Flashback Friday: The Farm served ’50s fried chicken from a big house in west Wichita
.jpg "The Farm operated in the 1950s near Maple and Tyler.")
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant operated in the 1950s out of a big colonial house at Maple and Tyler, and one of my late coworkers lived and worked there as a girl.
During the first three years of my employment at The Wichita Eagle, one of my favorite co-workers was Diane Lewis.
Diane covered Wichita restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s, but when I started at The Eagle in 1997, she was on the theater beat. She was probably the first true foodie I met.
I remember that Diane used to tell me stories about an elegant restaurant her mother owned when Diane was just a girl. It was set up in a giant colonial-style house, where they also lived. Fried chicken was the specialty, and Diane would often help her mother by working in the restaurant.
Diane died in 2009, and ever since, I’ve found myself frequently wondering about that restaurant, and because digging up restaurant history is now my thing, I decided it was time to find out more about it.
That restaurant, I’ve learned, was called The Farm, and Diane’s mother — Winogene Copeland — was a co-owner. It operated in the 1950s in a house at 8406 W. Maple, which still stands today and serves as a collection of offices called The Farm on Maple.
These days, people driving west on Maple will notice the very large white house that’s set back from the street as they approach Tyler. The house, purchased in 1998 by Tim and Joyce Wooding as a home for Tim’s mortgage business, now belongs to the couple’s daughter, Liselle Whitehill.
When they bought it, the Wooding family turned the house — which sits on two acres lined with cedar trees — into a place where different businesses could rent office space on the second floor. Among the businesses still based there today are Thrive Mortgage, Alpha Title and Farmers Insurance.
Tim Wooding died in 2020, but he loved the historic house, which had five bathrooms, two kitchens and three fireplaces, including a marble fireplace that had been imported from Mexico.
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Whitehill, a real estate broker, said that her family added on to the house several times over the past 27 years, and it now includes about 10,000 square feet. Her father, Whitehill said, was fascinated by — and proud of — the historical property. He learned all he could about its past, including details about when it was home to The Farm. The family has an old menu from the restaurant, and a drawing of it along with a list of its menu items is framed and hanging on the main floor.
The building’s time as a restaurant started around 1950, when Copeland teamed up with William and Phyllis Corrigan to open The Farm. The Wooding family was told that The Farm restaurant operated in what is now the building’s lobby area, which features a big crystal chandelier and is open to the second floor above, and in the room adjacent to it, which the owners now use as a seating area. People who dined at The Farm would often have been seated near the marble fireplace.
The restaurant, according to the old menu, served chicken dinners with potatoes, cream gravy and biscuits with jelly. It also offered steak and fish dinners and carried Duncan Hines ice cream.
People who wanted to dine at The Farm had to reserve a table. The restaurant opened only in the evenings on weekdays but opened at 1 p.m. on Sundays to catch after-church crowds.
According to research done by various owners of the property, the house originally was built in the late 1800s as a small farmhouse, but it grew and grew after additions in the 1930s and 1940s — and again when the Woodings bought it.
Diane’s mother, Winojean, ran the restaurant until 1957, when she sold it to Mr. and Mrs. H.R. Burnett, who had owned a steakhouse in Memphis but had relocated to Wichita. The Burnetts did some remodeling, added a new kitchen and reopened The Farm in March of that year. They also introduced a new menu that featured steak and seafood dishes.
But by September of 1958, the Burnetts had put the house on the market, and it was converted back into a private residence. In the late 1960s, a day care center briefly operated there.
In 1992, Diane and Carroll Parrett bought the house and opened it as The Holiday House bed and breakfast. The B&B concept was especially popular in the 1990s, and the Parretts rented two rooms to overnight guests, both with canopied beds. They also would frequently host murder mystery dinners in the house — which was rumored to be haunted. Whitehill confirms that lots of bizarre and inexpiable things have happened in the house over the years. Her family has always attributed such activity to a spirit they’ve nicknamed “Emily.”
Whitehill said her family has always appreciated the historical significance of the house, which in the 1950s sat 3 miles outside of Wichita. Many locals also still love the house, she said, and they most often hear from those who remember it when it was The Farm. Whitehill said her mother, Joyce, even recalls dining there when she was young.
“We have people come in all the time saying that they were in the building once or twice when it was a restaurant or even when it was a private residence,” she said. “There are a lot of people who have stories about the property.”
So many people would mention The Farm restaurant, that when Tim Wooding was deciding on a name for his new office building, he chose The Farm. That’s what everyone’s always called it.
Though Diane would often talk to me about her time on The Farm, she never wrote about it during all her years at The Eagle, at least not that I could find in our archives. I miss her, and I wish I could ask her more questions about her time in the house.
I like to imagine that she and Emily meet up there occasionally to reminisce about fried chicken by the fireplace — and to cause a little trouble.
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 5:03 AM.
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