Lifestyle

John Humphrey Butts was born on a farm in Casey County, Kentucky on December 29, 1853, to Archibald and Priscilla Humphrey Butts. Mrs. Butts was a second cousin of Hon. Lyman U. Humphrey, ex-governor of Kansas. They came to Kansas in 1869 when John was 16 years old. John was reared on the farm and attended the meager country schools of pioneer times and learned how to read, write, and spell, acquiring a little knowledge of history and geography and became familiar to a limited extent with figures.

The spring of 1916 was extremely wet. More than average snow that year, and an extremely rainy spring caused the dirt streets of Augusta to become quagmires of mud. To quote one Augusta resident, “It was so bad if you stepped off the wooden sidewalks you sank in the mud up to your knees.” The majority of Augusta residents were tired of the muddy situation which was solved in the large cities by paved roads.

An article from the July 27, 1900 Journal

Soon, the rain will slow down, and the farmers will be full speed ahead. There are crops still to plant, wheat to harvest, and hay to swath and bale. That means you will see an increase in farm equipment and implements on the road. As a farmer/rancher myself, I have experienced near misses due to drivers not slowing down and taking their time to ensure safe passing conditions. I have also read recent articles where farmers on tractors have died as a result of other drivers not paying attention. Farmers have just as much right to the road as other vehicles. They just travel at a much slower speed.

We continue sharing historical essays written by Miss McDaniel’s 1973-79 Methods in Research Class. Following is the History of Augusta Theaters written by Dana Sills. Her essay is shared with minimal editing.

From the start, local newspapers were an active voice in the lives and politics of every frontier town. Across the plains, newspapers were started as soon as townsites could be plotted and populated. It took little more than an enterprising editor and a simple hand operated press to churn out the weekly tabloid which advertised the community, recorded its history, and promoted its interests. By 1889 there were 733 weekly papers in operation across Kansas. At first, the community newspapers often were simply a mouthpiece for town promoters and local speculators. The early issues were filled with notices advertising vacant lots or new businesses, along with articles extolling the virtues of the growing community. But once the town’s development was well under way, the paper invariably focused on political crusades of the day. Usually, the editors were highly opinionated and partisan and used their papers as pulpits to espouse their own views and interests.

In 1975 and 1976, two of Miss McDaniel’s Methods of Research students wrote research papers on the history of the Augusta Public Library. The students were Noreen Egger and Donna Leis. Following are excerpts from those papers.

A three-story white structure in the 600 block of Santa Fe was built in the early part of this century by J. W. Jennings, a well-known contractor and builder in Butler County, as a home for the family of Warren E. Brown. Brown was the son of George Brown, the prominent early day banker of Augusta. Warren followed his father into the banking business. The home was purchased by the Empire Oil Company when Warren and his family moved to Wichita.

Here is the famous 1905 Augusta Baseball Club which spread terror in the hearts of all the teams in this section of Kansas. Although their uniforms were far from snappy the team had big league material among its small number of players.

In my work in the international hunger space over the past two decades, I discovered the important role that supporting smallholder farmers had to do with ending hunger and providing food security. A smallholder farmer is defined as someone farming on five to 10 acres of land, and there are more than 570 million smallholder farmers who provide about one-third of the global food supply.