At Home in Kansas

Caught in a side view mirror

When my family moved to Kansas in 2000, the prospect of adjusting to a new community brought great trepidation. I imagine the feeling was similar to that of a settler’s wife, she who might have come west more than a century earlier, around 1880, as a young bride.

The young bride may be akin to a state of mind, the wistfulness that comes from leaving what is comfortable and moving to unfamiliar territory.

Perhaps the Civil War has just ended, and she is following her husband to a strange flat land of extreme temperatures and wary natives, where most news of the outside world comes from the Methodist circuit rider who pays monthly visits to conduct a revival or perform a baptism.

That was me, trailing my husband out to the Plains, hopefully anxious and anxiously hopeful – a young bride, figuratively speaking, wishing to feel at home in millennial Kansas. For despite the homogenization of American culture, communities do maintain distinctive social structures. I found that it would be necessary to acquire a local state of mind in order to fit in.  

View from a Target parking lot;
Overland Park, Kansas

From its earliest days as a territory, Kansas challenged those who made the journey. Whenever the pioneers reached their destination – whether by covered wagon after the Homestead Act of 1862 or by train during the rise of the Populist / agrarian movement a few decades later – they found unpredictable weather and unbroken land.

Even before they got to the place, there were premonitions. One pioneer woman would recall:

To me Kansas spelled destruction, desperadoes, and cyclones. I could not agree with my husband that any good could come out such a country, but the characteristic disposition of the male prevailed, and October 1, 1879, saw us bound for the “Promised Land.”  

A dairy farm lingered in suburban
Johnson County, Kansas

My family arrived in mid-July and waited for the temperature to cool. Day after day – 107, 105, 106. Occasionally, a faint prairie wind blew through. We stayed inside nearly all the time, enacting the nineteenth-century drama of the parlor darkened by curtains pulled against the sun.

Would the doorbell ring? Would the minister pay a call on the new family? That did not happen.

Eventually the heat diminished, and our two sons began the school year. I started to find my way, always driving, along the wide streets and through the startling checkerboard of big-box stores and fields filled with hay bales.

By the time of the High Holy Days in October, we were invited to break the fast at the home of neighbors, where the hostess’s famous ten-layer Jell-O mold, presented in the world’s largest trifle dish, arose in the center of the buffet.

Land for sale

It’s not easy to understand why any individual will become comfortable in certain places and not others. There are cities and towns where the fit is right, and we discover with pleasure what Willie Morris called “terrains of the heart.”  

We do not need to be kept in familiar boxes in order to feel sure of ourselves. However, there are things we grow to as a habit without which we may not be happy.   

Of course, I did not appreciate Kansas while we were there. That’s an old story.  Farther down the road, when I was no longer a young bride, it became possible to know and understand the place.

Photos by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/08/at-home-in-kansas.html

Looking for Henry

The indelible case of Henry Moore winks out from nineteenth-century America, through the dim years of Pierce and Polk, peering from tintypes. He loses family heirlooms, buries a wife, sails through to the next century, wags his head at Woodrow Wilson. Bearded and musty in a black frock coat, he celebrates his golden anniversary with his second wife and expires in 1925 at the home of his son at Lake Congamond, Massachusetts.

A vain, difficult young man, Henry lurked in Victorian parlors, on porches and piazzas; attended oyster parties, smoked and smirked. “Henry,” wrote his mother, Sarah, in 1852:

I think of you every night when I go to bed. Don’t throw all your money when you earn it so hard. You won’t ever be young but once. Oh how short the years look to me when I look back at the time I lived in Market Street and you was but 4 years old. Them will never return. Henry don’t be out late nights will you and do go to some evening meetings and not live all the while for the world.

At 21, Henry went to New York City. He paid $3 a week for room and board and hoped to earn enough to pay off a debt to a Hartford tailor. Sarah begged her son to return.

My dear boy, I feel hurt and sorry to realize that I seem to be so forgotten by you. Is it possible you are so taken with that wicked place that you have not one moment’s reflection or sober reality – You are now free of my talk and advice which you hated so bad to hear. Do stop long enough to think whether you are under any obligations to us or to me. Oh how much I have done without for you – but tis all gone by and among the things that were.

She scribbled on the envelope: “Send back your dirty laundry by return post.”

In 1850 the widow Moore lived with her children, Henry and Kate, and her mother and sister in the Captain Daniel Moore Homestead at the corner of Main Street and Windsor Avenue, Hartford. Inside the Homestead, the four women sat around the stove, worrying about Henry. He could not make a success of anything. He had the habit of leaving suddenly on the train or in horse and carriage. As a cousin once wrote: 

We had almost concluded that you had forgotten us entirely, as the last we knew of you, you left the gates and whether you ever reached home or not we never knew.

In 1853, Henry was back in Hartford, mulling dry goods prospects in Chicago. But he ended up hanging around, purchased new trousers, and on Valentine’s Day 1854 received several strands of brown hair braided with pale blue ribbon. Soon enough, he married Theresa P. of Maine. The idea was, he would settle down. 

But in 1858, Henry packed up Theresa and traveled out to Kansas Territory where he earned $15 a week delivering mail via pony express. His route was Lawrence to Fort Riley.

They called it “Bleeding Kansas.” Not yet a state, this vast unorganized territory seethed with tension as Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act forced the issue of slavery into the West.

Henry spent much of his time on the open prairie. He saw the buffalo and Kaw Indians, and it all made impression enough to be related to his son and grandson. But Kansas disappointed, too, because Henry did not make the money he expected. He decided to look for gold that ran in the streams near Pike’s Peak.  

But Theresa persuaded her husband to return to New England. They moved to Massachusetts and she died one year later.

He lost her as he lost many things: for instance, the key to the parlor desk in the Homestead. 

Then there was the old black trunk that Gram loved; it was sent to New York to collect Henry’s laundry but disappeared. 

He never received the piece of carpet that his mother shipped out to Kansas. 

He lost or never received a packet of arsenic that a minister sent him to use in preserving and mounting dead birds. Simmons & Leadbetter, Forwarding & Commission Merchants, spent a year searching for his boots lost somewhere between Hartford and Chicago. 

And much later, an heirloom chair was stolen from his home, presumably by an agent acting for the Rhode Island Historical Society. (It now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Before Sarah died in 1870, she probably realized that Henry himself would not be lost. He didn’t end up in State’s Prison, as she often worried. He voted in every presidential election from 1860 to 1924, although she declared he would never stay in one place long enough to gain residence. And he never was knocked down and robbed, as she once predicted.

Instead he married his cousin Henrietta in 1863. Their only child, Henry Elmer, was born three years later. After a few months’ apprenticeship with a bookbinder in Northampton, Henry joined the Springfield Republican as a printer, working there until retirement. 

He bought a clapboard house in West Springfield and never moved again.

Drawing by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/12/looking-for-henry.html

See also February 10 + 17 posts, 2016.

Gates of Kansas

In 2000 my family left New York and moved to Kansas for three years. Yesterday, the state with the magnificent motto, per aspera ad astra (“to the stars through difficulty”) was on my mind, for the Royals just won the World Series and my memory of Kauffman Stadium happens to be very clear. During the first game we attended there, Buck O’Neil – one of the great players on the Negro American League team, the Kansas City Monarchs – threw out the first ball. He died in 2006. By that time we had left Kansas.

We'd lived in Johnson County, right on the state line with Missouri and the most liberal county in the state. At the turn of the 21st century, this area was in the throes of residential and commercial development. Mega-churches and Walmart proliferated. Townhouses rose quickly on land where bales of hay were scattered . . . just the day before yesterday, it seemed. Evidently the development continued although corporations (like Sprint) did not deliver the jobs.

As an Easterner, I was fascinated by the new five-lane asphalt roads heading south, dwindling to four lanes and then two lanes and ending in dirt roads that trailed off into towns that looked like 1913. Along one of those roads I snapped the photograph above. Someone planned a mansion but for whatever reason had started the construction with iron gates. I have often wondered what happened next.



Photo, Claudia Keenan, 2003

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/in-2000-my-family-left-new-york-and.html