News, Events & County History

This September 11 marks 25 years since the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were struck by hijacked commercial airplanes in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Nearly 2,800 lives were lost in the WTC attack. According to 911memorial.org, 100 million Americans are too young to remember the day that changed New York City and our nation forever, but former Lakinite Joel Neff, son of Martin and Donna Neff, has not forgotten.

Joel and his wife, Tenille, were living in Larchmont, NY at the time. They had moved there so that Tenille could attend graduate school, and 9-11 took place on the very day she was to begin classes. Joel was working in Manhattan at A.I. Friedman, a long-standing independent art supply and graphic materials department. He traveled to work on the Metro North, and as he boarded the train bound for Grand Central Station that morning, news of a plane hitting the WTC began circulating on the train. Joel and other passengers assumed that a small private plane had probably hit the buildings because that had happened before.

Joel’s 30-minute ride into the city went smoothly, but upon arriving at Grand Central, news was spreading that two large planes had hit the WTC. Thinking that all was under control, Joel boarded the subway for the rest of his journey to work. The subway stopped somewhere between 20th and 14th Street at about 9:45 AM, not at a scheduled stop. It was pretty intense underground with no light or air conditioning and only speculation of what might really be happening above. Joel made it to 14th Street around 11 a.m. and entered onto the street above to a chaotic scene. Only then did he begin to comprehend the magnitude of the devastation. His work place was 10 blocks from the WTC, and the building had been evacuated. Joel used his cell phone to let his wife know he was okay and began his long walk back to Grand Central Station where he was able to catch the last train leaving the city for that day.

“I walked back to Grand Central and caught the last train back home, the whole time in a daze of visual reality fighting the unreality in my head.”

Joel wasn’t able to go back to his job in Union Square until the following week. “Although we were open, for the next month we really didn’t have any sales but we stayed open so people would have a place to just go and be.” The area around Ground Zero was blocked off with National Guard units stationed at barricades with NYPD.

Although Joel didn’t personally know anyone who lost their life in the attack, most of his co-workers lost someone they knew that day. Still, Joel couldn’t help but be impacted by the tragedy. “The weeks following were really just a daze, where nothing felt real. I never experienced any sense of fear in those days, but a profound sense of sadness and connectivity with the greater community. It also seems that very shortly after, the memorials began popping up with anti-war and a real sentiment for peaceful resolution.”

“Even though I had just been living in NYC for three months when the towers were attacked, the thought of leaving never really crossed my mind, even though several people from back home made the statement, “when are you going to move back?” To me, there was nothing more amazing than seeing the people of NYC pull together and deal with this traumatic event in a very real and meaningful way. Feeling somewhat of an outsider at that moment I was never treated that way by the people I knew or met at that time. I know there is the stereotype of the mean, cold New Yorker that is often portrayed on TV, but I did not find that to be even remotely true having gone through such a tragic event with my fellow New Yorkers.”

The Neffs remained in NYC for 13 years but moved back to the Midwest after having their first child. Their Missouri home is a far cry from the skyscrapers, subway, and hustle and bustle of New York City life, but memories of the terrorist attack still linger.

“Looking back, as with most tragedies, seeing the whole country unite as a community where we were all just Americans, no matter your politics, race or ethnicity, rallying to support one another as we all struggled to make sense of this senseless tragedy was an amazing thing.”

Neff added, “Unfortunately, the following war and politics since then seem to have used the attacks as a catalyst to begin to divide the country over the last 25 years. I guess thinking back to that time, I wish that sense of togetherness that we had as a country was more prevalent in today’s society and that we could have used that moment to foster in 25 years of country and worldwide unity helping to bring greater stability through the world instead of the insecurity that seems to be so prevalent in today’s society.” That’s a sentiment we can all relate to.

 

Special thanks to Joel Neff and his mother, Donna Neff. The accompanying pictures were taken by Joel 12 days after the WTC attack.

During the first decade of the 1900s, tens of thousands of Czech and Slovak immigrants came to the United States in search of the American dream. They hailed from the Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia which were all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918 and World War I. From 1900 to 1910, official U.S. immigration records did not list “Czechoslovakia.” Instead, these immigrants were categorized by their language or broader empire of origin and were often listed under Austria or Hungary. Many had been encouraged by fellow immigrants who sent glowing letters home about American jobs and land availability. Hoping to escape poverty, religious discrimination, the military draft and political and cultural repression, they arrived on American soil ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

 

Josephine Horcik was born in Prague, the daughter of a railroad worker. She had learned about the glowing prospects in the U.S. from rich Americans passing through her European country.  At the tender age of 17, she sailed to America and landed at Baltimore where she was to meet a family who had paid her passage and for whom she was to work as a maid. Josephine spoke both Bohemian and German but not English. She was not able to communicate and became bewildered and lost in the city. A friendly German police officer guided her to an American family who hired her to do household work. The year was 1905.

 

Two years earlier, Joseph Zoubkova had immigrated to America aboard the Koenig Albert to the port of New York. Joe, as he was familiarly known, was a native of Moravia. He Americanized his surname to Zubeck, and according to the 1910 census, he did speak English.

 

As fate would have it, the two met at a party of Bohemian immigrants and were soon married. Son Frank was born in Michigan. Thomas was born in Pennsylvania, and Joe Jr. in Ohio. Another son died soon after birth. In 1911, the Zubeck family came to Southwest Kansas, answering the call of the U.S. Sugar and Land Company (later Garden City Company) for people to work in the sugar beet industry. Both Joe and Josephine had worked similar fields in their home country. Joe was hired and placed in charge of maintaining irrigation pumps in addition to farming.

 

When they arrived at the Deerfield train depot, they were greeted by the sugar company’s people who took them first to eat and then to the house near Deerfield where the family would live. Josephine was amazed that not only was the house furnished but even the beds were made up with sheets and blankets. Sons Jimmy, John and Bob were added to the fold, but another son and two daughters died in infancy. In 1912, Joe applied for his naturalized citizenship.

 

Joe excelled at farming. In June of 1926, the Garden City Telegram gave the following report on his beet crop, “A PROGRESSIVE FARMER: Finney County residents who have taken a trip up the valley along the trail have remarked frequently about a field of beets on the hill just beyond Deerfield. These beets are fully a month in advance and most beet fields, are a good stand, well cultivated, and in fine condition – the kind that makes the big yield when the digger digs.” According to the article, factory people said that Joe did that kind of farming with all his crops. He also grew alfalfa, wheat and sorghum and raised cattle too.

 

Joe’s successful farming was also mentioned In Conquest of Southwest Kansas. He reportedly had 10 acres of beets that averaged 18 tons an acre and 10 that averaged 15 tons per acre in 1930, exceeding the overall average in the area of 12 tons per acre. Then came the Great Depression. According to granddaughter Pam Zubeck Cunningham, the family went to Ohio to work and had been there less than a year when they returned to gather the rest of their possessions in 1937. They never made it back to Ohio. Instead, Joseph met an untimely demise that October when he was killed almost instantly in a head-on collision on HWY 50 east of Deerfield. He was only 52.

 

Josephine and her sons stayed and continued to work the farm. The rains returned, and in a 1944 letter written in her native tongue to a Chicago Bohemian newspaper called, “Hlasatel,” Josephine wrote about their abundant crops. “Yields were good: barley yield was from 25 to 60 bushels and wheat from 30 to 50 bushels so that there will be plenty of bread.” But she also talked about hunger. “Here is how my son writes to me from Italy: “Mommy, you have already seen enough, but you have not yet seen so many hungry people like here. As soon as we sit down somewhere, we have children around us, they beg for food, we give them what we have, including potatoe peelings, what we throw away from the kitchen. The children eat everything. May the wheat or flower be shipped to them.” John was serving during World War II and was injured twice in battle as an infantry soldier but was treated in field hospitals and remained in the service. He received the Purple Heart with one bronze oak leaf cluster, bronze arrowhead, the Good Conduct Medal and American Defense Service Ribbon. After his tour of duty, John returned to Deerfield and worked for Harley Rector and the Santa Fe Motor Co. before moving to Garden City where he was a welder for East Side Iron.

 

In addition to farming, Frank worked for Santa Fe Motors as a mechanic. Jimmy was a lifetime farmer and also a Lynx corn seed dealer. Joe, Jr. farmed and was a carpenter. Thomas never married but lived with his mother until her death. He and Bob farmed together, and Bob also raised hogs and cattle on a small farm a half mile south of Deerfield. That operation was moved to their farm north of Deerfield in 1965 when the great flood came roaring down the Arkansas River and covered the valley with flood waters. Bob later worked for Central Power Inc. and a John Deere dealership in Garden City.

 

Although Josephine Zubeck never became a US citizen, she did teach herself English. She was shy and reserved and kept mostly to home where she cooked with vegetables grown from her garden and baked fresh bread. The simple pleasures brought her joy, and she relished long walks in the country, referring to the trees and skies as her church. She died in 1963 a few months before her 77^th birthday.

SOURCES: Diggin’ Up Bones by Betty Barnes; Harvest of Memories by Pam Zubeck Cunningham; Czech Immigration to America by Magda Jurčíková; Conquest of Southwest Kansas by Leola Howard Blanchard; museum archives; newspapers.com; Ancestry.com, and steveszabados.com. Special thanks to Pam Cunningham and Ann Zubeck Brink.

 

During the first decade of the 1900’s, Lakin experienced a building boom. Among the contractors/carpenters at this time was Horace Grant Stocking, Jr. Stocking was a man of many talents: performer, one-room school teacher, barber, Modern Woodmen of America deputy, county surveyor, appraiser, store keeper, representative for the Aetna Building and Loan Association, election judge, and highly active Presbyterian Church member.

Born in 1872 in Indiana, he came to Kearny County in 1887 with his parents, Horace Grant, Sr. and Melvina Lovelace Stocking. He first taught in the rural schools, but in 1892, after spending the summer at Anthony, Kansas learning the barber trade, he returned to Lakin and opened up his own barber shop on Main Street. The following year, he married Sarah Edna Long, daughter of Benjamin and Lou Long. The couple had four sons: William, Clyde, Max, and Glen who was the youngest and died just a few months shy of his second birthday.

By the early 1900s, Stocking had partnered with his nephew, Will Bailey. The duo did carpentry work, painted, papered and performed general repairs. In 1905, they purchased a cement stone and brick-making machine. Stocking bought out Bailey’s share of the business in 1907. Horace and his crew not only built the city jail but several houses in town and even did some work in Deerfield. He was responsible for a good portion of the sidewalk work in Lakin not just for residences but for Main Street, along Waterman Avenue, and at the school.

The early settlers had to depend upon their own talents for much of their entertainment and recreation, and Horace had a great deal of musical talent both as a vocalist and as an instrumentalist. He played the mellophone and cornet, performed in vocal groups, and served as music director at church. He was also known to act in local productions. He and his sister, Alice, even did a stint touring with the Ellis Dramatic Company. In 1900, The Lakin Investigator reported that Stocking had returned from a tour where he gave “elocutionary entertainments in several towns west of here with flattering results. Mr. Stocking has given a great deal of attention to his art and deserves success.”

Stocking identified with every movement to make Lakin a better city to live in. He was an active church and Sunday school worker, member of the Knights and Ladies of Security, and also served as president of the Board of Education. According to The Independent, Horace did much to make our schools successful, and his untiring effort in that line was much appreciated by the community.

In December of 1915, the Stocking family moved to Texas. Horace had been ill for nearly a year and was hoping that the Gulf breezes would improve his health. Their time in Texas was short-lived. The following year, they returned to Kansas and settled at Winfield, but Horace frequented Lakin often. He died in 1942 in Florida at the home of his son William.

While he may not have lived in Lakin as long as some of the old settlers, Horace Stocking did leave his mark on this community, and some of his handiwork remains. For example, he was the contractor on the building where Golden Plains Credit Union is located. One of the residences he built, located on the southeast corner of Lincoln and Garfield, is currently on the market. Many know this house as the Speer home, and just across the alley to the east is the home that Stocking built for his family.

 

SOURCES: History of Kearny County Vol. I & II; Diggin’ Up Bones by Betty Barnes; Museum archives; and archives of The Lakin Investigator, The Advocate, The Lakin Independent, and Miami News

Sixty-five years ago, communities all across Kansas were celebrating our state’s 100^th birthday. Kearny County was no exception. Thursday, August 17th through Sunday, August 19^th of 1961 was dubbed “Centennial Weekend” here, and residents had a full slate of activities to partake in.

A three-day arts, crafts and antique show was held at the Veterans Memorial Building. Elizabeth Edwards was in charge of the event, and everyone was invited to bring their handiwork and/or view the creations of their neighbors and friends. The display of local talent was a worthwhile project and attracted considerable attention.

Thursday and Friday were the final days of the annual Kearny County Free Fair, and residents were encouraged to attend the 4-H livestock sale as well as view the impressive exhibits. According to The Independent, the fair enjoyed even more exhibits and “the quality was tops.”

The rodeo, also held that weekend, took on a Kansas Centennial flavor and included the added attractions of a cutting horse demonstration and quarter horse show on Friday afternoon. Competitors vied on Saturday and Sunday evenings in front of estimated crowds of 1,500 persons each night. A rodeo dance was held at the fair building in Loucks park following Saturday’s competition. Rodeo Queen Pat Schulz reigned over the events, and her attendants were Linda Claar and Pat Bolinger.

Lakin business firms closed their doors from 12:30 until 3:30 on Saturday so that employees and customers could attend a buffalo barbecue and parade. More than 1,400 people turned out for the free barbecue served at Loucks Park. Plenty of western-style sides were served alongside the buffalo. Members of the Lakin Rotary Club, Deerfield Lions Club and VFW helped with serving and cleanup. Funds for the barbecue were contributed by many Kearny County folks. The buffalo came from the Garden City Game Preserve with Tom Wright and B.C. Nash making the kills, and Alvin Michel, Vernon Barnes, and Bob Coder assisting the two hunters in dressing them. A huge pit was dug to cook the main entrée with the fire being lit on Thursday at midnight. Jack Rice was the chairman for the Centennial Committee, and his son Earle D. Rice recalled, “Not being a very adventurous meat-eater, I was not sure if I was going to like this unfamiliar buffalo meat. However, I tried it, and it wasn’t too bad!” The paper reported the food as excellent and many compliments were received by those who prepared it.

The kiddie parade, which preceded the main parade on Saturday, left Earle with plenty of memories too. “My mother, Ruth Rice, and Bonnie Plummer, mother of Stan Plummer, planned the construction of a buffalo costume for us made mostly from a large cardboard box and dark brown burlap with Stan and me supplying the legs and power to walk down Main Street. Unfortunately, when we had a trial run on the curving sidewalk in front of our new house at 110 North Hamilton, we found that Stan and I couldn’t see a thing from inside the buffalo! It was decided to ask our neighbors and friends Kenny and Dennis Speer, sons of John and Jo Speer, to guide us down Main Street. They wore their blue Cub Scout shirts and cowboy hats to act as soldiers leading the buffalo in the parade. Jo Speer and Bonnie Plummer turned their daughters, Pam and Beverly, into sunflowers for the parade. I don’t know what they wore, but the mothers made something to surround the girls’ faces, causing them to look like sunflowers. These costumes were simple but very effective.” Pam and Beverly claimed second place while Earle and Stan’s buffalo costume took third. Earle said he and Stan divided their earnings four ways with the Speer’s boys getting an equal share each.

A band, composed of grade and high school musicians and directed by Kay Loeppke, led the main parade. Earle recalled, “My dad and grandpa were members of the Lakin Rotary Club as was John Plummer. The Rotary contribution to the parade was to be two couples riding on tandem bicycles dressed in period clothing. As I remember, Mr. and Mrs. Erickson, who lived in the Kansas-Nebraska plant housing on the river road between Lakin and Deerfield were one of the couples to ride the two-seater bikes representing the Lakin Rotary Club.” One of the floats in the rodeo parade that seemed to take the eye of many of the old timers was the Friendship Grange float which depicted an old-fashioned pioneer home. According the The Lakin Independent, “Cliff Moyer, besides doing the churning, kept the old topsy stove fired up with authentic cow and buffalo chips. Iman Wiatt made the remark that those were some of the most perfect chips he had seen since as a boy he scouted the prairies looking for fuel for the winter.” The paper reported the parade as the best one seen here since 1948’s Diamond Jubilee.

The Kearny County Historical Society served free coffee and doughnuts to 400 persons Saturday afternoon at the Memorial Building where they were also selling a limited supply of Volume I of the History of Kearny County and taking reservations for more. Virgil Patterson won the championship in a horseshoe pitching contest with Carl Jones placing second and Paul Gilleland, third. The contest was sponsored by the VFW on their newly installed horseshoe pitching court on the Tate lot north of the courthouse.

In other competition, Ralph Holden won the longest beard contest with Floyd Schwindt winning the most becoming and Russell Shankle the meanest looking. All men in the county were encouraged to grow a beard to get into the spirit of 1861. The official growing period began May 1, and as a fundraiser, a $2 shaving permit was sold to those who didn’t want to grow out their facial hair.

Capacity audiences participated in the activities which were pronounced as some of the best ever held in the community.

SOURCES: “The Kearny County Kernels” by Monte Canfield, Sr.; “Kansas Centennial”; Museum archives, and archives of The Lakin Independent. Special thanks to Earle D. Rice.

Ethan McCue’s photographs are a treasured and nostalgic nod to days gone by. Behind the lens of his camera, the Kearny County native captured the spirit of rural America during the 1930s and 40s.

Born April 13, 1917 in a farmhouse in Southside Township, McCue was the son of Elbert and Mary Alice Keys McCue who had moved from Finney County to Kearny County the previous year. Ethan was educated in primary grades in a one-room school on the South Side. When he was 14 years of age, his family moved to a different farm south of Deerfield. His father bought him a Model T Ford to drive into town for high school, and he graduated from Deerfield High School in 1934 in a class of five.

Upon the recommendation of his father who was serving on the school board at the time, McCue took his first salaried work as a teacher at the one-room Prairie View School. This school was located north of Deerfield next to the Amazon Irrigation Ditch. While teaching, Ethan purchased his single-lens reflex camera which used a mirror and prism system allowing him to view through the lens and compose exactly what would be captured on the film negative. Besides his local reputation as a capable young educator and impressive baritone singer at public events, Ethan became known during the following decade as a creator of images around Kearny County. Small prints from his black and white negatives were given as gifts and sent in letters. McCue carefully mounted his best prints in a leatherette album grouped by theme, but none were labeled or dated. None of his negatives from 1937 to 1947 survive.

Ethan’s album also contains a handful of prints made by other photographers, including one undated studio portrait of Ethan. In 1939, the Greyhound Bus line offered an unlimited travel deal on the national system for $99. That summer, Ethan traveled coast-to-coast with his camera visiting the New York World’s Fair, Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, his mother’s birthplace in Appalachian Ohio, the San Francisco International Exposition, and the McCues’ long-time hired man Anthony Lumsden who had returned to his native Virginian mountains after two decades working in agriculture in Kearny County.

Most of the historical value of Ethan McCue’s album is his documentation of rural agriculture in southwest Kansas when horsepower was being replaced rapidly by motor-driven equipment. He had a great interest in engines and was celebrated for his ability to analyze problems and to get them up and running again after breakdowns. Ethan’s photographs during that era often depict state-of-the art farm equipment and new techniques. He was not interested in romantic image-making that depicted old-fashioned practices. Curiously, McCue presented no images celebrating irrigation with water drawn from the Arkansas River. Ethan’s nights spent out alone as a teenager controlling the waters to irrigate the high-value crops must have encouraged him in his studies to forge his own desired career outside of agriculture.

Primary sources don’t inform Ethan’s descendants about many details of McCue’s life during his decade as a southwest Kansas photographer. For example, his family does not know where he spent one summer, between teaching terms, horseback as a cowboy on a ranch. He did get teaching positions at Sharon Springs and in Cimarron, and in 1947, he finally earned his four-year degree at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia. This enabled him to move to Denver where he remained the rest of his life as an educator in the public schools. In June 1948 at Emporia, he married his college sweetheart, Mildred Haag of Lyon County.

After Ethan and Mildred settled in Denver, his passion for documentary photography cooled and he went on to explore other interests. McCue continued to use his SLR camera for recording family activity, but he did not use it in the ways he had back in Kansas. He became most interested in horticulture, carpentry, and in audio recording using reel-to-reel tape recorders. Those were his most notable creative outlets during his life in Colorado. McCue died at his Boulder home in 2005.

This week’s story comes to you from Ethan’s son, Michael, of Asheville, NC. Mike kindly reached out to the Kearny County Museum and graciously provided us with an album of Ethan’s photographs. The photos are in the public domain and may be used when respectfully credited with the following credit line: Ethan R. McCue (1917 – 2005) photographer, Kearny County album 1937 – 1947. The photos pictured here are a few samplings from the album.

 

On the morning of June 25^th, 1949, Garden City law enforcement discovered a blood-covered scene in the rest room at the Stevens Park bandshell. They were told that a person had been carried from there to a car and concluded that a scuffle had taken place; however, a check with area hospitals revealed that no fight victims had been treated. Then Garden City Police Chief Lee Richardson received a tip that a murder had been committed.

Officers questioned persons who had been in the vicinity of the bandshell the night of June 24, and this led to the July 2 arrest of 22-year-old William Stebens at the Garden City Experiment Station where he worked. William told law enforcement that his younger brother, Wilmer, had forced him to help bury 40-year-old John Walter Mooney, and then William took them to a site on the edge of a wheat field north of the Experiment Station to retrieve the body. Only freshly turned earth was found upon their arrival. The body was gone.

The following day, Wilmer Lee Stebens was apprehended at Lamar, Co. He told officers that he had reburied the body on the afternoon of June 26 because of his brother’s involvement with the first burial. Wilmer led authorities to the second grave, marked crudely with the lid of an empty can, in a summer fallow field 14 miles north and two miles east of Garden City. Officers probed the ground with two shovels and within a couple of minutes, they located Mooney buried only inches below the surface. The corpse was badly decomposed, and the left arm had been severed apparently by a plow as the field had been plowed since the grave had been dug.

Wilmer was charged with second-degree murder and William with accessary after the fact. Neither of the Stebens brothers could post bond, and both were committed to the Finney County jail. While awaiting trial, Texas authorities arrived on the scene trying to link 20-year-old Wilmer to the murder of Tex Thornton in Amarillo on June 22. Although the out-of-work old field worker admitted to making a long trip through oil fields of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas to find work, Wilmer said he could produce witnesses to prove that he was not in Amarillo at the time of Thornton’s murder. That investigation into Wilmer “fizzled” out according to newspaper reports.

The Mooney murder charges, however, stuck. According to Wilmer, he and some other men had had a few beers at a tavern north of Stevens Park on June 24, and they bought a beer for Mooney, a 40-year-old transient farm worker from North Carolina. Mooney said he had hid a bottle in a bush at the park so they went to the park to look for it. Unable to locate the bottle, Mooney and Wilmer went to the bandshell where Mooney reportedly pulled a knife on Stebens and threatened to sexually assault him.

Stebens told officers he hit Mooney with his fist and knocked him down the stairs into the women’s rest room. When Mooney rose, Stebens hit him again and seized his knife, throwing it as far as he could.  Stebens said he thought that Mooney was only stunned so he left the bandshell, but then he returned an hour later and found Mooney’s cold body. Stebens panicked and forced his brother William to help bury Mooney.

Stebens’ mother told authorities that Wilmer told her he held Mooney’s head under water in the band shell toilet for 45 minutes and tried repeatedly to crush his skull against the concrete floor of the restroom. Charges were changed to first-degree murder as the investigation “gave reason to believe that robbery was the main motive.” Wilmer was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Charges against William were dropped in exchange for testifying against his brother.

Wilmer was taken to the state penitentiary, but in the fall 1950, he was transferred to the Larned State Hospital to be treated for a hyperthyroid condition. On November 4, he and another inmate jumped a guard and escaped then stole a car. They were picked up near Inverness, Fla., a week later after a nation-wide manhunt, and Wilmer was returned to the state pen in Lansing.

In September of 1951, papers reported that Stebens had confessed to the slaying of George Seahorn who was found deceased in his car near Lakin in March of 1948 with a wound in his left leg. At the time, no foul play was suspected, and the Kearny County coroner ruled that Seahorn had probably died as a result of exposure. The 56-year-old Kearny County landowner had also reportedly been suffering with heart attacks. It was believed that Seahorn had used his leg to break out a window in his car which was found in a snow-filled ditch south of the tracks near the stockyards.

Stebens saw Seahorn’s unattended death as an opportunity and made up an elaborate story as to how the murder took place. Wilmer later admitted that he concocted the tale in order to be brought back to Southwest Kansas where two former prison buddies were going to help him escape the night before his hearing. Those buddies failed to show, and Stebens went on to plead innocent. Suspecting foul play on the day of his arraignment, security at the Kearny County court house was beefed up with peace officers from seven neighboring counties, the highway patrol and Lakin police. Wilmer was later subjected to a four-hour lie detector test which cleared him of the Seahorn murder charge, but that was not the end of Wilmer’s shenanigans.

In October of 1969, Stebens escaped from the Kansas penitentiary and abducted a female student at the Kansas Medical Center. The 21-year-old woman told police she had just parked her car when a man approached her, pulled a knife and told her to start driving. Stebens did not hurt the girl but forced her to drive to Clinton, Mo., and then back to Kansas City, Kans., where he released her. Wilmer was captured near Greensburg following a chase three days later. He was given an additional 20 years in prison for kidnapping.

According to newspaper articles, Wilmer Stebens was rated as one of the toughest young men ever to go to the state penitentiary. He was 73 years old when he died at Kansas City, MO, in December of 2002, having outlived his brother William, ex-wife and a daughter.

 

SOURCES: Ancestry.com and archives of the Lakin Independent, Hutchinson News, Garden City Telegram, Emporia Gazette, Jefferson City, MO Daily Capital News, Jefferson City, MO Post Tribune and Evening Eagle.

As promised last week, this week’s column covers the childhood home of Dorothy Thorpe Weber. Dorothy’s father, Thornton Clarence Thorpe, was the eldest child of E.R. and Irene Zink Thorpe. Born in Medicine Lodge, he came with his parents to a sod hut just south of Lakin in 1888. After graduation, he went to California and attended Stanford University in the fall. In 1907, he married Ella Wright, also a Lakin native, while still at the university. They moved back to Lakin shortly afterwards. What follows are excerpts from a story written by Dorothy in 1984.

“At the time my Dad came back to Lakin from California, my Grandfather had started investing in cattle, as well as farm land. My Dad took over the cattle business for him. He liked it, except that the ranch where the cattle were (was) several miles from Lakin where his family was. After the ranch was making a good profit, my Dad decided to build a home out there for us and in 1918, we moved into the new ranch house. The name of our ranch was the T Lazy T.” This ranch was located six miles west of Lakin.

“We only lived in the ranch house about two and a half years. My Mother had the flu just after my youngest brother, Thornton, was born in 1918, and she was never very strong after that. In 1920, my Dad decided we should move back to Lakin so she would be closer to a doctor and be nearer to her folks, and in October 1920 we moved back into town. Our new house in Lakin was built from the same floor plan as the one used for the ranch house. The only difference was that the ranch house had a side porch, and our house in town didn’t.

“I don’t remember my Mother being up very much after we moved back to Lakin. We were always welcome to go into her room any time, and she was always glad to see us and talk. We had only lived in our new house a year and half when my Mother died on April 8, 1921. She was not quite 36 years old.

“About a year after Mother died, Dad married again. He married Ione Enslow. She was a nurse, and she had taken care of all of us when the whole family had the flu in 1918. Just a few weeks after they got married, I had a very bad case of scarlet fever and our house was put under quarantine. My brothers and sisters and Dad had to go stay with Grandmother Thorpe and not even my Dad was allowed to come into the house with me and my stepmother. My Dad would come by every evening and talk to us through the window, and sometimes he would leave me a present on the porch. I remember especially a doll with a china face and arms and feet and bright red cloth body. I thought she was beautiful. After I got well, that doll and all the things I had played with had to be burned up, and our house was fumigated.

“I loved our house in Lakin. There were three bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. Margaret and Edith and I shared a big room upstairs, and Edgar and Thornton shared one. The other room upstairs was the guest room. Downstairs there was a living room with a big fireplace, a dining room with a built-in china cabinet with glass doors, a den for my Dad, a big kitchen and bathroom and the master bedroom and a smaller bedroom.

“Our house had a big front porch with a door into the house at each end of the porch. One front door went into the living room and the other went into a hallway with three openings, one led up the stairway, one into the den and the other into the dining room. There was a big porch across the back of the house too. The house was heated with a central coal-burning furnace. There was a big floor grill opening in the dining room which was really the center of the house and then there were floor grills in each of the bedrooms upstairs to let the heat up there. One of the nice things about it was that we could look down through the grill from upstairs in the bedrooms and watch what was going on downstairs in the living room and dining room. This was especially nice at Christmas when we could watch and see what presents were being put under the Christmas tree and in the sock hanging from the fireplace.”

Dorothy’s father, stepmother and younger brothers left for California when she was 12, and she moved in with her Thorpe grandparents. Her childhood home has had multiple owners over the years but still stands at 403 N. Hamilton Street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOURCES: Dorothy Thorpe Weber; History of Kearny County Vol. I; Archives of Kearny County Advocate and Lakin Independent; and Museum archives with special thanks to James Clyde (Jerry) Thorpe, son of Edgar Wright Thorpe.

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Jerry Thorpe and his beautiful wife, JoAnn, of Eagle, Idaho. Jerry is the great-grandson of E.R. Thorpe, a Kearny county pioneer who invested greatly in the development of this county. Jerry graciously shared with me some photographs and information about the Thorpe family. Some of these photographs are a perfect complement to a story written in 1984 by Jerry’s aunt, Dorothy Thorpe Weber. Dorothy’s story, nine pages in length, is a bit long to share in its entirety; however, I have picked out some excerpts that I think our readers, especially those who live in Lakin, will find interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edgar Robinson Thorpe was born in 1861 and grew up in Ross County, Ohio. On April 4, 1881, he married Irene Zink at Hillsboro, OH. Not long after their wedding, E.R.’s parents decided to move west to Kansas, and they invited the young newlyweds to go with them. The Thorpe family first settled in south central Kansas. E.R. and his bride lived on a cattle ranch not far from Medicine Lodge where he worked as a superintendent of the ranch and where Dorothy’s father, Thornton Clarence Thorpe, was born in 1886. In 1888, an opportunity came to move further west, and E.R. and Irene moved into a sod hut on land in Kearny County just south of Lakin.

“In every family I think there is usually one very strong character who stands out from all the others. In the Thorpe family it was my grandfather, Edgar Robinson Thorpe,” wrote Dorothy. “Although my Grandfather Thorpe had only a high school education, he had a burning ambition to become an attorney. My Grandmother used to tell us stories about how he studied law at night after the farm work was done and the cattle taken care of. There was no electricity so they studied by lamp light. Sometimes my Grandmother read the books to him; sometimes he studied by himself. Finally, all the hard work and determination paid off, and he passed the Kansas Bar Examination and was admitted to the Kansas Bar Association. He opened his own Law Office in Lakin and specialized in searching land titles and preparing Abstracts of Title. There was a great demand for this work, from the government as well as from private firms and individuals. All the money that Grandfather could spare was put back into more land, or the purchase of mineral rights.”

Eventually, E.R. and Irene moved their family to town into a house on the northwest corner of Lincoln Avenue and Main Street. “The house started small. There were just four rooms in 1890 when they moved in. Two more bedrooms were added after my Aunt Georgia and Uncle Glen were born. Then a few years later, there were some major changes and a library was added on the south end of the house and a billiard room was added at the north side of the house. A wide concrete porch ran across the entire front of the house for easy access to any part of the house. A small bedroom, utility room and porch were added off the kitchen on the west. The small bedroom was used by the girls who came to live with my grandparents while they attended high school in Lakin. In return for board and room and a small salary, each girl would help my grandmother with the housework and laundry.

“Grandmother’s sewing room had a big picture window that looked out on Main Street, and every afternoon she would sit in the wicker rocker by that window and sew and watch for my Grandfather to come home from his office. He always walked. I can remember how he looked – very tall and slim and a little bit stooped. When I was in High School, and the year after I was at Chillicothe Business College, I worked in his office and we would walk to work and back home together. Through most of those years, I lived with my grandparents.

“My Grandfather had had cataracts removed from both eyes and his glasses had very thick lens. He had the kindest blue eyes I ever saw. He was always there when we needed him. My Grandmother had very thin hair, and she wore a “transformation”. It was a hairpiece that pinned into her own hair. She used to curl her hair, around the front of the hairpiece, every morning right after breakfast. She wore a little white cap with lace around it until she had her hairpiece on. I still remember the good smell in her bedroom when I would go in and sit beside her while she fixed her hair. The smell was a combination of the coal-oil lamp that heated the old-fashioned curling iron, and the cold cream that she used on her face, and her powder.

“My grandparents’ home in Lakin played an important part in my life. It was a kind of security blanket,” Dorothy recalled.

This fondly remembered home is still a part of the Lakin landscape. In the spring of 1947, the structure was moved in three parts to Campbell Street and used as apartments. Originally known as Clements Apartments, they were managed by Dorothy’s sister and brother-in-law, Edith and John Clements. In next week’s article, learn about Dorothy’s childhood home.

SOURCES: Dorothy Thorpe Weber; History of Kearny County Vol. I; Ancestry.com; Archives of The Lakin Independent; and Museum archives with special thanks to James Clyde (Jerry) Thorpe, son of Edgar Wright Thorpe.

 

Kearny County is an agricultural community, but we have been growing more than crops here in Southwest Kansas. Max Harry Hillyard was one of many talented artists that Kearny County has produced over the years. The son of J. Max and Jean Rardon Hillyard, this homegrown boy grew up to be deeply respected as an illustrator and Western and Native American artist. Throughout his life, Max received numerous awards for his paintings and sculptures, but he was equally adept with his pen and ink renderings.

A 1948 graduate of Lakin High School, Max studied art at the University of New Mexico. While there, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served from 1950 to 1953 during the Korean Conflict. He later studied in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona where he was the art editor on the school’s yearbook and president of Alpha Rho Tau art honorary. While still a student, Max was employed as the art director for KDWI-TV, later known as KGUN-TV.

Hillyard was hired as the art director at the Arizona Daily Star/Citizen around 1957. In addition to creating charts and drawing cartoons, Max’s pen and ink drawings of Native Americans regularly appeared in his columns entitled, “hillyard’s corner” and “hillyard’s sketchbook.” While with the Star/Citizen, he was put in charge of the Newspaper in the Classroom program. He also spent time as an illustrator for a U.S. defense contractor providing technical artist renderings for missile systems and satellite surveillance equipment, and in 1973, he opened his own art studio in Tucson.

In 1977, Max moved his family to the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in east central Arizona where his wife, Myrna, was the elementary school’s principal. He then started working as a full-time freelance illustrator and artist. Max was commissioned by the White Mountain Apache Tribe to design their official tribal seal which is still used today. He also created much of the original artwork displayed in the Whiteriver Indian Hospital.

Max’s work gained widespread national distribution through his unique 1973 collection entitled, “A Portfolio of White Mountain Apaches.” The portfolio includes six meticulously detailed pen and ink drawings which capture tribal elders, historical leaders and daily tasks of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The Kearny County Museum is very fortunate indeed to own a set of these limited-edition prints.

In 1998, Max and Myrna retired to Oak Creek valley, AZ, where he continued to paint. It was there that Max passed away on November 3, 2002 at the age of 72. Still today, Hillyard’s works are highly sought after by collectors of Western and Native American historical art.

 

SOURCES: History of Kearny County Vols. I & II; archives of The Lakin Independent and Arizona Daily Star; Museum archives; Ancestry.com; Ebay; Invaluable.com; Etsy and Bidsquare.