For 150 years, Wichita has persevered. This pandemic year will be no different.
Happy Birthday, Wichita.
On Tuesday, July 21, you will be 150 years old – an accomplishment for any Midwestern city that’s currently buffeted by a worldwide pandemic, a ping-pong economy and a constant yearning to be bigger, better and more.
You join a growing list of Kansas cities who’ve already reached the 150 mark.
You started rural but have matured into the largest in Kansas with 389,938 people.
But that’s really nothing your parents would tell you to get “the big head” over.
“First of all, we’ve only been the largest city in Kansas” since about 1950, said Jay Price, Wichita State University’s department history chair. Before the turn of the 20th century, “Topeka was, in fact, the largest. And, if you were looking at it back in territorial times, it was Leavenworth.”
Back in 1870, Price said, Newton, El Dorado and Abilene seemed more likely to grow into a large city than Wichita.
“How do I say this delicately?” Price asked. “There is no inherent reason for a city to be here at all.”
But we are.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kansas provided the spark for the Civil War, gave rise to the Pentecostal movement, Prohibition and social reform. Cities like Wichita promised opportunity, jobs and quality of life.
Following World War II, the nation’s attention shifted to the East and West Coasts. Now, the cycle may be coming back around, some say.
As people become disenchanted with life in coastal cities, they may turn to places like Wichita for cheaper housing. As more families in rural Kansas lose jobs and farms, Wichita provides a promise.
Just like they did 150 years ago, people may look to Wichita for a chance to build their version of the American Dream – a nice house, a place to live, a way to provide.
“We are a medium-sized city on the Great Plains trying to find our identity,” Price said. “I think we were always created to be a dream. We were created because we could be this.”
Who and what will Wichita be in future years?
This is where we’ve been.
How we grew in Wichita
When Wichita’s first plats were drawn up by William Greiffenstein and Darius Munger in the spring of 1870, they used brown wrapping paper to mark the town’s beginnings because Greiffenstein – known as the father of Wichita – was in a hurry to get things done.
Andrew Greenway, a trader who operated a ferry across the Arkansas River from 1868 to 1872, was one of the first to describe Wichita.
On Aug. 28, 1868, he wrote a letter to the Junction City Weekly Union about a small town: “I see that you never say anything about our city. Probably you do not know where it is, as it is a new place, at the mouth of the Little Arkansas, where five years ago the country was covered with buffalo, (it) is now looming into importance.”
In 1868, “importance” meant 30 residents.
By 1870, that number had swelled to 689.
In the preface of his book, “Wichita: The Magic City,” by Craig Miner, the late WSU historian and author marvels at why people would even come to Wichita – “a flat prairie site with winters varying between Siberian and Italian day to day and summers running from Saharan to Amazonian.”
Yet, Miner wrote when the book was published in 1988, that “People did not come here for the scenery or the climate or because they had nothing else to do. They came here to write their names, character and dreams in the molten “plastic” of a developing western city. The ones who stayed did not need inspiring vistas. They needed challenge and opportunity, and they brought the skill, discipline and imagination to spin straw into gold along with them.”
Old West, traders and cowboys
What makes a city like Wichita spark and grow?
“Everyone talks about ‘location, location, location and in Wichita, it is all about the location,” says cowboy historian and author Jim Gray. “It’s located between the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers – flowing toward the southeast, towards Indian country. Right from the start, it had the Indian traders settling there.
“And then, the men who came after that were great promoters. Their intentions were to make Wichita the great city. These guys were very dedicated in moving in the same direction to make Wichita a great city and bulldoze anybody who got in their way.”
Jessie Chisholm opened Wichita’s first business, two years after Kansas became a state. The trading post, started in 1863, was west of where I-135 now crosses 18th street. Chisholm operated cabins, a trading post and corral there until about 1868 when he died from eating rancid bear grease. During that five-year period, he constructed a second post at what is now the Twin Lakes parking lot at 21st and Amidon.
And, when Elia Hicks Durfee decided to build a trading post in Wichita in the 1860s, Midtown was part of a prairie dotted by buffalo. His post, in what is now the 400 block of W. 9th, soon marked the hub of a growing community. He had other trading posts, up and down the Missouri River, through the Dakotas and in Montana. Durfee and his brother-in-law bought out the Great American Fur Co. and the company was then known as Durfee and Peck – the largest fur and robe company in the west.
He promoted the little town with circulars printed which described Wichita, and distributed them to Texas cattleman, encouraging them to bring their cattle through town. Durfee’s circulars marked the first time the name Wichita was used on printed material.
There were other communities in Kansas that soon had all the elements Wichita would have – railroads, rivers and cattle drives.
So what made Wichita different?
“Wichita was founded by a group of – at their heart – they were entrepreneurs,” said Jami Frazier Tracy, curator of collections at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. “They were seeking opportunity, fortune, and something new. They wanted to write their name in the sky and Wichita has always set its sights on an idea.
“That’s the history of our community from hunting and trading on. And then, when that went by the wayside, in came real estate and the cattle trade, aviation, the oil industry, and the health care industry – it’s all based on the entrepreneurial spirit.”
In the cattle days, Old West legends graced the streets of Wichita – “Buffalo Bill” Matthewson, Jessie Chisholm, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid.
By the ‘20s, Wichita was home to aviation giants – Clyde Cessna, Walter and Olive Ann Beech, Lloyd Stearman.
But the community leaders have almost always typically been white men.
An exception was made when the town was incorporated – the one woman who was among 124 people to sign the petition to incorporate Wichita was Catherine McCarty, mother of “Billy the Kid.”
Finding a place to call home
Wichita has been, at times, hard for people of diversity to have and find a voice.
More than a decade after the Civil War, some former slaves from the South were drawn to Kansas, not only for its political climate as a free state but also for the promise of economic prosperity.
By the late 1870s, a significant community of those former slaves had settled in Wichita.
Wichitan Mary Elizabeth Lease became a forceful spokeswoman for the Populist Party during the 1890s, although she later turned her back on the party when it would not support a woman’s right to vote or support her in her run for president of the United States.
Wichitan Jane Brooks was wife of a prominent attorney and president of the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association. After attending the National American Women’s Suffrage Association conference in 1919 in St. Louis, she came back to Wichita and founded the nation’s first chapter of the League of Women Voters.
Wichita became a hub for Syrian-Lebanese families who immigrated to Wichita at the turn of the 20th century. Their descendants frequently became prominent entrepreneurs and it’s one of the reasons why Wichita boasts so many restaurants with hummus on the menus.
As Wichita grew throughout the 20th century, many of Wichita’s neighborhoods were filled with families that worked at Wichita’s aviation plants. Wichita drew farm kids from across the Midwest, Native Americans and African Americans from neighboring states and Hispanics from the Southwest to work in its industries.
Families such as the Colemans, the Garveys, the Kochs, the Hydes, who invented Mentholatum and the Carneys of Pizza Hut fame built industries.
Wichita was the first city in the nation to have a successful youth-led sit-in for equality.
Late in the summer of 1958, members of the local youth chapter of the NAACP staged a successful sit-in at the lunch counter at the Dockum Drugs Store, on the southeast corner of Douglas and Broadway. Their nonviolent effort resulted in Dockum and eventually other Rexall stores across the state providing seated service for Blacks.
And, until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, some Wichita neighbors refused to allow African-Americans to buy houses on their blocks.
It was the city where Academy Award Winner for Best Supporting Actress Hattie McDaniel — famous for her portrayal of Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” — was born, but there is no monument that recognizes that.
In the 1970s, Kansas gays and lesbians began to march and champion their rights.
In 1977, Wichita passed one of the few civil rights ordinances in the nation protecting gays, putting the city on the map when singer Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children organization challenged it.
The amendment barred discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations.
Seven months after it was passed, it was repealed when Wichitans voted to overturn it, 47,246 to 10,005.
In San Francisco, when news spread of what Wichita had done, more than 1,000 demonstrators staged a march to Union Square chanting, “Wichita means fight back.”
In 1991, Wichita again gained national attention for Operation Rescue’s 46-day Summer of Mercy that resulted in arrests of more than 1,700 people who defied a federal judge’s order and blocked access to the city’s abortion clinics. It was in Wichita where abortion provider George Tiller was shot and killed in 2009 while attending a church service.
And, it was in Wichita where BTK, a serial killer from Park City, stalked and killed at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991 and was finally caught and convicted in 2005.
That is our history.
But what’s our legacy?
Wichita’s coming of age
“We are a people who want to be successful,” the Wichita-Sedgwick County Museum’s Frazier Tracy said. “We are problem solvers and challenge acceptors. You see that through the whole landscape of the community. It’s people taking challenges and wanting to make a difference and not being afraid of failure, nor detoured by setback.”
Wichitans, in the beginning, may have first been attracted by hyperbole.
We believed in boosterism.
Marsh Murdock, the first editor and publisher of The Wichita Eagle, would describe the muddy Arkansas as the “Nile of America,” and Wichita as “The Magical Mascot of the Meridian” and “The Magic City of the Plains.”
“We are both Americans and pioneers and I think we still have that spirit of a pioneer who is willing to go into the unknown landscape and make something fantastic out of it,” Frazier Tracy said.
But can we still be boosters?
“Wichita was born when a small place on the frontier could end up being the next Chicago,” said WSU’s Jay Price. “We were born at a time when anything seemed possible. All of the communities — Emporia, Newton, Hutchinson, McPherson — were created with the idea that they would launch themselves into national prominence, so, why wouldn’t we? All of them have the same basic model.”
Wichita, Price said, is a bumble bee city.
“Think of the bumble bee as the insect that shouldn’t be able to fly but does,” he said. “We are the city that shouldn’t be here but is. If you were a betting person in 1870, you would have been very wise to bet on Newton, Abilene or El Dorado.”
Wichita has been at the crossroads from the outset, he said.
“This is a city where — where you went to high school, made a huge, huge difference,” Price said. “Many of the people knew each other and grew up with each other. We were well into the middle of the (20th) century where a handful of folks could (still) get together over a drink at the Candle Club and make decisions. They didn’t hire consultants to do it, they did it themselves.”
Wichita came of age during the Golden Age of Small Business — where a person could start small, grow the business and form a company like a Mentholatum, a Coleman or White Castle.
It maintains after all these years, a small-town feel.
“That’s a good thing and a challenge,” Price said.
It’s a 21st Century challenge during a worldwide pandemic where more and more workers are working from home.
“One of the things modern cities are going to have to think about is quality of life. If you want to attract people or keep people – because so many people now work from home, as we have so blatantly learned — why live here?”
Will Wichita offer enough? Will it still grow?
“I think the next generations of leaders of Wichita are going to include people with Spanish surnames, Vietnamese surnames,” Price said. “There are going to be people of color, women launching into businesses, LGBT in all sorts of permutations.
“I think that is what the future of Wichita will look like and if we can celebrate that – and that we have always been in that place, where different kinds of groups come together, I think that’s our strong point.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2020 at 6:00 AM.