Photos of Wichita’s past have thousands of Facebook devotees

The Facebook post shows a black-and-white photo, circa 1888.

It’s the northeast corner of Douglas and Seneca in Wichita, only instead of a Taco Rio and a Subway, there stands an elegant three-story building with patchwork stained glass, ornate gables and carved stonework. In front, car No. 1 of the Wichita Street Railway, hitched to a white horse, waits for passengers.

The building, says Facebook poster Jim Mason, stood until the 1960s. The enormous Palace Block cost $16,000 to construct.

His post has 32 likes, three shares and 23 comments.

“Seriously,” one comment on the post reads, “why would they demo a building this beautiful??”

“Now, we have what?” says another commenter. “Taco Rio? It’s such a shame no one cared about these old buildings. They were works of art!”

Wichita celebrates its 146th birthday July 21, and it’s finally getting the kind of Facebook love that’s become customary on one’s big day.

The above post is typical of what can be found every day on a Facebook group called Wichita History from My Perspective. Started by local history graduate student Barb Myers, the page has almost 9,000 members, who every day share and consume pictures and information detailing Wichita’s past, mostly in black and white.

It’s one of many Facebook pages and websites that have appeared of late and are devoted to Wichita history – to its corseted shop owners, its dusty streets, its stark landscapes and its ornate buildings – some long since demolished, some still in use.

The number of these social media sites seems to grow all the time, as does the number of fans they have. Some of the most popular on Facebook include Humans of Wichita (8,265 likes), Old, Abandoned and Interesting Places-Kansas (16,840 members), If You Grew up in Wichita Kansas, then you remember... (13,633 members) and Wichita History, administered by the Wichita-Sedgwick Count Historical Museum (4,226 likes). The sites fill their followers’ Facebook feeds daily with pictures and stories from Wichita’s nearly 150-year history.

It’s a trend that thrills local historians, who say they love that the internet and social media are making pictures of Wichita’s past so accessible and are helping thousands of locals join the history-buff ranks.

“People are just generally interested in our history,” said Mason, the director of the Great Plains Nature Center, who also is one of the administrators of the Wichita History from My Perspective Page and the author of two books on the city’s history. “It’s very heartening that people have this type of curiosity.”

Social history

Myers started her page, Wichita History from My Perspective, two years ago. A longtime history buff, she was fascinated with old pictures of Wichita and especially loved “then and now” pictures that showed Wichita street scenes in the early 20th century next to what the same spot looks like today.

She kept her page open so that its fans could also post on it. The page quickly became a mixture of old photos, people seeking information about buildings or people from the past, posts of old newspaper clippings and links to current stories about Wichita’s history.

Last Thanksgiving, she said, the page suddenly blew up and now has 8,739 followers.

“We went from hundreds of members to thousands in a weekend,” she said. “It’s historians, educators, people from a lot of museums and people who’ve grown up here and just want to know more about stuff that they’ve seen their whole lives but didn’t really know a lot about.”

Many of the photos shared come from Wichita’s main repository of photos online – the Wichita Photo Archives (www.wichitaphotos.org), a cooperative online effort between the Wichita Public Library, the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum and Wichita State University’s Department of Special Collections. Occasionally, the photos posted are personal pictures discovered at estate sales, purchased on eBay or unearthed in grandpa’s attic.

Dalton Sanders, a 20-year-old Wichita State University engineering student and history buff, started his Facebook page, Humans of Wichita, a year ago, and it has already been “liked” more than 8,000 times.

His page is different, in that, instead of being populated by those who follow it, Sanders provides the content. He frequently posts photos from Wichita Photo Archives and shares a bit of “on this day” history. A recent post featured a black-and-white photo of hundreds of capped swimmers in the Municipal Beach swimming pool, which opened in June 1938 in South Riverside Park, where the Ralph Wulz Riverside Tennis Center is now.

Sanders said he caught the history bug when he took a WSU class taught by Jay Price, the director of the school’s Public History Program. Sanders found the topic fascinating, he said, and he started helping out with the River City Trolley Tours, which offer guided tours of the city and its history. He’s fascinated by Joyland history, he said, and he loves photos of elaborate Wichita buildings that are no longer there. One of his favorites is of the Mark J. Oliver house, a mansion that once stood on north Broadway where Saigon restaurant is now.

He tries to post on the page every day.

“These are things people relate to and feel happy about,” Sanders said. “It’s nice for people to come home and open up their Facebook pages and instead of seeing something negative, they see something they remember as a kid.”

Deep photo archives

The majority of the photos that fill the social media pages originated from wichitaphotos.org, said Jami Frazier Tracy, the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum’s curator of collections.

The site went up in 2001, and Tracy helped coordinate the project, which digitized many of Wichita’s historical photos, dating from the 1860s to the 2000s. The project, which is free to view, has hundreds of photos separated into categories like “aerials,” “agriculture,” “parks,” “education,” “public events” and “street scenes.”

The photos, whose originals reside in archives at the three institutions, offer fascinating peeks at moments in Wichita time. Six well-appointed members of a local family canoeing on the Arkansas river in 1905. A roller coaster on Ackerman’s Island circa 1916. A native American parade proceeding down East Douglas in 1895. Smiling contestants in a Wichita Eagle Bathing Beauty contest, photographed in 1925. Floods in the the 1940s. Old diners and cafes in the 1950s. The Wichita skyline of 1966.

The site is a hit, to say the least. In 2015, it got 2.1 million hits, Tracy said.

“When we developed this site in fall of 2000, we always had a lot of people calling and wanting to look at our photograph collections,” Tracy said. “Some of them were scholars, some were students and some were people who really liked old photos and wanted to look and see what we had. It was wonderful that people were interested, and we wanted to make these materials available to a wider group of people.”

Tracy estimates that about 90 percent of the photos she sees on the social media pages come from the site. (Some credit the archive better than others.) She administers the Wichita History page and frequently shares photos from the collection. She always gets big reactions to postings about Joyland, the Innes Tea room and Miss Fran from the 1970s television show “Romper Room.”

The growth in interest, she says, seems to come from many places. For one, social media makes the pictures so much more accessible and sharable, and they reach more people every day.

Also, she said, Wichita has an amazingly rich collection of photos and information, gathered over the years from family donations, former professional photographers and more.

It doesn’t hurt that the photos are so dreamy. They harken to a simpler time, she said, particularly appealing in today’s unpredictable world.

“I think there’s always been an interest in historical photographs not just for documenting the past and having that kind of a record, but there’s a romantic notion of the past. Sometimes it’s dangerous to romanticize the past. But on the other hand, there is an aspect of it that it was a romantic time.”

The danger, she says, is that the people living in those old photographs faced inequities and poverty and filth and stench. It’s easy to forget that the ladies in corsets smiling on Douglas were likely frequently overcome by the odor of horse manure in the street.

“For the average person, they don’t care about that,” Tracy said. “They just care that it’s a great picture, and ‘Wouldn’t it have been great to live in that time?’ It looks like a halcyon day.”

Mason, who wrote two books for Arcadia Publishing – “Wichita Postcard History” and “Wichita’s Riverside Parks” – said it’s easy to get lost in the old photographs.

When he was working on his books, his brain was so filled with the images that he dreamed one night that he found an old manhole cover, pulled it up and stuck his head down for a look. What he saw was Wichita just as it had been 80 years ago, bathed in a gray light and covered in cobwebs.

If anyone ever invents a time machine, and using it wouldn’t alter history in a sci-fi kind of way, Mason would definitely buy a ticket, he said with a laugh. He has a list of famous Wichitans he’d love to chat with and a few historical events he’d like to attend.

“It’s kind of a safe place to go, especially when you look at how things are in the world nowadays,” he said. “There’s some pretty spectacularly ugly stuff going on. Examining what used to be is kind of a safe place to go, even though not all those stories are pleasant either.”

This story was originally published July 20, 2016 at 9:23 PM with the headline "Photos of Wichita’s past have thousands of Facebook devotees."