north and west of here, but had a lot pride in this land. He described with admiration his friend’s rescue of his family’s farm—600 unbroken acres. It’s rare for around here, he explained. And he was right. Just a few miles to the east, Kansas City suburbia encroaches.
Fake palm trees replace prairie grasses and crops. Rural gentrification causes property taxes to go up, making it too expensive for most to farm.
While farmland is broken up for lawns and pools, it is not broken up for meat processing. Tonganoxie gained national attention in 2018 when its citizens—many of whom are professionals from Lawrence and Kansas City—opposed Tyson’s plan to build a chicken “processing” plant. Those plants moved out to western Kansas in the 1960s and 70s, partly to avoid urban-based political opposition. Yet, as remote work and better transportation infrastructure increasingly enable urban elites to occupy rural lands, the political make-up of rural America is changing.
Instead of a meat packing plant, the city of Tonganoxie recently secured 1.5 million dollars from the U.S Department of Commerce to build a new water tower to support building a business park.
This debate over who and what Tonganoxie is for is not new. The town is named for a member of the Delaware who were forced east to Kansas in the 1830s, and then forced from Kansas to present day Oklahoma in the 1860s. After the Civil War, African Americans moved to Tonganoxie, and by the 1870s made up 25% of its population. For a short period, Kansas promised to make good on its status as a Free State and offered those freed from slavery a chance to buy property and make a new life. Today, Tonganoxie is 87% white, and has an average income that is 1.5 times greater that of the average rural town in Kansas. But all of this is a much more complicated story that I hope to understand better as I continue to cycle across these prairie lands.
For now, for tonight, this town is a place of rest for which I am grateful.
