This photo was taken on Maple Hill's Main Street in 1922. It shows Jim Clark, who was then responsible for maintaining "Old #10" through Maple Hill Township. This was the main gravel route from Topeka west to Manhattan, Kansas. The team and equipment are facing west on Main Street, and the building in the background is the Turnbull Blacksmith Shop built in 1888 by John Turnbull, Sr. and his son, John Turnbull, Jr. The Turnbulls immigrated from Scotland a few years betore this shop was built.
Old #10 went through town on Maple Hill's Main Street until it came to the intersection of what is today Main and 6th Street at the north end of town. It then turned west following what is today Warren Road. At what is today Bluebird Road, it turned south until it intersected with Bison Road and then turned west until it intersected with Strowig Mill Road and then proceeded through Paxico and on west to Alma, Kansas. Jim Pete Clark maintained only that portion that was in Maple Hill Township. Not all of the road was graveled, large parts of it were just packed dirt.
My Grandfather Clark had a farm background. His father, John "Johnny" Clark, was a farmer in the Snokomo Community of Newbury Township. His grandfather and great grandfather had been farmers in Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Farming was all Grandfather Clark knew how to do. He was farming when he met and married my grandmother, Mabel Rachel Jones and they farmed after they were married.
In 1914, Mabel (Jones) Clark was offered the full-time (and more!) job of managing the Maple Hill Central Office. Grandfather Clark didn't want her to take the job because he didn't think it was right for women to work. Besides, they already had a two-year-old little girl that needed caring for. Grandmother had already been an assistant operator at the Paxico Central Office, which her father Leander E. Jones and step mother, Susanna (Reinhardt) Jones managed, so she knew what it would involve. I don't know what the final compromise was, but in August 1914, Mabel Clark became the manager and chief operator at Maple Hill. She was simply called "Central Mabel."
This photograph of my paternal grandmother, Mabel R. (Jones) Clark, was taken in 1914 when she was 20 and just taking over the Maple Hill Central Office. She is sitting at the switchboard console. You can't see the front of the board very well but there were "drops" that covered each connection on the board. When a call came into the central office, the drop would actually fall, revealing a hole which was the connection. The operator would then take one of the plug ins (the plugs are the upright rocket-like pieces visible at the rear of the board) and put it into the hole connection. You can see a couple of completed connections in the photograph. The operator would then answer "Number Please?" or simply "Central." The caller would then tell the operator who they wanted to call by name or by number. The second plug would then be inserted into that connection behind the other party's drop and the operator would use the little black levers to "ring" the other person's phone. You can see one connection that has been made on the right side of the switchboard.
My Grandfather Clark gave up his rented farm, the Haubold Farm, south of Paxico, Kansas and moved to Maple Hill with Grandmother. Running the Central Office took more than one person so Grandmother trained Grandfather to run the switchboard and also trained several high school girls, so that she would have time to take care of her home and daughter, Thelma Maree Clark. Grandfather didn't like operating the switchboard and didn't want her to take the job in the first place, so I'm sure he was not a very willing helper.
In this 1910 photograph of Maple Hill's Main Street, you can see the Maple Hill Central Office, the small white house with two windows on it's north side. The next building to the south is the stone Turnbull Blacksmith Shop. The next large building visible behind the Turnbull Blacksmith Shop is the Romick Livery Stable. It was a wooden story and one-half structure. Hay and feed were stored in the upper portion of the building and the lower part had stalls for horses, several different kinds of horse-drawn conveyances, and an office. Just a portion of Dolly's store is visible south of the Livery Barn.
Willing or not, Grandfather didn't have much choice many times. The town's two doctors often called my Grandmother and asked her to come to their aid immediately. She has told me many times that she would tell Grandfather she was needed to assist one of the doctors, she would put on a clean apron, and go where she was needed. During her 43 years in the Maple Hill Central Office, she actually assisted in delivering dozens of babies and delivered seventeen children without the doctor being present. Grandmother never seemed to think there was anything special about her "nursing" work, she just did what was needed.
In 1916, Jim Pete Clark and his cousin, Lee Wilson, bought the Maple Hill Livery Stable which was located just south of the Turnbull Blacksmith Shop. This business had originally been operated by the Romick Brothers and was one of the first enterprises established when Maple Hill was founded in 1887. I think Grandmother agreed he could buy this business only because it was located six lots to the south of the Central Office and she could get him quickly if needed. That's my speculation of course :) Grandfather Clark became know for his ability to buy, sell and train horses and many people in the surrounding area came to him to help them buy and sell horses.
Grandfather Clark and his cousin, Lee Wilson, bought a horse pasture that was less than a half block from the livery stable. Most of that horse pasture is still open pasture, but there is a cement block-type building on the southeast corner (formerly the Glogau Tavern, the Bronaugh home, and currently owned by Freda Kimble) and the tennis courts and restrooms of Maple Hill City Park sit on the northwest property line. It was about three-acres total but right on Main Street in the south end of Maple Hill. The property was later owned by Lyndon Mee and today, there is a little memorial on the northeast corner dedicated to his sister, Winona "Nonie" (Mee) Miller.
Grandfather Clark and Lee Wilson kept their "dray" horses and buggy horses in the little pasture. The team hitched to the road grader in the top photograph, is really two teams. The two light-colored horses in the middle are dapple-gray percherons. The two horses you see on the outside are bay-colored and are probably a Belgian mixture. Both teams were used to pick up freight at the Rock Island Depot and deliver it to individuals and businesses in town. Percherons were by far the most popular draft horses if you could afford a registered team, but the mixtures of registered stallions with crossbred mares created by far the largest number of horses on farms.
This is an historic photograph of the Romick Brother's Livery Stable on Maple Hill's Main Street. (Photograph was loaned to the author by Janice McClelland) The man holding the horse is Steele Romick, Sr. and the man to his right in the hat and coat is his brother, Al Romick.
The Maple Hill Livery Stable had two registered stallions that would "stand" for the mares of area farmers and they were both percherons and could have very well been the horses shown in this photograph. Grandfather Clark continued to buy, sell and train horses long after he and Lee Wilson sold the livery stable in 1919.
In fact, although my Grandmother Clark was broken hearted when he suddenly died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve 1948, she was also furious when she found out he had a secret bank account with several thousands of dollars which he was still using to buy and sell horses and also farm machinery. I hope she'll forgive me to telling that :O))
The cars in the maintainer photo are also interesting. The car pulled up along side the blacksmith show is a Ford Model-T "Runabout" that was popular from 1915 until about 1925. I can't tell what model year it is. When I magnified the photo, there's another car pulled up close to the left end of the grader. I think that's my Grandfather Clark's 1918 Dodge touring car, but I can't see the insignia on the radiator to make certain. Grandfather Clark broke his arm trying to turn over the crank on that car and was laid up for several weeks. I remember hearing the story twenty years later so it must have been a traumatic experience.
The porch and entrance to the central office are just visible under the nose of the first horse in the team. That was the entrance to Grandmother Clark's office where the switchboard was located and they lived in the three big rooms and screened back porch behind the office.
Grandfather Clark was either just heading out for the day and someone took the photograph, or he had stopped by the blacksmith shop to pick up sharpened blades for the road grader. John Turnbull and his father, both from Scotland, did all kinds of blacksmithing, which included hammaring the blades back into shape when they were bent or hit a big rock in the road and were pitted or broken. These two capable blacksmiths were more than able to weld broken blades and also provide sharpening and other services.
I don't know how many years Grandfather Clark was responsible for maintaining Old #10 in Maple Hill township but I'm sure it was a job that was thankless and provided scorching heat in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. Roads were easiest to maintain just after a rain in the summer. It softened the ground and made it easier to cover up and fill in ruts and also move gravel around where roads were graveled. In winter, the roads would become impossibly rutted and almost impassible. It took a great deal of hard work to get them back into shape in the spring.
While I'm talking about that, you may wonder how roads were passable in Kansas winter snows. In the days of horse travel, a horse could go several miles through snow as deep as 20-24" but would tire after a couple of hours. In reading the Maple Hill News Items for the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, there are numerous "thank yous" to area ranchers who got their "big" teams out and helped clear roads of winter snow. One way they did this was by taking the wheels off heavy wagons and simply dragging them so that it pushed the snow to the side of the road. Another way was to hook a big four-horse team to a sledge, sort of a heavy sled, and putting 50# blocks of salt on the sledge. The it was pulled down the road pushing the snow to the side. William J. Tod, a rancher southeast of Maple Hill, was known for getting his men out and pulling sledges before church so people could drive the buggies and wagons over cleared roads.
As a boy, I remember one horrific blizzard when I was seven or eight years old. In checking Google, I note there was a terrible blizzard in March 1950 in Kansas that killed thousands of cattle. That could have well been the one. It snowed for three days and the winds blew 30-50 mph from the north. Roads were drifted shut from the tops of fence posts on one side to the top of fence posts on the other. My father worked for Chuck Fauerbauch in building ponds and field terraces and he kept one of Chuck's "D-9" Caterpillar bulldozers at our home. Our phone rang the morning after the blizzard ceased and it was the chair of our Maple Hill Township board asking my dad if he would drive his D-9 into town and hook it up to the township's "v" nose snow plow and work clearing the roads.
My father, John "Tim" Clark agreed and the township paid Chuck Fauerbach for the use of his bulldozer and my dad's time, but it took a week for him to clear the major roads. When the drifts were attacked, the snow was piled 10' higher than the top of the bulldozer cab---and then only one lane of traffic was opened. If you met a car coming down the road, you'd have to back up to the first farm lane and let the other car pass. I don't remember another blizzard as severe as that in my life time.
Got to get back to working on preparing for the arrival of my grandchildren!
Happy Triails!
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