Old Cowtown Museum mainstay taught generations about Wichita’s history

As long as she knew her husband, Rhonda Horsch said, he was always interested in history and learning whatever he could about how things worked.

“His mind was always going,” she said recently from her home in Newton. “He always wanted to know the story behind anything.”

A thoughtful man with many interests, Anthony Horsch seemed to find his calling a little over three decades ago.

That’s when he started volunteering at the Old Cowtown Museum, which led to a career that eventually saw him rise to director of education and interpretation at the sprawling Wichita museum.

Horsch, 67, died June 11. A memorial service to celebrate his life will take place Tuesday afternoon at Faith Mennonite Church in Newton.

As Rhonda and her daughter, Rachel Andreas, sat in Rhonda’s home in Newton, artifacts from Horsch’s life were displayed throughout the room.

Hanging on a door were three sets of overalls – his trademark attire – including one pristine pair with a note that read “Good Sunday overalls.” There also was a bottle of the Old Cowtown sarsaparilla that he would help make, family photos and a bookmark that read “I learned about Kansas at Old Cowtown Museum.”

Many, children and adults alike, learned about the history of Wichita and Kansas at the 23-acre museum grounds during the decades when Horsch was a mainstay there.

Horsch, his wife said, started volunteering at the museum after he received a degree in elementary education from Wichita State University in the early 1990s.

“Like he always did, he just delved into whatever he was doing,” Rhonda said. “I think he just kept learning more and more about that era, the 1870s. He enjoyed sharing that with people so that people knew the history of this area and where we came from.”

At Cowtown, time remains frozen in the period from 1865 until about 1880. The dirt roads and refurbished old buildings and artifacts offer visitors a sense of what life was like just off the Chisholm Trail in those days.

And Horsch, for so many years, was in the middle of everything – performing reenactments, presenting to school groups and interacting with people from as near as the Riverside neighborhood and as far away as distant continents.

James Quint, Cowtown’s executive director, said Horsch loved working with children.

“He was so knowledgeable about Wichita’s history,” Quint said. “Whenever we would talk about new exhibits or new programs, he would always hold us to the highest standard. He wouldn’t allow us to cut corners.”

Nearly two years ago, a cow named Rosie, a mainstay at the museum’s farm, died, Quint said. Museum leadership wanted to get a new cow to replace Rosie and, of course, had some different options.

“Anthony was incredibly insistent on it being a historically accurate breed of cow,” Quint said. “We had a couple of cheaper options, but he said ‘No, it has to be this type of short-horned cow,’ so that’s what we ended up getting.”

If a performer at Cowtown had an aspect of their costume that was historically inaccurate, Quint said, he was sure to call them out, but in his own way, which was never mean.

It was always his way, his daughter said, to try to find a way to make history come alive. So much so, in fact, that she said she and her brother sometimes felt like they were living in Cowtown while growing up.

“He lived it and breathed it,” Andreas said. “It’s been fun, since I’ve had kids, to take them to Cowtown and see them experience it. Going to the Halloween maze there and the Christmas programs. It’s been fun to see them be a part of the world that meant so much to him.”

A man of faith, Horsch was the son of a Mennonite preacher. He was born in Newton, but would go on to move multiple times with his family as his father pursued his career in ministry.

Horsch spent his high school years in Pennsylvania, but moved back to Kansas after high school in search of work. He found it at the old Colonial House Restaurant in Hesston, which is where he also met his future wife, a waitress there.

“He had a friend who was working there, so he packed up his car after high school and came out here,” Rhonda said of her husband. “At first, he was just another cook behind the line, but one day we were at the drink station and he made a pun that I thought was pretty funny. We started talking and we just had a connection.”

About a year later, in 1978, the two were married. They moved into their Newton house in 1983.

In the days since his passing, the family put a black wreath on the front door of the home with a photo of Horsch in the middle. That was his mother idea, Rhonda said.

In front of the house sits a big ash tree with the remnants of a tree house that Horsch built for his children. That, of course, was just something that Horsch would do.

Everything he did, according to his daughter, had his full attention. Whatever it was, she said, he did it “wholeheartedly.”

“I know it’s kind of falling apart now, but that was a really good treehouse when we were younger,” Andreas said. “His laugh was so classic and he always had a sparkle in his eye. For us, he made life more interesting and more enjoyable. As a whole, I’m not sure he realized the influence he had.”