A Journal of the Central Plains Volume 38, Number 2 | Summer 2015
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Kansas History A Journal of the Central Plains Volume 38, Number 2 | Summer 2015 A collaboration of the Kansas Historical Foundation and the Department of History at Kansas State University Kansas experienced its most dynamic period of population Union proclaimed on April 29, 1865, that Kansas “presents growth by far during its first three decades of statehood. At to the pioneer settler inducements second to no State in all the the end of the Civil War in 1865, the state census enumerated West, as a field for emigration. The idea that the Central 136,000 people; federal census takers counted 364,000 in 1870; and Western portion of the State is a Desert is exploded. almost one million in 1880, and nearly a million and a half The field is wide and inviting, and there is nothing in the way. in 1890. Most of the expectant settlers came from states to The idea of border and Indian difficulties has kept the State the east, with Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri leading from settling up rapidly. Both of these evils have passed.” In the field. But the state’s immigrant population, most of whom 1868 the commissioner of immigration called on Kansans to be hailed from the British Isles or Germany, was significant, and aggressive in their recruitment of immigrants: “It would not although it actually peaked at 13.3 percent in 1870, the overall be characteristic for Kansas to be hid under a bushel. Let us see number continued to increase. Thousands of immigrants from that her light shall shine.” southern and eastern Europe joined this transatlantic migration In the early 1890s, as the state’s foreign-born population peaked around the turn of the twentieth century. For the most part, at 148,000, William H. Carruth created this “Map of Foreign the state welcomed all the migrants who came to settle its vast Settlements in Kansas.” It was published in the Ninth Biennial public and private lands and to build their farms and towns, Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, 1893–1894, and especially during the immediate postwar decades. The State shows the locations of German, including Russian Mennonite; Bureau of Immigration, the State Board of Agriculture, local Scandinavian; French and Italian; Bohemian and Hungarian; newspapers, businesses, and private individuals and groups and Irish, Scotch, and Welsh settlements. The map above can be actively recruited immigrants. The editor of the Junction City viewed on Kansas Memory at kansasmemory.org/item/220778. Kansas History A Journal of the Central Plains Volume 38, Number 2 | Summer 2015 Suzanne E. Orr Managing Editor Identity, Culture Maintenance, and Social Mobility: 66 James E. Sherow Assistant Managing The Welsh in Emporia, Lyon County, Editor 1870–1930 Virgil W. Dean by Robert Llewellyn Tyler Consulting Editor Derek S. Hoff “Peerless Princess of the Book Review Editor Southwest”: 80 Katherine Goerl Boosterism and Regional Identity Editorial Assistant p. 66 in Wichita, Kansas by Jay M. Price Editorial Advisory Board Donald L. Fixico Kenneth M. Hamilton “Facing This Vast Hardness”: 108 David A. Haury M. H. Hoeflich The Plains Landscape and the People Thomas D. Isern James N. Leiker Shaped by It in Recent Kansas/Plains Film Bonnie Lynn-Sherow edited and introduced by Thomas Prasch Patricia A. Michaelis Jay M. Price Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Kim Carey Warren Reviews 136 p. 80 Cover: Kellogg Cowboy. Book Notes 143 Courtesy of Jay M. Price. Back cover: Souvenir program from the premiere of Dark Command (1940). Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society, Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, Kansas. Copyright ©2015 Kansas State Historical Society, Inc. ISSN 0149-9114 p. 108 Printed by Allen Press, Lawrence, Kansas. Welsh Congregational Church, Emporia, Kansas, 1882. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 38 (Summer 2015): 66–79 66 Kansas History Identity, Culture Maintenance, and Social Mobility: The Welsh in Emporia, Lyon County, 1870–1930 by Robert Llewellyn Tyler Emporia, Kansas, is well known among our Welsh people through the country, chiefly on account of the strong and flourishing Welsh settlement, of which it is the centre. The Welsh people are a strong element in the town population and have a fair share of the mercantile business.1 n recent years, the Welsh in the United States have received increasing attention from historians and, quite understandably, these historians have focused on the greatest concentrations of Welsh settlement: the mining and metallurgical districts of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.2 Other states also attracted significant numbers of Welsh migrants, and micro-studies of smaller settlements can provide relevant insights into Welsh American communities and the ways in which they changed.3 If Pennsylvania, with 35,435 Welsh-born residents in 1900, and IOhio and New York, with 11,481 and 7,304 respectively, were the states exerting the greatest pull on Welsh immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, Kansas with its 2,005 residents has, unsurprisingly, yet to draw significant attention from students of Welsh immigration history. Nevertheless, Kansas provides opportunities for studies that produce significant insights, because although relatively few Welsh immigrants were drawn to Kansas, settlement patterns within the state made their presence in certain areas more noticeable (table 1). Robert Llewellyn Tyler, received his BA at the University of Wales in 1984, his MA at the University of Pittsburgh in 1989, and his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2000. In 2009–2010 Professor Tyler was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in British History at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He has been widely published and continues to research Welsh communities overseas. 1. “Personal and Miscellaneous Notes,” Cambrian: A Magazine for Welsh Americans 15 (February 1895): 59. During the years 1880 to 1919, the Cambrian was one of the most popular magazines read by Welsh Americans. 2. See, for example, William D. Jones, Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh, 1860–1920 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993); Anne Knowles, Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), and Ronald L. Lewis, Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). For a general survey of Welsh immigration to nineteenth-century America, see Edward George Hartmann, Americans from Wales (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1967). 3. For a contemporary account of Welsh settlements in the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century, see R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America (Utica, N.Y.: T. J. Griffiths, 1872). A translation by Phillips G. Davies of the section on Kansas appeared in Davies, ed. and trans., “Welsh Settlements in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 43 (Winter 1977): 448–69. All statistical evidence for this article is drawn from United States Federal Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. A useful and interesting article is Carolyn B. Berneking, “The Welsh Settlers of Emporia: A Cultural History,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1971): 269–82. Identity, Culture Maintenance, and Social Mobility 67 Table 1. Welsh Immigrants in Kansas a masnach fywiog; ac y mae dwy reilffordd yn myned trwyddi. Mae yn Emporia 1870 1880 1890 1900 amrai o’n cydgenedl yn grefftwyr ac yn Born in Wales 1,088 2,088 2,488 2,005 fasnachwyr cyfoethog, a rhai o honynt mewn swyddi cyfrifol. Bydd y dref gynyddol hon yn fuan yn Total Population 364,399 996,096 1,428,108 1,470,495 ail i ddinas Lawrence. Mae llawer o dyddynwyr Cymreig yn byw yn agos ati.7 [It The census returns from 1900 indicate a concentration has wide streets, several large stores, many of Welsh migrants within Kansas, with 451 of the state’s good houses some excellent churches and Welsh-born residents to be found in Lyon County alone. lively businesses and two railroads running Within Lyon County itself, the Welsh were further through. Emporia has several wealthy Welsh concentrated, with the vast majority, 356, residing in craftsmen and businessmen. Some of them in the town of Emporia and on its associated farms.4 What positions of responsibility. This growing town drew the Welsh to Emporia ahead of other locations will soon be second in size to Lawrence. Many within the state is by no means certain, although it has Welsh farmers live nearby.] been suggested that the original town agreement, which Emporia’s population of 2,168 people in 1870 had proscribed the making and selling of alcohol, appealed to reached 4,631 by 1880 and 9,058 by 1910, and it was the religious and temperate Welsh. The area also received home to a number of prosperous business enterprises. praise in the pages of the Welsh American newspaper, Y Among the industries drawing people to the city were Drych, which attracted Welsh people already residing in 5 mills, foundries, factories, and plants producing wool, the United States. Writing in 1929, Laura M. French was flour, cream, ice, machinery, wagons, brooms, bricks, aware of the Welsh contribution to the development of tile works, and marble. The town also boasted several the district from the earliest days: “While much of the churches, banks, first-class hotels, one daily and two settlement of Lyon County was made by immigrants weekly newspapers, a post office, an opera house, and a from other States, as early as 1857 many Welsh were telegraph service.8 Despite this growth, Emporia was not a arriving, and they continued to come in large numbers huge magnet for immigrants, with only four nationalities throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties. There reaching treble figures from its beginning (table 2). Until were business men and mechanics among these people, the arrival of Mexican immigrants to labor on the railroad, and many of them at once became residents of Emporia, 6 the largest number of foreign-born Emporia residents and many others moved to this town later.” hailed from Wales.