Daily News

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

Butler County Courthouse, El Dorado.

SOUTHBOUND

When gas prices dropped below $3.50 a gallon, Dave and I celebrated with a road trip.

On a Saturday morning we picked a town off the map.

“How about Winfield?” I suggested.

Dave and I like to be surprised, so our trips are seldom well-planned. We tend to just get in the car and go.

However, on the road, we will sometimes check Marci Penner’s book, “The Kansas Guidebook for Explorers,” to see what’s in the next town, especially when we’re looking for a place to eat.

On some trips, we focus on a couple of towns; other times we can hit eight or more communities. It’s a trade-off: distance and variety versus one or two towns carefully explored.

On this daytrip, we used the shotgun approach: a bunch of towns.

We drove south on the turnpike and made El Dorado our jumping-off point.

The Butler County Courthouse in El Dorado is one of the state’s beauties – a 1909 Romanesque Revival, designed by famed Ottawa architect, George P. Washburn.

The courthouse was being repaired; the front steps were torn away, so I couldn’t photograph the building in all of its glory.

Many of these older Kansas courthouses have annexes; Butler County’s is on the east side of the square, built with the same red brick and limestone scheme as the courthouse, so it fit in quite nicely. And down the street, also built to match, is the county’s judicial center.

The courthouse square has an impressive brick and stone tribute to the military. The Celebration of Freedom features a large bronze eagle, recognizes the five branches of the armed forces and remembers prisoners of war and those missing in action.

West of the courthouse is a replica of the Statue of Liberty, donated by local Boy Scout troops in 1950. A number of Kansas courthouse squares have replicas of Lady Liberty.

Across the street stands the old Carnegie library, which now houses an architectural firm.

Dave and I walked around downtown and headed for the post office because Penner’s book mentioned a William Allen White memorial there. In the grass to the side of the post office was an engraved stone, commemorating the 100th anniversary of White’s birth.

White was born in Emporia in 1868, but grew up in El Dorado. The memorial stands on the location of his boyhood home.

El Dorado puts its slogan, “The Fine Art of Living Well,” to work. This town promotes art. The community offers a 16-statue walking tour.

Sculpture Alley includes a ceramic tile mural of a Flint Hills scene by Phil Epp and Terry Corbett. Here you’ll also find “Flight,” a bronze statue made by Jim Brothers, featuring a young Amelia Earhart-like girl wearing an aviator cap and scarf.

Downtown has an art museum and a number of galleries. We stopped in one, Time Light Images, which features photography by H. Richard Kuhns Jr., but currently also displayed the work of other local artists as part of the town’s recent gallery walk.

After our quick visit to El Dorado, we left southbound on U.S. 77, then took a county road, looking for Smileyberg. Because how can you not stop to see a town named that?

Smileyberg wasn’t much – a few houses, a transmission shop bearing the name, and a decrepit wooden building with a faded metal sign: Smileyberg Bait Shop.

According to Dan Fitzgerald in his book, “Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas,” Smileyberg got its name in 1908 from traveling salesman, Thomas Smiley (who stopped traveling and settled down), and Barney Berg, a blacksmith. (Hence, the odd spelling of the town – not “burg” as one would expect.)

The community apparently had a small burst of energy during the oil boom but that burst didn’t last long.

Smiley died in 1919, Berg in 1926. Fitzgerald wrote, “When Berg and Smiley died, most of the town died too.”

At Smileyberg, we turned west and headed for Douglass.

Copyright 2008 Cheryl Unruh

Filed under: columns, courthouses, small towns, traveling on August 26th, 2008