Retreat to Kansas City

July 10, 2011: There was a time that Kansas was too far north for magnolias, Southern or sweetbay. But with the climate change of global warming, this magnolia was doing just fine in Salina, Kansas:

Crossing the Flint Hills:

We detoured to see the actual Shawnee Mission (c. 1839), a Methodist mission to the Shawnee. The Civil War did not begin at Fort Sumter but here at Shawnee Mission. The mission served as the Kansas territorial capital in 1855-56. The territorial legislature dominated by Border Ruffians here passed pro-slavery laws that led to Bleeding Kansas which led to the Civil War.

Inexplicably, a statue of Winston and Clementine Churchill sits on the Country Club Plaza:
"Sky Station" sculptures top concrete pylons where the convention center crosses over the top of the interstate:

The Land of the Post Rock

June 9, 2011: We started with a detour to the actual Brookville to see the actual hotel site. The Abilene reconstruction (left) is pretty close to the original hotel; the Brookville "replacement" (right) is just weird:

We soon entered the Land of the Giants, electric wind turbines. Kansas takes its name from the Kansa, the "South Wind People" in a Sioux dialect.

The Lincoln County Courthouse:
David's boyhood home:

Goldenrod Elevator was built by David's grandfather (left); the Dansk Evangelische Kirche (1876-1878) in Denmark, Kansas.

David spread his father's ashes in this wheat field:

The Kansas plains were once the bottom of a great ocean. The limestone deposit immediately below the surface contains the fossils of sea shells. The limestone was used not only for homes, churches and court houses, but for fence posts in a land where trees were scarce. Hence the name "post rock."

The road was flooded; the Indian is a folk art sculpture:












The Garden of Eden is not in Jackson County, Missouri, but in Lucas, Kansas:
Adam, Eve, the snake and the apple (left); the devil:

The Crucifixion of Labor:

Wilson dam and reservoir:













The suitcase grave in the Lincoln Cemetery; the monument to Bessie Stanley's "Success:"















A purple poppy mallow (right):













We took a detour to Rock City:














Back to Salina:

An Afternoon in Kansas

June 8, 2011: We headed first to Lawrence where we made a pit stop at The Bourgeois Pig:

We drove across the KU campus: The "Pterodactyl" Jayhawk stands in front of Strong Hall (left); The Daniel Chester French statue of Uncle Jimmy Green (right), "the only full-figure sculpture of a teacher on any university campus," stands in front of Lipponcott Hall.

We went into the lobby of Ellsworth Hall (residential) to see it's view of The Hill:

In West Campus, we stopped by the Robert J. Dole Institute for Politics; the donors clearly were hoping for a presidential library:

There's a stained glass window homage of his Russell, KS hometown; another of the American flag, and, inexplicably, two girder relics from the Twin Towers?

In Topeka, we stopped by the Kansas Capitol to see the art.

Native son John Steuart Curry painted "Tragic Prelude" with the iconic John Brown in Bleeding Kansas.

He also painted "Kansas Pastoral:"

The "controversy" over these murals caused Curry to stop work on eight others planned for the second-floor of the rotunda. In 1976, the legislature hired almost-native-son Lumen Martin Winter to complete the rotunda murals. John C. Fremont is on the left; The Sacking of Lawrence is on the right.

In 1956, native son David H. Overmyer painted eight murals on the walls of the first-floor rotunda. The Coming of the Spaniards is on the left; The Battle of the Arikaree is on the right. David's great-great-uncle John Healy fought in, and survived, the Battle of the Arikaree.

William Allen White (left); Dwight D. Eisenhower (right).














We stopped in Abilene to see Dwight D. Eisenhower's boyhood home (left). Dwight and Mamie are buried in the chapel.





























We met Susan Marshall for a family-style chicken dinner at the relocated Brookville Hotel. The meal wasn't as good as it used to be, but, for central Kansas, it's still pretty good. The restaurant's heyday was during and after World War II. It's claim to fame was that William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody stayed there on June 2, 1899.