Edwards County Historical Museum and Sod House
Kinsley, Kansas

By Joan Weaver

Starting in Washington, D.C., you can drive U.S. Highway 50 all the way to San Francisco. Along the way is the small Kansas town of Kinsley with a towering sign that announces you are “Midway” across the continent. Contrary to being just the “midway” of a journey, Kinsley has been the desired destination for many people. Some came on the Santa Fe Trail, others on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad, or, more recently, like I did, on a modern highway.

The sign also invites you to visit the Edwards County Historical Society Museum to see how the pioneers lived on the prairie. You can go inside a reproduced sod house built in 1958 by men who still remembered the process. On exhibit are the tools they used and pictures taken during construction. The house contains period furniture and artifacts donated by the descendants of the early settlers. Because the original open-air sod house required continual upkeep, in 2001 the Edwards County Historical Society preserved the house by building a structure to encase it.

Among the early immigrants were the Maxey family from Galesburg, Illinois. On October 1, 1886, George and Clara Maxey gathered their six children into a covered wagon pulled by two horses to begin the 650-mile trip to Kinsley. Penelope “Nellie” Maxey was twelve and very excited and a little frightened. The day before, some mean boys had jerked on her braids and told her that Indians would scalp her.

“Our wagon was very well built and warm,” recalled Nellie in an interview celebrating Kinsley’s 1973 centennial. “Father had it built wide over the wheels so beds could be arranged sideways and that is where we slept. And don’t forget to mention my dog Bounce. He trailed the wagon, walking all the way from Illinois.”

Despite his wife’s warnings to not be swindled, in Missouri George traded their faithful horse for a mule “with more endurance.” It was a long, hard trip, and the family arrived at Clara’s brother-in-law’s brickyard on November 7. “We slept in a tent that first night we were in Kinsley and nearly froze,” Nellie remembered.

The following day, they headed nine miles south to homestead next to Clara’s sister. Remembering her mother’s warning, Nellie said, “When we got halfway there, the mule, Jack, laid down and died. Father walked to my aunt’s place and brought back a horse to team with the other to take us on our way.”

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered “free” land to settlers if they would build a house, make improvements, and farm the land for five years. The Maxey’s claim was ancient sand dunes covered with short buffalo grass and a few thorny plum bushes – no tree in sight. Regular prairie fires and grazing buffalo herds eliminated trees in the prairie ecosystem.

In this area, building with sod was the quickest, most inexpensive way for settlers to improve their claims. Sod blocks should not be confused with the dried adobe bricks of the Southwest. With sod, thick buffalo grass roots held the soil together, and blocks could be cut and lifted intact. Typically, blocks were 24 inches long, 12 inches wide, and four inches deep. They weighed 50 pounds each, and it took 3000 blocks to build a 16-foot by 20-foot house.

There are no pictures of the Maxey house, but a family of eight would have needed shelter quickly. The sod would have been broken with a plow, cut into blocks and stacked. For some families, red clay from the banks of the nearby Arkansas River was mixed with sand and used as mortar. After this mortar dried, it became almost as hard and durable as cement. The same mixture could also be used to stucco the inside and outside of the house.

Sod homes often were topped with rafters covered with tarpaper and a thinner layer of sod, grass side up. Sometimes boards were laid loosely, covered with several layers of asphalt roofing and left exposed.

Living in a soddy had some advantages. The insulating, two-foot-thick walls offered coolness in summer and warmth in winter, aided by burning buffalo chips. However, housewives found many disadvantages. Bugs, mice, and snakes, including rattlers, liked to move in. Dirt floors were hard to keep clean. Heavy rains eroded walls and leaked through the roof, leaving wet furniture and muddy floors.

After the Maxeys settled in, Nellie learned there was no need to fear Native people. The U.S. government had called for the eradication of the buffalo in order to defeat the Plains tribes who resisted the takeover of their lands by white settlers — including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche. No buffalo meant no food and no Indians.

The next summer’s real threat came from hot winds and drought. The sun beat down every day. Their corn crop withered despite all efforts to carry buckets of water from the well to every stalk. The land was lonely and harsh, threatened by grasshoppers, rattlesnakes, hail-storms, and occasional cyclones and prairie fires. At night, Nellie would lay in bed listening to coyotes howling.

One hundred years later, in 1989, I too found myself moving to the sandhills. I was luckier than the Maxeys, as we purchased an existing six-room, one-bath frame farmhouse built by homesteaders in 1907.

Our moving train consisted of a U-Haul truck, two cars, two pickups, and three trailers hauling our riding horse, two miniature horses and a1959 Ford tractor with implements. The dog rode in the car with our two teenaged sons.

Our entourage took one long day to move 500 miles at a top speed of 50 mph. Compared to the Maxeys, my hardships were minor. I broke a finger loading the horse into the trailer. We arrived after dark to find the barn full of eighty years of detritus. When I put the riding horse into the corral, four-foot weeds obscured my view of an open back gate. She escaped into the dark. Fortunately, the pasture fence was intact, and she appeared back at the barn in the morning, covered in biting flies. When I applied fly repellent, it must have stung, because she reacted by landing a good back-kick on my knee. All I could do was crawl out of the corral, driving sharp sandburs into my shins. Less than 24 hours in Kansas, and I was ready to leave.

In time, life became more manageable for both Nellie and me. She would marry a lawyer and live in a large Victorian house as one of Kinsley’s leading ladies until her death at age 85 in 1959. After thirty-five years, I still live in the old farmhouse, which has since been remodeled with a large master bedroom and bath.

Now, I go to the sod house museum to discover stories like Nellie’s. The names on the donated artifacts I see there are familiar surnames of my friends who are their descendants. I spend time talking to those friends and researching in the old newspapers and the library archive. I suppose I’m a little like the sod house museum, as I too want to preserve and share the stories of the early people who settled midway across the continent.

Joan Weaver has been the director of the Kinsley Public Library for twenty-seven years.  She has a passion for discovering, preserving, and making the stories of her adopted prairie community digitally accessible. Currently she is working on a book about Kinsley’s role as the regional center for culture and the arts in the early twentieth century.

Photo by Bob Obee.

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The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library
Indianapolis, IN

By Laura Beadling

Like many, I found and loved Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in my miserable teenage years. Slaughterhouse-Five is now one of my favorite novels to teach, whether in Great American Books or Science Fiction Literature, and at least some of my students have had similar reactions. When the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum moved to its new location in downtown Indy, I knew I had to go, and, late in December 2019, my husband and I packed up the dogs and headed west from Youngstown.

Slaughterhouse-Five showcases Vonnegut’s finely tuned eye for evocative juxtapositions. Structurally, the book strings together short vignettes from across protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s life, which is fitting given his assertion that he’s “come unstuck in time,” as the first page tells us. The narrative ping pongs between Billy’s sad youth, his hellish experiences in World War II, his humdrum breakdowns in Illium, NY, and his domestic contentment as an exhibit in a Tralfamadorian zoo with porn star and fellow captive Montana Wildhack.

The trip from Youngstown to downtown Indy is also filled with jarring incongruities. After several hours of flat sameness on I-70 West, suddenly you’re in the city. As we drove through downtown, we passed the gigantic blue curved-glass Marriott Hotel and a minute later a small homeless encampment under an overpass. Less than five minutes later, we pulled into a spot just off Indiana Avenue, right outside the museum.

The most striking artifact inside the museum was the icebox from Vonnegut’s childhood home. Such an incongruous object to include in a museum dedicated to a writer, especially a writer of science fiction and satire. It can’t have been easy to install either. The giant thing, made of painted wood and a number of serious-looking metal fasteners, looked murderously heavy and was, also incongruously, topped by a jaunty toy Tralfamadorian. My eyes went back to it again and again.

The museum building itself is lovely, brick with a second floor patio and plenty of windows situated in a lively neighborhood. I noticed that the Madame C.J. Walker Building was across the street, so we took a walk around the area, one of Indy’s six Cultural Districts. Although the Walker Building is closed on the weekends, we appreciated the beautiful detail on the flatiron-shaped brick structure. On it, a number of intricate, Art Deco-esque terra cotta ornaments depict African art motifs. Both buildings sit quite near to Indy’s Canal Walk, which is a pretty promenade alongside an old industrial canal that cuts through downtown.

The visit made me think about structures and organization. Given the lack of a chronologically coherent narrative, Slaughterhouse-Five relies on purposeful juxtapositions between the vignettes to create meaning. Museums are similar, deliberately placing objects to illuminate connections and disjunctions. City blocks can sometimes do the same, although not always intentionally. The placement of the museum on Indiana Avenue, once a thriving residential and commercial African American neighborhood, is an example. Although few of Vonnegut’s characters were African American, he was an outspoken lover of jazz, and Indiana Avenue boasted over 33 jazz clubs at its height. Furthermore, each building offers different but important programming throughout the year. The Walker Legacy Center offers a wide variety of African American art, history, and cultural programs. Alongside its usual focus on banned books and freedom of speech, the Vonnegut Museum’s particular focus this year is on civic engagement.

Whether inside the museum or throughout the city, these juxtapositions can, like jazz, be improvisational and surprising and beautiful. I’m sure Vonnegut would approve.

Laura Beadling was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio where she now teaches literature, film, and screenwriting at Youngstown State University. She realizes now that she should have bought the plush toy Trafalmadorian on offer at the Vonnegut Museum’s gift shop as it would be a good addition to her office collection of tchotchkes.

Photo by Neil Teixeira, courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library.

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River-Horse Pavilion
Columbia, Missouri

By Kit Salter

In March 1995, my wife Cathy and I went to wish Godspeed to Columbia, Missouri, resident William Lewis Trogdon as he was leaving for New York City to begin a 103-day nautical journey, which he would chronicle in the 1999 book, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America, under the pen name of William Least Heat-Moon.

Trogdon called his newly acquired boat Nikawa, which means “river-horse” in the Osage language. This 22-foot C-Dory with twin engines was nestled in a solid towing trailer. As the author prepared to ease both his boat and his hopes into motion, Cathy presented him with an ivory amulet of a sea otter. I handed him a Timex Expedition watch that had been my trusty travel companion. On that spring day, little did we know that the C-Dory being carefully pulled into traffic would later stand in a bold wooden pavilion just outside Columbia.

Today, as you drive north on Highway 63 just coming into Columbia from the direction of Jefferson City, the massive red metal roof of the Boone County History and Culture Center catches your eye. Then you see an open structure next to the parking lot. This is the River-Horse Pavilion, built in 2006 to celebrate Heat-Moon’s journey in Nikawa, the very boat we saw leave his home some years earlier.

Heat-Moon wrote on the final page of River-Horse that he had ridden Nikawa “5,288 watery miles from the Atlantic.” At the very end of that trip, to celebrate arrival at the Pacific, he reached for a pint of Atlantic water he had safeguarded for 103 days. He writes, “I raised the bottle  high, sunlight striking through the glass, salt waves rising to it as if thirsty, and I said, ‘We bring this gift from your sister sea — our voyage is done. Then I poured the stream into the Pacific and went back to the wheel of our river horse, and I turned her toward home.”

Some years after completing that adventure, Heat-Moon presented his already fabled C-Dory to the Boone County Historical Society.  The Society was proud to have such a fine bit of Missouriana from one of the state’s most productive and creative authors, but they had to ask, “How do we display it?”

The historical society wanted to make Nikawa available 24/7, yet protect it from the weather and potential pilfering. Local architect Nick Peckham (himself a marine engineer) worked with volunteers to design and build the wooden pavilion that stands adjacent to the Society’s main building.  This open structure provides easy viewing of the boat (behind plexiglass), a map of Nikawa’s route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and photographs of the craft and the author. Nikawa, in fact, was now home, resting and lending its stature to all of Boone County.

But the backstory of this literary landscape possesses two more elements. In 1978, Heat-Moon was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, when it had to let him go because of declining enrollments. At the same time, he and his wife decided to divorce.

Heat-Moon reacted to that pair of events by undertaking a 13,000-mile solo trip in his 1975 Ford Econoline van. That 90-day journey (which began on Earth Day in 1978) resulted in the 1982 book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, which spent 42 weeks on the NYT Best Seller List and has never been out of print. In the early pages of Blue Highways, Heat-Moon declares, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life.”

With Nikawa’s historic voyage across the continent, William Least Heat-Moon showed again that he “could at least go,” and this time he took contemporary travel exploration to a new level of innovation. To complete the circle, I have my Timex back — but the amulet remains with the author.

Kit Salter lived in 22 different places by the end of high school. He graduated from Oberlin College and took his Masters and PhD at Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Missouri and taught for UCLA, the University of Oregon, and National Geographic. He has been married to writer and geographer Cathy Lynn Salter for 38 years.

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Boyhood Home
Central City, Nebraska

By Nathan Tye

For Wright Morris, home was both a physical place and emotional ache. Born in Central City, Nebraska, in 1910, Morris made his life elsewhere, but returned to the Platte Valley in his writing and photography. His childhood home remains, now a museum maintained by the Lone Tree Literary Society and in it I find a shared weight of homecoming. Like him, I was born in the Platte Valley, built a life elsewhere, and returned. Morris’ labor to excavate the home’s memories resonate as I uncover connections fallen into disrepair and begin to build a new life on the old.

Carefully restored, this single-story white frame house, built amidst the Panic of 1893 by a real estate agent, carries the faded wealth of a small-town businessman. Certainly, it must have felt like that when a widower, his son, and housekeeper moved in two decades later. Morris’ earliest memory of “lampglow and shadows on a low ceiling” is likely tied to this home. A window topped with a row of colored glass faces northeast. Bedbound with pneumonia, Morris traced the colored beams as they moved across his sheets in that room. In his first memoir, he admits that such memories left him with “the ache of a nameless longing,” which he threaded through his work until he died.

In The Home Place (1948), Clyde Muncy returns to Lone Tree, a stand-in for Central City. Nearly 30-years gone, Clyde has a new family, a new place, and memories ill-fit to Lone Tree’s present. Clyde’s futile attempt at placemaking is framed by images of debris and empty farmsteads, a subject Morris’ first explored in The Inhabitants (1946). In both books he captures a world worn over — abandoned homes, barren storefronts, football-worn carpets, frayed familial ties — and finds those spaces inhabited by absence. These homebound texts are all the sharper in our homebound epoch, for our own places are now populated with days upon days of unbroken living.

Morris relished patina, the worn, and the lived-in. For him, abandonment closes distances in time. Or, as the art critic and novelist John Berger found, “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” What though, does home mean, in Central City and the elsewheres we find ourselves ordered in? Where do our ties to the past take us when the future is so uncertain? Morris returned to escape, and by documenting these visits laid the foundation for the preservation of his home. The connection to the past, “was the important thing. It had to be established,” Wright wrote in The Home Place, “I had to be born again.” Morris’ texts and images commingled the present and past to forward a vision of living nostalgia.

The Lone Tree Literary Society has reversed the decay Morris documented and made his childhood home available to curious publics. And while what Morris called “the inhabitants” of these structures may now be obscured by respectful restorations, in Morris’ work, their absence persists. Later in his career, Morris commented that photographs came from “the most durable of ghosts, nostalgia.” In his early images of Central City, he reached back to the remnants he left in order to move forward. Nostalgia is a welcome escape given the uncertainty of our present, but as Morris’ struggle with his homebound ghosts underscores, our worn-over homes are points of departure, not occupation.

At home with ourselves, we’re learning to live with our inhabitants. Like Morris’ photographs, Covid-19 emptied the streets, turned homes into lived-in voids, and blurred delineations between past, present, and future. Yet, by documenting deterioration and distance, Wright pointed toward a restorative future. Now, in the stillness of an uncertain time, the inhabitants of Morris’ home and those of our own become clearer, and the possibilities they hold emerge.

Nathan Tye was born and raised in the Platte Valley. A historian by trade, Tye is assistant professor of Nebraska and American West history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is currently working on his first book, a history of hobo workers in North America.

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