Day 65, Thursday May 2, 2024: Olathe, Kansas to Webb City, Missouri
- Mark Carl Rom
- May 5
- 4 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Fort Scott and Cherryvale, Kansas and Webb City, Missouri
I had to Harry Houdini myself in the car this morning. (How does one Harry Houdini? The same way that one gets to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.) The first night of May greeted me with a warm and moist breath, and Goldfinger was getting stuffy. Before retiring, I cracked three of the car windows open and fully opened the fourth, which I covered with mosquito netting even though I had not yet felt their bite. The forecast called only for a chance of showers, and I wasn’t concerned. By 7.15 the heavens had opened up and the rain poured in. I had to close the windows, and I can’t do that in my 2015 Subaru without turning the car on. So wearing only my favorite bright orange Saxx underwear I squirm through the small gap between the back and front to turn it on and roll them up. Sitting nearly naked in the puddle on the seat, I planned my next moves.
The white settler who founded Olathe wanted to name the town “Beautiful” because of the verbena and other wild flowers blooming there. Legend has it that he asked his Shawnee interpreter how to say beautiful in his native language and was told “Olathe”. (If history is any guide, he then proceeded to shoot the unnamed Shawnee.) Olathe (pronounced O-lay-the) does not have a Carnegie library, and by all accounts the most beautiful library in Kansas is in Lawrence, so I don’t know why I put it on my itinerary.
I’m glad I did. The Olathe Indian Creek library is my new favorite modern library. It’s a marvel inside and out. From where I am writing, a 20 horizontal foot long fire is flickering inside one wall, while another tall glass wall holds bubbles rising through the water inside, illuminated by ever changing colors.
In the last decade of the 1800s, only about 400 public libraries existed, and some 180 of these were in Massachusetts. Before Carnegie began funding libraries, women’s organizations across the country were already mobilizing to establish libraries in their often small towns.
One such group was the Ladies Reading Circle of Olathe, Kansas. Olathe, located just south of Kansas, developed as a stop along the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe trails. In the same year (1883) that Carnegie built his first library, the women of Olathe joined together to form the Ladies Reading Circle. At first, the “women of Olathe” comprised three individuals: Mrs. Susan J. (Jenny) Parker St. John, the wife of the former Governor of Kansas; her sister-in-law, Mrs. Emma Parker, and Mrs. Celestia Stevenson. (The library says that the Ladies Reading Circle continues reading.) Their tasks: collect books, find places to accommodate them, and volunteer as librarians. A library had been opened by the Olathe Library Association in the 1870s, although it was a subscription library and hence not free for public use.
Although the Olathean women were not allowed to vote in federal elections, they did have the right to vote in local elections, including those pertaining to the library. Their votes were separate but equal; that is, the votes of men and women were counted separately. The result? Women were substantially more likely to vote “yes” on library issues than were men, concludes Paula Watson in her article “Women, Carnegie, and the Public Library,” which appeared in the Libraries & Culture journal in 1996.
In 1909, the town contacted Carnegie to seek library funding, and they received it. Miss Lena Bell, an Olathe native, was chosen from among 20 applicants to be the town’s first librarian, and she led the transition from a temporary library hosted in the City Hall to the new one funded through the Carnegie grant. That library opened in 1914, and on opening day eight different women’s clubs jointly hosted a reception for the women of the town. Nearly 1000 enjoyed “one of the most enjoyable social functions of the month” which makes me wonder what the competition was. Lena continued to serve as the librarian until she passed away in 1922. While librarian, Lena was especially involved in working with children and the town’s women’s clubs. She willed her personal collection of 100 books to the library.
Elizabeth Barr Arthur became the librarian upon Bell’s death. In the next year, she reported that 1822 books had been added to the collection and that 422 overdue notices had been mailed. In 1926, she reported that over 1200 reference questions had been asked, and presumably answered; to ease the load, Pearl Edson was hired as an assistant librarian. Arthur left the library in 1929 and Edson assumed library leadership. During the Great Depression, Pearl, her daughter reports, worked for next to nothing in order to keep the library open. In the 1940s, Pearl was quoted in a local newspaper as saying “the nicest people in town come to the library” which seems like a prudent thing for a librarian who wants to keep her job to say.
Nancy (“Nannie”) Anderson Hogue retired from the library board in 1951 after having been appointed one of its original members in 1909. She died two years later. Her notes as a teacher and administrator (Nannie served as the Johnson County Superintendent of Schools), as well as Hogue family memorabilia across three generations, are held in the Kansas Historical Society Archives. It might be worth a visit.
In the parking lot behind the Sleep and Suites in Webb City, I cued up The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. A father was watching his daughters play a game of wiffle ball across the way. Three men, dressed head to toe in camouflage, were skinning a wild turkey, sliding its guts into zip lock bags. At first I thought the guys were messing with their golf clubs and while I knew that camo was not traditional golfing attire I thought, well, this is Missouri. The film ends with Katniss watching her idol Peeta thrashing frantically, strapped down to a hospital bed.
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