Time can’t dim their devotion – Town has gradually faded, but memories fuel those who remain. 

By Amy Bickel;The Hutchinson News;abickel@hutchnews.com;  

First published: Nov. 21, 2010 – The Hutchinson News,

ALAMOTA – As an early 1900s postcard showing young lovers hugging states, “I could stay in Alamota forever and ever.” 

Yet, on this fall day, a walk along the deserted main street is eerily quiet, except for the Kansas wind and a sprinkler running in the yard of one of the community’s three remaining homes. The only human activity on this morning was a postal worker who stopped to deliver mail and a couple of drivers in farm trucks that kicked up dust as they drove by. Meanwhile, the lasting business, a grain elevator, had already closed for the season.

Most who used to frequent this little town back in its heyday have packed up and moved away.

“I’m the one holding down the fort now, and I don’t know why,” said 76-year-old Joanie Trebilcock with a laugh – who grew up in the town her grandparents helped establish.

She is one of at least four people who still call Alamota home – the Lane County town that once had a hotel, a store, a restaurant, school, fuel stop and lumberyard, along with a bank her father, Winslow, ran. Nevertheless, these days, the town once vibrant with activity is abandoned and crumbling. The roof of the family bank has fallen in and the old restaurant and store are only shells.

Except for the towering grain elevator that peeks above the terrain, the Lane County ghost town is hidden from the sight of those traveling along nearby Kansas Highway 96 – a passing thought, if that, as folks head east or west.

Except, that is, for a few like Trebilcock.

“I’ve very sentimental about that town,” she said.

Alamota, about 10 miles east of the county seat town of Dighton, started in 1877 along present-day K-96 as a post office, according to the Kansas State Historical Society. The town even had a brick factory. However, when the railroad was built about a mile or so south of the former town site, residents decided to move Alamota to be closer to what they considered a lifeline, Trebilcock said she suspects.

The post office closed in the previous Alamota in 1894 and reopened in 1903, according to the historical society.

It was in 1902 that two men – farmer William Durr and businessman Richard Church – convinced their friend from Holyrood, Trebilcock’s grandfather, Frank Vycital Sr., to come and help build a commerce center, said Ellen May Stanley, who lived on a farm near Alamota and has written several books on Lane County’s history.

He moved his family, including sons Frank Jr. and Winslow, who was just a toddler, Stanley said. They opened a store, followed by the hotel.

According to a historical document, the town had at least 40 people in the nearby vicinity by 1910.

In 1923, after Winslow graduated from college and married, he came home and started the bank, as well as operated an insurance business, Trebilcock said. When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, her father’s bank closed, never reopening after President Franklin Roosevelt’s “bank holiday.” Yet her father stayed busy selling insurance until he died in 1972, making enough to put her and her brother through college.

After the Depression, the town never was as big as when it first started, she said, but added there was plenty of activity.

“It was like living on a farm, but you weren’t,” she said. “We had a horse, we went to school.”

She attended the elementary school through the eighth grade, then went to Dighton High School. And like many in rural settings, she went on to college in a big city – Colorado Springs – where she eventually married and raised her family instead of coming back to rural Lane County. But every Christmas, as well as other times of the year, she, her husband and her children would make the four-hour trip back to Alamota to celebrate the season with family.

Over the years, the town began to dwindle even more. The hotel shut down in the 1940s. Her uncle’s store and post office burned down in the 1950s. He reopened it in the hotel, but on a much smaller scale before closing not many years later.

The school closed in the 1970s and is now used by a local farmer as a machine shop. The post office, still visible through the windows of the old hotel, closed in 1992.

Don and May Thomas have lived in town for more than 60 years – first in the rooms of the old hotel before moving after the mercantile fire to a small house across the railroad tracks. Don Thomas said he grew up on a nearby farm, coming to town with his family for supplies. He recalled the town having three elevators, including a Garvey elevator.

A lot has changed, he said, pointing to a photocopied picture of Alamota’s downtown area.

Trebilcock said she and her husband returned to Alamota in the 1990s to care for her mother, who passed away at age 100 in 2002. Now she frequents two towns, both Alamota and Great Bend, where a daughter and grandchildren live.

However, she said, she has passed down the love of her hometown to her children, noting she tells them fondly of her memories, and family gatherings by the grandchildren are requested to take place at “the farm.”

“It was a great place to ride your bike – no crime and lots of chickens,” she said. “It was a great place to grow up.”

When COVID hit in March 2020, my twin daughters were in the middle of studying Kansas history.

Among their virtual assignments was to learn about Kansas settlement, including about Exodusters who came to the state after the Civil War.

Tasked with writing a report about the subject, I told them we should just take a field trip and learn more.

So, on a cloudy, early April morning, we headed toward the Morris County ghost town of Dunlap.

The spirits of this Exoduster colony are still visible in Dunlap

The African-American history here exists only in traces – mostly a few wayward gravestones and dilapidated structures.

The the old Baptist church where parishioners once sat in the pews was standing the last time I was here – a few pews remaining in the building along with a piano. It was now a collapsed pile of rubble.

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Dunlap, a tiny town in southeast Morris County – population 20 – was home to a few hundred African-Americans – “exodusters” who left the post-Civil War South looking for new land and a new life.

The last African-American resident, London Harness, died in 1993, his grave one of the few marked by flowers.

There were several Exoduster communities across Kansas. I’ve been to three, including Morton City in Hodgman County, Nicodemus in Graham County and Dunlap, which I made my first trip to around 2000 for a story for The Emporia Gazette.

Little remains at Morton, which I had the chance to visit when I worked for The Hutchinson News. I was guided by a descendant of a founding resident. Nicodemus is a National Historic Site operated by the park service. It’s a great stop for those traveling through western Kansas. Dunlap is just one of the ghost towns in the Flint Hills of Kansas – communities that once prospered at the turn of the century. Yet, while Dunlap’s community died, the history is still there for those who look closely.

Names, some scratched into stones in the cemetery, tell part of the community’s history.

Some of the residents, former slaves, served in the war and fought for their freedom. Then thousands of them went west, including to Kansas – searching for a better life, according to the Kansas State Historical Society.

In 1879, Pap Singleton founded the Dunlap Colony, located next to the white community of Dunlap, according to “Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas.”

Because Kansas was famous for John Brown’s efforts and its struggle against slavery, Singleton considered the state a new Canaan, and he led people to the promised land, including around 200 to Dunlap.

The town had businesses and the Dunlap Academy for African-American students. 
In 1880, with the help of the Associate Presbyterian Synod of North America and the Freedmen’s Aid Association of Dunlap, “The Freedmen’s Academy of Kansas” formed. Its mission was “to educate the colored youth for teaching, for business management, for mechanical industries, for an honorable social life, and to encourage settlement of destitute colored families of the cities on cheap lands in the country.” Upon completion of the academy, a student would be ready to attend freshman classes at a university.

But like many rural communities, people moved away. Harness was the final link to the past, the last to represent the generation of exodusters who made Dunlap their home. Nearly 200 African American residents are buried in Dunlap’s cemetery, including many in unmarked graves. “My grandparents are buried here.” Harness was once quoted as saving. “I’ve helped bury many of my friends in this cemetery.”

Today, the community has numerous abandoned buildings, including a large gymnasium, paint-peeling houses, concrete foundations testifying to more prosperous times.

A history lesson

I‘ll have to admit, my daughters were skeptical about taking the trip. They don’t share my love a ghost towns as much I would like them. The girls, and especially my husband, have been on too many unexpected side trips where I’m out taking photos happily of a dilapidated building – mesmerized in the hopes and dreams – while they don’t think it is quite as cool.

But as we stood in the African-American cemetery on the hill north of town – with the wind whipping the well-kept prairie grass dotted with stones — located not far from the “white cemetery,” they began to comprehend the trials of the early settlers here.

And, we could see the colony’s spirit is still very much evident.

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I can’t say I remember their birth well. I was higher than a kite the day Brett and Kaci came into the world.

Or maybe, at least, as high as one of those hospital congratulations balloons – thanks to the strong concoction in the epidural. I do remember giggling when the doctors said push.

What I didn’t realize – between the giggles and sticking my tongue out at my nervous husband after the first twin was born – was how much life would change. 

The evening before started as a typical day in our household. I took the day off from The News to run a few last-minute errands. My doctor wanted to induce me the next morning. JY and I decided to take one last date to the golf course as a couple before kids. We talked about how very soon we’d be bringing the twins golfing with us, as well as to coed softball games and hunting trips. I even attempted to drive a few golf balls off the tee – despite the 33 extra pounds that stuck out like a giant watermelon in my belly.

Within a few hours, both waters broke, and Brett and Kaci came into the world around 1 in the morning. Brett was named after the famous No 5-wearing George, and Kaci after the Royals – although my Braves-loving husband will argue it was just a name he liked.

It didn’t take long for reality to hit.

Thirteen years later, the golf clubs sit in a corner of the garage collecting dust – a reminder that those first few months – and years – were anything but easy. It was a blur of babies crying at different times of the day and night. We had baby bottles all over the house, We smelled like sour milk as Brett was always projectile vomiting.

There would be no well-written baby books of milestones. I started them with such good intentions. But we could barely even keep our backyard mowed.

Yet, I wouldn’t trade this imperfect journey for anything. 

No, our life isn’t perfect. We have a pile of clothes in the laundry room that needs folding. Our house is sometimes messy as we go from work and school to activities. JY has been cleaning the garage for 13 years.

My hair that used to be stick straight before the twins were born is now frizzy. JY is going bald.

We might not play golf or softball anymore, but we have plenty of other family activities we love. Our days are filled with hunting and fishing trips, softball and basketball games and many other adventures.

I thank God for bringing us Brett and Kaci and their little sister Jordie into our crazy life. I can’t believe they are teenagers.

By Amy Bickel

Originally printed May 30, 2017 by The Hutchinson News

It wasn’t a lackluster attitude that killed Nonchalanta.

When luck ran out, so did the residents.

But along this dirt path in southern Ness County, stone ruins still remain – sort of a grave marker amid the cattle pasture Harlan Nuss has rented for several years.

On a gray Sunday afternoon, Nuss led a small tour of the former town site. He scoped the surroundings, which included an old livestock barn, a dilapidated hotel and falling down schoolhouse, murmuring it is hard to imagine there was ever a town here.

Non-chalanta, in fact, was like many Kansas ghost towns – it sprouted liked a weed on the prairie. It busted for a few years. Folks built a school, church and a hotel, along with other businesses. Work began on a bank, and there was even a post office – giving the town the official stamp of existence.

But five years later, the death knell sounded.”The railroad was supposed to come to town,” said Nuss, noting the town grew with that anticipation. “When it didn’t come through, the town pretty well folded.”

Just give it a “d—” name

With the promise of free land, Fred Roth and his family came in covered wagons from Missouri to Ness County.

So did others. John Silas Collins, a circuit-riding Methodist minister, who arrived in 1879 and began work to prove up his homestead, according to an article by local historian, the late Jan Gantz, which was published in the Ness County News.

They began building sod homes and plowing up the grass.With pioneers came the need for a town. Homesteader Lewis Odom in 1885 decided to plat a town and asked another local, Dr. W.A. Yingling, to come up with a name.

“And I don’t care a d- – what kind of name it is, just so it’s a taking name,” Odom told Yingling according to several historical articles.

So, as the tale goes, Yingling called it Nonchalant, after the French word of that very idea, and then decided to add the “a.”

Odom loved it and began promoting Nonchalanta with the idea the railroad was coming. One newspaper printed on May 23, 1885: “New town of Nonchalanta laid out.” By September, lots were reported to be selling for $15 to $85, according to the book “Ness, Western County, Kansas” by MinnieDubbs Millbrook.

Momentum continued and folks prepared for a promised railroad. Nonchalanta would soon have a livery, a drug store, three-story hotel, real estate office and a general store, Gantz wrote in her article. There was a Methodist church and newspaper. A quarter-mile away, a man named McCandish operated a small country store and post office that the government had previously dubbed Candish. By 1887, the post office was renamed Nonchalanta.

In fact, said Wichita resident Cheryl McVicker Lewis, whose family homestead in the area, the Nonchalanta newspaper from August 1887 showed 22 businesses advertising in it.”And it said there were also several more carpenters, two more blacksmiths and several stone masons and plasters,” said Lewis, who grew up near the town site and has researched local and family history. “There were plans to build 100 houses in the next six months.”

Folks had began construction on the bank, as well as more stores, restaurants and a Grand Army of the Republic post. There was even talk of a summer resort called “Wildhorse Lake” – located around a natural depression where the wild horses would water, wrote Gantz.

Gantz also reported that lots were advertised in Folsom Heights – “a beautiful suburb overlooking the city.”And, in 1887, according to the book by Millbrook, the newspaper advertised the town as “the magic young city of the plains, with six public wells with pure water, a hundred houses to be built in early spring and a railroad to be built during the coming summer.”

Sam Howell was one of the business owners. According to family history, he worked on the railroads across western Kansas, drove freight and was employed on area ranches before homesteading and starting a feed store in Nonchalanta.

There he met Susie Helen Corbet, a young girl working at the Nonchalanta hotel, which was operated by John Rogers, a man who would later become governor of Washington, according to Corbet’s writings discovered by Lewis.

Susie and Sam married in Nonchalanta in April 1888 – the same year the school was finished.

The town was buzzing.

“Dancing, baseball games and picnics were part of the entertainment,” wrote Gantz.

Survival

Survival, however, became work in itself.

Settlers struggled but made it through the blizzard of January 1886. But a Mr. Cooper died of a rattlesnake bite, John Abrahams was killed by lightning and a Newby boy froze to death. Meanwhile, rain didn’t follow the plow – like advertised – especially in these parts where the average rainfall is 17 inches a year.

The Nonchalanta Herald, which issued its first paper on May 20, 1887, went out of business on Feb. 8, 1889, losing hope that the promised railroad would come.

“By 1890, little was left of Nonchalanta, but the ghostly stone buildings,” Millbrook wrote.

Some activity continued

The Slagle family, however, were among some of the homesteaders who stayed in the area, said Lewis.

Her great-grandfather, George Slagle, ran the store in Nonchalanta for a time. An article in the Ness County News from spring 1894 reported he turned over the “groceries” to another man and moved back to the homestead east of town.

That fall, he moved his family to a stone house west of Nonchalanta.

A tornado in 1899 may have taken the third story off the hotel, said Tom McCoy, Lewis’ cousin. Meanwhile, the family living in the hotel ran a general store in the area, which was open a few decades after the town depopulated, said Nuss.

The post office eventually moved to Lewis and McCoy’s great-grandfather George Slagle’s rock home located a few miles away. Built on a hill using the limestone of what was to be the Nonchalanta bank, folks could walk into the basement doorway to get their mail, Lewis said.

Part of the basement was for the family’s apple crop – which, one season, totaled about 700 bushels of apples, said McCoy.

The post office closed in 1930, according to the Kansas State Historical Society.

Lewis’ father, Dean, and sister, Mary McVicker McCoy – Tom McCoy’s mother, recalled visiting their grandparents and watching George put out the mail, “but weren’t allowed to go in,” Lewis said.

Reclaimed by the prairie

On this winter day, Harlan Nuss, Tom Reed, who hails from the nearby ghost town of Ravanna, and McCoy, traipsed about the pasture Nuss rents where the town once stood.

Except for his grazing cattle and the rattlesnakes that make their appearance in the heat of summer, there is nothing much happening in Nonchalanta, Nuss said.

“There may have been 300 people,” said Nuss, but added with just the tales that are passed down and everyone from that era dead, he doesn’t know for sure.

McCoy said he remembers visiting the Nonchalanta school in the mid-1940s while a cousin was attending. It closed in 1946. Nuss said it was turned into a farm shed before falling into disrepair.

The school is one of the remaining ruins on the prairie. McCoy, on the recent Sunday afternoon, pointed out the names of schoolchildren carved into the stone walls are still visible after all these years.

Many would carve their names and initials, despite the teacher scolding them for it, said Lewis. Somewhere amid the rubble is the name of Lewis’ father, Dean.

“He had been home sick … and his sister came home and told him you are in trouble,” she said, noting the teacher must have discovered the carving. “He had to stay after school the next day.”

Nuss said he often finds rocks where foundations might have been, as well as a few of the spots where city wells were located. There is a large depression at the site of the bank.

Nuss sometimes thinks about the area being a town center as he is checking cattle.

“It makes you wonder what it looked like and stuff – what the houses looked liked,” Nuss said.

Lewis tries to envision the town, too – a town with homes, businesses and streets with names like Warren, Heath and Union.

Now, except for the few stone structures, Nonchalanta has been reclaimed by the prairie.

“I just can’t imagine what that looked like in 1887 considering how it looks now,” she said.

A year ago, I was deep into telling the story of what was then the state’s largest wildfire.

The Anderson Creek Fire that hit Barber County in late March 2016 killed cattle, burned fences and some lost their homes.

But over the next several months, I saw the rebirth from the ashes. With our spring issue of Kansas Agland coming out around the year anniversary, I decided to travel back to the Gyp Hills and tell the story of how ranchers, and the prairie, endured.

These ranchers talked of renewal, rebuilding and of hope.

Spring Agland mailed on March 1. We wanted to share the story with our Hutch News readership March 12.

But nature had other plans.

On the weekend of March 5, fires broke out all over the state, that includes Reno County, where 12,000 people were evacuated north of Hutchinson. Then, on March 6, the Starbuck fire that would burn 500,000 acres in Clark, Comanche and Meade counties, was blowing into Kansas. All told, it is about 100,000 acres bigger than Anderson Creek.

Moreover, the losses are more horrific.

I saw this as I headed to the Gardiner Angus Ranch just days after the fire burned across it. Just a year ago, I had visited them – doing a story on how the three Gardiner brothers – Greg, Mark and Garth – were leading the way in Angus genetics – working to create the best quality beef for consumers.

The scene, however, was like a battle zone. The land was scorched. Ash and sand were blowing, piling like snow against the feed bunks. The dead cattle were still scattered in the burned pastures – at least 500 carcasses.

The county estimates the death toll between 3,000 and 9,000.

Now folks here need help in the way of fence materials and fence builders, hay and monetary funds as they work to rebuild their lives.

They also need prayers.

Recovering from this could take longer. It might not be possible for some. But I pray that sometime down the road, the scars and pain won’t be as deep. Remember, we couldn’t imagine anything worse than Anderson Creek. The story a year later shows there is hope.

Here’s the story. Friday night lights glow after flicker: Western Plains football tradition being revived