To Chanute

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

TO CHANUTE

On a Saturday morning, Dave and I headed southbound on K-99, the car happily gobbling up white stripes on the highway.

After a long and unforgiving winter, it was exhilarating to see scenery zipping by at 60 mph again. We’d had a week of 50-degree temperatures and when the sun rose that morning, it seemed like a good day to see if Kansas was the way we had left it.

It was. Ditches still held the highways in place and barbed wire still fenced in the cattle. The horizon was a steady line in the distance, just as it should be.

At Madison, we took a left onto K-58, a winding road through the faded buckskin-colored fields of winter. We drove through Lamont, a quiet unincorporated town in Greenwood County.

The Lamont school is gone and along the highway a marker states that it closed in 1966. A preserved cornerstone of the school indicates that the building had been a public works project.

We cruised through Buffalo (pop. 276) in Wilson County. Folks were out and about on Main Street. Two men were having a conversation in middle of the street, one sat in his pickup, the other guy stood near the truck’s door. Three kids, probably siblings, walked down the street, and the post office had in-and-out traffic.

Like many small towns, Buffalo has holes in its business district, vacant lots where buildings have fallen down or burned down or disappeared over the last 50 years.

Off Main is an old diner. I’m not sure if it’s a Valentine Diner or just a similar metal building, white with red trim. The painted name of the old business had faded, but it looked like Dairy Drive-In. The building is trapped inside a prison of young trees that have grown up against it.

Chanute, our destination, was just a short drive from Buffalo – and only about a 90-minute trip from Emporia, unless you stop and take photographs along the way like Dave and I do, then it takes two to three hours.

In downtown Chanute, you’ll find an attractive little park, a tribute to the town’s namesake, Octave Chanute. Mr. Chanute, born in Paris in 1832, was a civil engineer, building the first railroad bridge across the Missouri River. And he was in charge of building railroad lines, including one that ran through this region, so the new town of Chanute was named after him. Mr. Chanute moved on to Chicago and began to work on what he considered “the problem of the ages,” heavier-than-air flight.

Octave Chanute was a mentor and friend to Orville and Wilbur Wright who studied Chanute’s 1894 book, “Progress in Flying Machines.”

The Wright Brothers’ first flight (1903) is the focus of the downtown tribute to Octave Chanute. The main sculpture, up in the air, is a graceful white flying machine with a figure lying on the biplane. On the ground are other figures, spectators.

Our main goal in Chanute was to visit the Safari Museum which tells the fascinating story of Martin and Osa Johnson. In the 1920s and ‘30s, these Kansans became famous for their films of natives and of wild animals made during their trips to the South Pacific, Borneo, and Africa. (I’ll have more on the museum in a future column.)

On the way home, Dave and I visited Humboldt (pop. 1,854) in Allen County. Humboldt gave the world two baseball stars: Walter Johnson, a pitcher who won 417 games for the Washington Senators between 1907 and 1927, and George Sweatt who played with the Kansas City Monarchs and the Chicago American Giants in the 1920s.

The stone wall around the Walter Johnson Athletic Field was a 1938 WPA project. Another ballpark in town is named for George Sweatt.

On the square in Humboldt stands a monument recognizing the Civil War events here, which included the burning of the town by Confederate raiders on Oct. 14, 1861.

As on any day trip, there was more to see and do than we could manage. Well have to catch the soda fountain in Chanute’s Cardinal Drug Store on another trip.

It felt as if years had passed since our previous meanderings, but Kansas is still there, right where we left it. After that long winter, it’s hard to believe that warm weather is finally here, and I suggest that we all get out while the getting is good.

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Next week,  The Safari Museum …

The museum granted Dave and me permission to post our Safari Museum photos on FlyoverPeople.net.