NonProfit Org U.S. Postage PAID Permit No 299 Topeka KS Autumn 2009 VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3 FROM OUR COLLECTIONS 2 Carry Nation and the Welcome Home Defenders pportunities abound this fall to enjoy Kansas’ most 6 colorful season. The Historical Society’s activities Three Cheers for O “Old Springfield” include fall festivals, graveside conversations, and the KSHS, Inc., Annual Meeting. Explore scenes of harvest 10 Serving Up Traditions at through the years when you browse the largest online Connie’s Café digital resource for state history, Kansas Memory. Michael Church, coordinator of digital Departments initiatives, oversees the immense effort to place the Historical Society’s photographs, Real People. Real Stories. .1 documents, maps, manuscripts, and artifacts Save Our History ..........4 online in kansasmemory.org. A native of Featured State Historic Site ..5 Cheyenne, Wyoming, Church grew up in Countdown to Statehood...8 Salina. An affinity for history took him to Utah to serve there as an archivist before joining the History’s Heroes...........8 Historical Society in 2005. Meet Our Members ........9 To prepare items for Kansas Memory, the Happening at KSHS.......12 team selects, scans, arranges, and describes materials from the collections; applying conservation methods to fragile items; creating transcriptions of Calendar . .13 handwritten documents; and paginating the images for publication. Many full-time and part-time staff, student interns, and volunteers contribute time to the resource, which currently features more than 62,000 images of items. “I enjoy digging through our collections and finding sources that document On the cover: Two unidentified the triumphs and hardships of everyday folks—like Richard West in Barton men visit with Carry A. Nation on Station, Alabama, pleading with Governor St. John to help him and his people a city street, circa 1908. Nation (foreground) was an outspoken come to Kansas and escape the cruelty of Southern discrimination,” Church proponent of prohibition. said. “Kansas Memory gives voice to the unknown actors in the state’s past and documents their contributions to the issues, movements, and events of Kansas and U.S. history.” Upcoming additions include 1,500 photos of central Kansas from 1908-1912 by L. W. Halbe of Dorrance and the records of William Clark and other Indian superintendents, 1807-1855, courtesy of a grant from the National Park Service. Real People. Real Stories. Eva Jessye – 1895-1992 Kansas Ambassador for Art s little Eva Alberta Jessye slept, her Aunt Harriet sang A spirituals, not knowing that she was fostering within her niece a love of music and poetry that would take the young girl far from her Coffeyville home. At the age of 12, Jessye organized a girl’s quartet, the first of many choral ensembles she would form during her life. REAL PEOPLE. REAL STORIES. Jessye could not attend high school in Coffeyville because she was African American, so she attended Western University in Kansas City. Despite her young age, she was They performed in the 1927 filmUncle Tom’s Cabin and soon responsible for organizing the school’s chorus. the 1929 filmHallelujah , for which Jessye served as choral As a teen Jessye continued to develop her talents for director. In 1935 she was hired by George Gershwin to direct music and poetry. She believed that the spirituals sung by the chorus for the original production of the folk opera Porgy her ancestors were unique to the African American culture and Bess. Jessye also performed in the show in the role of the and she wanted to share the tradition with the world. After washerwoman — a role no other actor in the cast wanted. receiving a teaching certificate from Langston University in “I told the other blacks they were doing opera because Oklahoma, Jessye moved to Baltimore in 1919 to direct the their mothers washed clothes, chopped cotton, bowed low, choir at Morgan State College. She moved back to Oklahoma suffered, and labored to get them there,” Jessye said. “I for a while to teach at an African Methodist Episcopal believe in keeping the dignity of your background.” Jessye’s Church school, but returned to Baltimore in 1925 to write work on several productions of Porgy and Bess earned her the for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. unofficial title of “curator and guardian of the score.” In Baltimore Jessye performed with the Dixie Jubilee During World War II Jessye and her choir toured Europe. Singers, which would later become the Eva Jessye Choir. The For some concertgoers, it was the first time they had seen an choir performed a wide variety of music, including spirituals, African American. “They called us ‘chocolate people,’” said ballads, ragtime, and light opera, on radio, stage, and film. Jessye, “and I said I hoped we were half as sweet.” Jessye was involved with the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked Jessye and her choir to be the official chorus for the 1963 march on Washington. The choir performed “We Shall Overcome” and “Freedom is the Thing We’re Talkin’ About.” Jessye returned to teaching and established the Eva Jessye Afro-American Music Collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1974. She established a similar collection at Pittsburg State University and served as its artist-in-residence from 1978 to 1981. Kansas Governor John Carlin declared Jessye to be Kansas Ambassador for the Arts in 1981. She continued to write, teach, and direct musical groups until her death in 1992 at the age of 97 in Eva Jessye shakes hands with Eleanor Roosevelt, who Ann Arbor, Michigan. she considered to be among her friends. Autumn 2009 Reflections 1 From Our Collections The Carey Hotel Bar in Wichita. Carry Nation broke the mirror when she threw rocks at it during a temperance protest December 27, 1900. Carry Nation and the Home Defenders efore Carry Nation ever moved to Kansas, women here were taking on the fight Bagainst alcohol. Believing that alcohol caused men to squander their savings, mistreat their wives and children, and lead to broken homes, these women were seeking reform in 1855 in the new Kansas Territory. With their efforts, Kansas voters in 1880 passed a As a young widow, Nation struggled to support an infant constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol, daughter, finding brief work as a teacher. Since jobs for well ahead of other states. When communities failed to women were limited, she knew that her best option would enforce the amendment, temperance supporters sought be to remarry. ways to stop the sale of alcohol. A passionate supporter David Nation was 19 years her senior. He found work would soon join their cause, putting Kansas’ temperance where he could as an attorney, minister, and newspaper fight in the national spotlight. editor. The family lived in Texas and eventually Medicine Carry Nation, born Carrie Amelia Moore in 1846 in Lodge, Kansas, where he served as a minister. In Kansas, Kentucky, quickly learned the negative effects of alcohol. Carry Nation found like-minded people and she took a Nation’s first husband, Charles Gloyd, as a result of leadership role in the Woman’s Christian Temperance alcohol died after two years of marriage at the age of 29. Union, organizing conventions and speaking at gatherings. 2 kshs.org Nation joined the president of the Medicine Lodge BROWSE | KANSAS MEMORY WCTU to conduct their first saloon raid in December 1894. With the help of two other women, they paid a visit to a Our digital repository features numerous images of “pharmacy.” Nation led the group into the store and Carry Nation, other prohibition supporters, and the announced, “Mr. Day, the ladies of the WCTU want to see temperance union. kansasmemory.org what you have in here.” To his surprise, Nation overturned a keg rolled it out the door. “Women, this is whiskey,” she proclaimed. A clerk and policeman were unable to keep Nation from smashing the keg and spilling the contents on the ground, which the women lit and watched “burst into flames.” Armed with a brickbat, Nation next visited the town of Kiowa where she attacked as many as six bars in June 1900. She defended her actions by claiming that WCTU members had tried letter writing, personal visits, and alerting officials but the law was continually ignored. In December 1900 Nation used a hatchet to smash VISIT | KANSAS MUSEUM OF HISTORY numerous “joints.” The demolition spree continued two The museum’s Main Gallery includes a masonry more months with thousands of dollars in damage to hammer Carry Nation used to smash saloons, a saloons around Kansas. As a result of these efforts, Nation promotional poster, broken mirror from a saloon, was arrested 30 different times, and her husband filed for and a song she wrote, “Forward, Home Defenders!” divorce on the grounds of desertion. Saying she would kshs.org/places/museum “Carry A. Nation” away from the evils of alcohol, she sold photographs, hatchet pins, and “Home Defender” buttons to fund her efforts. In February 1901 Nation laid down her hatchet and took her fight to the printing press. As editor of theSmasher’s Mail, Nation invited discussion regarding the issue of prohibition. “There are but two sides in this question,” she wrote, “the children of God and the children of the devil.” She printed letters from supporters and opponents alike. “There is no sense or reason in such as you, and the sooner VISIT | KSHS.ORG you are given a lesson in common sense, the better,” wrote J. L. Ward. “ . I believe Mrs. Nation has Our online exhibit, Carry A. Nation: The Famous accomplished more in a few days than the rest of us have and Original Bar Room Smasher, offers more images by many years of hard service,” wrote an Emporia woman.