CALENDAR
OCTOBER 2011:
- 4-30, Monarch Butterfly Snapshots Exhibit
- 9, Sunday - Quivira Chapter SFTA: Memoirs of an Old Trooper: My Life in the Frontier Army by Leo Oliva - 2:00 pm, 122 W Marlin, McPherson
- 12, Wednesday - Museum Committee - 1:15 pm
- 14, Friday - Marilyn Coffey: Mail Order Kid Book Tour - 2:00 pm
- 24, Monday - Dr. Dennis Montagna, NPS: Standing on the Border of Two Worlds~Mourning Our Civil War Dead in Garden Cemeteries - 7:00 pm
NOVEMBER 2011:
- 2, Wednesday - Museum Committee - 1:15 pm
- 6, Sunday - DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME ENDS
- 8, Tuesday - WINTER HOURS BEGIN
- 14, Monday - Board of Directors - 7:30 pm
- 24, Thursday - THANKSGIVING DAY - Museum Closed
- 26, Saturday - Home for the Holidays Parade
- 28, Monday - Election of Officers, Program Meeting - 7:30 pm
- 30, Tuesday - Museum Committee - 10:00 am
DECEMBER 2011:
- 11, Sunday - GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST - 1:00-4:00 pm
- 21, Sunday - CHRISTMAS DAY - Museum closed
NEWS & EVENTS
Memoirs of an Old Trooper
Join the Quivira Chapter of the Santa Fe Trail Association at the October chapter meeting as they welcome Private Robert Morris Peck, First U.S. Calvary. Peck, portrayed by noted historian Leo Oliva, will present Memoirs of an Old Trooper: My Life in the Frontier Army. Peck was born in Kentucky in 1839 and served as a private in the First U.S. Cavalry from 1856 to 1861. During this time, he participated in many military operations:
*The Cheyenne Expedition and the Battle of Solomon Fork in 1857
*The Mormon War in 1858
*Bleeding Kansas during1858-1859
*The Santa Fe Trail in 1859
*The Camp on Pawnee Fork during 1859-1860
*The Kiowa Expedition of 1860
*Fort Wise during 1860 -1861
Peck also spent time as an Army freighter from 1862-1865. Trooper Peck will answer questions following his presentation. Oliva will answer questions after Trooper Peck has finished.
The program will be held Sunday, October 9th, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. at the Bank IV building, 122 West Marlin, in McPherson, Kansas. Parking is available in the parking garage on the north side of the bank. Enter the building through the east door and take the elevator to the 5th floor. The program is free and open to anyone.
Leo E. Oliva became interested in frontier military history during the 1959 centennial celebration of the founding of Fort Larned and has been researching and writing about frontier military posts and trails across Kansas ever since. A graduate of Fort Hays State University, he earned graduate degrees at the University of Denver. He is the author of Soldiers on the Santa Fe Trail, six of the eight volumes in the Kansas Forts Network series, and Fort Union and the Frontier Army in the Southwest. He has written several other books and many articles, most dealing with the frontier army and trails. He is a student of Kansas history and writes a weekly newspaper column on “Our Kansas Heritage.” A former university professor who retired to take over a family farming operation near Woodston, KS, Leo continues to farm and write history. He was editor and publisher of the Santa Fe Trail Association quarterly, Wagon Tracks, 1986-2011. He is former chairman and current treasurer of the Fort Larned Old Guard, friends support group for Fort Larned National Historic Site, which has purchased the site of the Cheyenne and Sioux village on Pawnee Fork in Ness County that was captured and burned by Gen. W. S. Hancock's command in April 1867. He is currently manager of the village site. He is a frequent lecturer on Kansas history, the frontier army, and overland trails. He is a founding member of the Santa Fe Trail Association and the Smoky Hill Trail Association. Oliva has been portraying Robert Morris Peck, trooper in the First Cavalry, 1856-1861, for three years. His presentation on October 9 will be about Peck's military experiences in Kansas Territory, along the Santa Fe Trail, founding of Fort Larned, and other activities.
The Civil War Sesquicentennial in Central Kansas
There is a huge interest in this anniversary of the Civil War, and its Sesquicentennial presents a distinctive opportunity to capture the imagination of current and potential visitors to Americas Byways, public and tribal lands, and the National Park System. The National Park Service, Federal Highway Administration, National Scenic Byways Program, and federal land management agencies have formed a partnership to promote Americas Byways and Americas public and tribal lands. The goal is to engage a larger and more diverse audience well beyond those with a professed affinity for battlefield stories.
To kickoff events, the Federal Highway Administration has initially focused efforts on two regions of the Country the Mid-Atlantic and the Plains and asked scenic byways and their partner institutions to play a part in this exciting and unique partnership. Partner institutions have been asked to create events or programs that relate directly to three Civil War Themes: Battle, Homefront, and Civil Rights including:
Battle (Generals and Tactics): Military Experience, Changing War, Women and Reconciliation, Civilians, Emancipation, Border States, etc.
Civil Rights (Struggles for Equality): Causes, Emancipation, Consequences, Reconstruction, Reconciliation, Ethnicity and Race
Homefront (Affects everyone, nationwide): Causes, Emancipation, Westward Movement, Indian Wars, Border States, etc.
The Barton County Historical Society and the Barton County Arts Council have initiated two events toward this National Celebration.
The first, The Civil War and The Exodusters in Central Kansas includes displays and a brochure that highlight the Sparks of Conflict, Western Migration, Honored Memories, and Independence to Influence (from the Exoduster Movement through the legacy of its descendants, including black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux).
The second, Standing on the Border of Two Worlds: Mourning Our Civil War Dead in Garden Cemeteries on October 24, 2011, offers an evening with the director of the National Park Services Memorial Research and Preservation Planning program. Dr. Dennis Montagna will focus on how the garden cemeteries along the Kansas Wetlands and Wildlife National Scenic Byway reflect this national movement to recognize this important chapter in our Nation.
About Dr. Dennis Montagna
Dr. Dennis Montagna directs the National Park Services Monument Research & Preservation Program, based at the Park Services Philadelphia Region Office. This program provides comprehensive assistance in the interpretation and care of historic cemeteries, outdoor sculpture and public monuments to managers of National Park sites and to other constituents nationwide.
Recent projects include preservation planning and conservation for sculpture collections at the Gettysburg and Vicksburg Battlefields, for the City of Richmond, Virginia, and for the Hudson River Valley Greenway. In addition, he advised Arlington National Cemetery on the recent conservation of the Tomb of the Unknowns.
He is presently assisting the City of Wilson, North Carolina as they plan the conservation of twenty-nine whirligigs created by self-taught sculptor Vollis Simpson. Recent research efforts include lectures on the equestrian monument to General George Armstrong Custer in Monroe, Michigan, the photographs Eudora Welty shot in Mississippi cemeteries in the 1930s, and the memorial that Franklin D. Roosevelt designed for his grave at Hyde Park, NY.
His work has also included the creation of new memorials. He chaired the federal review panel that selected a design for the African Burial Ground Memorial at the burial site of thousands of enslaved and free Africans in lower Manhattan. With sculptor Jim Barnhill, and on a much smaller scale, he designed a memorial for Booker T. Washingtons birthplace near Roanoke, Virginia.
Dr. Montagna received a BA degree from Florida State University, a Masters degree in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD from the University of Delaware. He participated in the 1989 ICCROM Architectural Conservation Course in Rome, Italy with grants from the Kress and Getty Foundations, and in subsequent years has returned to Rome as a course instructor. He is a former chair of the American Institute for Conservations Architecture Specialty Group and served as an advisor to the Save Outdoor Sculpture! Project.
Abstract: Standing on the Border of Two Worlds:
Mourning Our Civil War Dead in Garden Cemeteries
The movement to design and build large garden cemeteries found its first expressions in large cities in the east during the 1830s. A decade later, they were flourishing in the mid-west as well. By the Civil War, these ambitiously designed burial spaces stood ready to play a starring role in public and private remembrance of the hundreds of thousands who went to war but never returned.
This lecture will consider the garden cemetery movement by tracing its birth in the ideas about the healing and ennobling power of nature that developed in Europe from the 16th through 18th centuries, and see how those ideas informed American cemeteries of the 19th century. Well focus considerable attention on the Civil War and the ways in which cemeteries created only a generation earlier came to the fore as the pre-eminent venues for both private and public remembrance of the human cost of war and its aftermath including western migration, the Buffalo Soldiers, and Exodusters. Within this national framework, well consider the development of cemeteries in Central Kansas and see how they met the commemorative needs of a young community as they reflect ideas that can be found in cemeteries throughout the nation.
Many of the ambitious burial places that well consider became forgotten and neglected as the suburbanization of American life and changes in commemorative traditions have caused us to create newer and much more modest burial places in the twentieth century. But the garden cemeteries of the nineteenth century have come to the fore once again; the result of current preservation efforts that seek to restore them to a place of prominence for Americans seeking to better understand the nations history, and striving to find ways to recreate places where they can establish community with others.
ARCHIVES
Saluting Kermit Thompson & All-Kansas Fly-In -- April 3, 2008
In Memoriam: Ray 'Jiggs' Schulz - July 25, 2007