Our Kansas History Museums Tell the Story!

Some have asked for this so here it is!

Speech given to Kansas Museum Association

Nov. 6, 2009

By Marci Penner, Kansas Sampler Foundation

I’ve been doing a little research. Listen to this as those you’ve never been to Kansas.

WHERE YOU’LL FIND US

We have history museums in opera houses, jails, hospitals, Carnegie Libraries, newspaper buildings, old mercantiles, courthouses, auditoriums, schools, churches, banks, depot, houses, fire stations, city halls, an American Legion hall, a city shop, a county shop, a home for nurses, a grain elevator, a livery stable, and a water office.

HOUSES

You can enjoy the building or the stories they tell in places like the Strawberry Hill Mansion, the Brown Mansion, the Seelye House, and the Carroll Mansion.

Ah yes, the matter of the Carroll Mansion... In 1964 Ella Carroll, the last Carroll to live in this Leavenworth home, announced at church that she was leaving the mansion and people could come get anything from the house they wanted. After the last item was removed, Ella gave the key and the house deed to the Leavenworth County Historical Society.

BARNS AND MORE

The largest barn in the state, the Cooper Barn, once housed Hereford Show cattle and can now be viewed by all. Another museum documents the sad story of the largest horse barn in the state that met its fate from a lightning-induced fire. You can walk through a spectacular 1898 restored roller mill and a clay-brick Mennonite immigrant house or learn about pueblo Indian ruins that date back to the 1600s that you can still see! You can tour a Lustron and a Hartford House, too.

You’ll find a museum within an active high school and they give an awesome tour – even while school is in session. Or, you can tour and eat in the first Harvey House to have a restaurant!

Step inside Constitution Hall where the walls are still shaking from vigorous free-state and pro-slavery debates during our territorial days.

HOUSES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE

You can visit the homes that famous people lived in: Walter Chrysler, Dwight Eisenhower, Amelia Earhart, John Steuart Curry, Carrie Nation, Fred Harvey, General Fred Funston, Bernard Warkentin, Susanna Salter, and even the mayor of Munchkinland.

OUR COLORFUL PEOPLE

Our museums tell about colorful people. John Brown, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, George Custer, Martin and Osa Johnson, and even John R. Brinckley (the goat gland doctor).

The list goes on. A few more of our people include George Washington Carver, Gordon Parks, William Allen White, Clyde Cessna, Cyrus Holliday, Arthur Hertzler, Mother Bickerdyke, and there are so many more.

Satanta was held prisoner at Fort Harkner and you can still see the stretched bars in an upstairs window that were his escape route.

We tell about some real characters, too – Vivian Vance, Buster Keaton, Emmett Kelly, and Whizzo the Clown.

Athletes shine, too. From Olympians Thane Baker, Glenn Cunningham, and Billy Mills to Walter Johnson and Jackie Stiles, coaches Dean Smith and Eddie Sutton and the inventor of basketball himself James Naismith.

Do you know these people that you can learn about in our museums?

Merle Evans (Ringling Brothers band leader)

Ron Evans (astornaut)
Harold Krier (aerobatic flyer)

Wayne Dunafon (Marlboro Man)
Grace Bedell Billings (letter to Lincoln)

Grandma Layton (artist of social causes)

Earl Sutherland (Nobel Peace Prize winner)

Lorenzo Fuller (African American musician, Broadway performer, and early television pioneer)

---and we also have a Gallery of Also Rans...

We cover some really big and fascinating topics

Lewis & Clark

The Plains Indians

Santa Fe Trail

Oregon Trail and other overland wagon trails

Cattle Towns and cattle trails

Forts

Bleeding Kansas

Pony Express

Railroad expansion

Cherokee Strip Land Rush

Aviation industry

Oil industry

Lead, zinc, and coal mining

Exodusters

Immigration (Mennonites, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, Asians, Scandinavian, more)

Pioneers

The evolution of agriculture and ranching

And we’re a hotbed for fossils

You can go underground to see where businesses were once housed, you can traverse through a tunnel once used as a getaway for bad guys, or you can take an elevator 650 feet down to hop a tram into a dark ride for a salty adventure.

On the flip side, we have another museum that will give you all the space you need and rocket you upward and onward.

THE LARGEST, BIGGEST, ONLY AND MORE

We have the largest electric coal shovel in the world and our museums also tell about the largest hailstone on record, the largest hairball, the largest swimming pool, the largest cattle pool in the state, the largest gas field in the world, the oil field that was the largest producer/supplier of oil in the U.S. during WWI, the first 1950s all-electric house in the U.S. open to the public, the first MGM lion*, the first patented helicopter, the airplane of the first Kansan who built an aircraft that flew successfully, and the longest hand-carved wooden chain! We have displays about the only nuclear plant in the state, the first post office in Kansas, the first state mental hospital, the first Kansas radio station, the first feedlot, the first night baseball game to be played under lights, the first chimpanzee to go into space and survive!

Did you know that the first greyhound race was in Kansas, that a Kansan won the first NASCAR event, that we have the fastest half-mile dirt track in the world, and that the world’s first synthetic diamond was made in Kansas? One museum tells about a nearby Glebe, the only one left in the United States! And, Comanche, the only living being of Custer’s U.S. Seventh Cavalry found on the battlefield following the 1876 Battle fo the Little Big Horn, now stands proudly draped in his army blanket in a natural history museum.

ART (art museums are not included in this summary of history museums -- but we have great ones)

JJ Pennell left us great photos of early Junction City and the Everhard photos of African American life in early Leavenworth will leave you breathless. Vi Fick’s shark’s teeth art is just unbelievable -- in fact, was listed in Ripley’s Believe it or Not. See a display about the humorous trick larger-than-life photos of Dad Martin. Rudolph Wendelin painted a marvelous mural of Rawlins County but was better known as the illustrator for Smokey Bear. The Combat Air Museum and National Ag Hall of Fame are just two museums that feature incredible paintings that help tell the story.

LEARN

Mickey Mantle was a member of the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids. In 1953, Ed Fouts put some shoes on and got on a train with the second largest ball of twine in Kansas went on I’ve Got a Secret.

We have whole museums for Girl Scouts, pharmacy artifacts, motorcycles, telephones, carousels, Bibles, and barbed wire.

FEATURED IN OTHER MUSEUMS ARE prison escapes, the start of suburbia, truck farming, auto-camping, deaf culture, jackrabbit hunts, chautauquas, rodoes, a round square, and Knute Rockne’s 1931 plane crash.

Find out about communities being lost under reservoirs, oil boom towns and gas camps that are now left for the ghosts, Asa Soule’s legendary effort to bulid an irrigation canal uphill. Learn the story of German POW prisoners in Kansas camps, orphan trains, the gripping account of those who attended Haskell Indian University in its early days, and the story of sister Rose Philippine Duchesne and how she ministered to the Potawatomi Indian children after their forced march along the trail of death.

NATURAL DISASTERS

Displays tell about the dust bowl, drought, floods (especially the 1951), tornadoes, including the 1955 tornado in Udall that killed 83 people, 270 injured, and erased 192 buildings.

IT’S NOT ALL NICE STUFF
Threshing Machine Canyon Massacre

Marais des Cygnes Massacre and the days of Bleeding Kansas

German Family Massacre

Kidder Massacre

And both sides of the Indian story

MILITARY HISTORY

Find the Frontier Army Museum, U.S. Cavalry Museum, and the very interesting Fort Riley Regimental Museum that has exhibits that focus on training and combat operations of today’s Fort Riley units. Museums tell about combat from the air and training fields for B24s and B29s. Did you know we have a museum about the Kansas National Guard?

YOU CAN SEE

a fish within a fish fossil, a full-scale model of the Liberty Bell made out of Kansas wheat straw, printing presses, a chair made from cattle horns, 42 windmills in one row, a mini-scene built with 8,557 hand-carved pices of a wagon train attack or you can watch episode after episode of Gunsmoke. Admire collections of WPA dolls, brooches, fishing lures, and all things Wizard of Oz!

Visit our museums to "get Kansas!"

KE #2 Marci Penner

*now known to be the second MGM Lion but maybe the most famous.