Red Rocks Day honors Kansas journalist William Allen White

Gov. Sam Brownback has proclaimed Saturday as Red Rocks Day to honor the famed Kansas journalist William Allen White.

The Red Rocks State Historic Site in Emporia was White’s family home. The day marks the re-opening of the home for the summer season as well as nod to a recent redecoration of its furnishings.

The editor of the Emporia Gazette for nearly half a century, White was a nationally known journalist who twice won journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize.

A friend of the era’s biggest political figures, White entertained six presidents at his Emporia home. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt slept in an upstairs bedroom, and Herbert Hoover posed with White on the family’s front porch in 1935.

When the Whites remodeled the house at the beginning of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the staircase and several other features of the house using wood grown in Lyon County.

A cathedral-ceiling bedroom filled with light belonged to Mary, the White’s teenage daughter. She died in May 1921 in a horse-riding accident.

The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976.

The Red Rocks State Historic Site is located at 927 Exchange Street in Emporia.

This story was originally published May 8, 2013 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Red Rocks Day honors Kansas journalist William Allen White."