Nancy B King

With my Daylight Donut pinecone and diet Coke in my car, I drove west from Winfield for today’s tour. My first destination, nine miles down the road, was Oxford. My grandmother Barnes lived there, in the same house, all her married life, including after my grandfather died and until she passed away. So, this is where my mother grew up. When she was 31, she met my father as she was walking down main street eating a banana. I, also, lived there for six months at the age of 10 when my mother, sister, and I stayed with my grandmother so Mother could help take care of her after she had a stroke.

My first stop, the park at the end of the Arkansas River bridge as you come into town from Winfield, brought back childhood memories. It was always a big deal in the summertime for the grown ups to fix a picnic supper and take it to the park so we could eat where it was a bit cooler and my sister and I could run around and play on the slide and swing on the swings.

My second stop was the Oxford Mill.

“Oxford is known for The Old Mill. The mill was built in 1874 by D. N. Cook and John Hewitt. A three mile race was hand dug parallel to the Arkansas River. The water running through the mill race provided the electricity necessary to run the mill. A dam was built across the river to help the mill grow. The mill’s flour and cornmeal supported the slogan “Oxford’s Best”. In 1910, Charles Champeny bought the mill in which he worked until he passed away. The Old Mill has since been restored by its owners. The old Mill was placed on the National Historical Register on April 26, 1982. The Oxford Jr/Sr High School Entrepreneurship Class has recently started serving dinners on weekends.”

The mill is a great old place. I can still remember the cloth flour sacks that said “Oxford’s Best”. No, I didn’t wear anything made out of the cotton flour sacks.

Next, I drove around the Oxford grade school (still the same sturdy brick building) where I attended most of third grade. I disliked it intensely. I had come from a one room country school where only two of us were in the third grade; here there were probably fifteen to twenty students per grade. I discovered in the Oxford third grade that I couldn’t read very well—the lowest reading group. No matter how many times I read the story, I couldn’t answer any of the teacher’s questions. She never asked the questions that I had the answers for. I really wanted to be put back in second grade buy my mother and the teachers said, “No.”

I continued my drive around Oxford with a trip down main street and around and about the remembered houses including, of course, Grandmother’s house. I then went out to the cemetery where Mother, Grandmother and Grandfather Barnes, and Great Grandmother and Great Grandfather Barnes are buried.

I then left Oxford and drove to Wellington for a short tour. The Hatcher Hospital where I was born is now a museum (no, not in my honor). Driving on down main street, I discovered that the Woolworth dime store (an interesting company history) is no longer there—no surprise. The only memory I have of my grandfather Barnes is of his once taking me to Woolworth’s—the “dime store.” I remember his lifting me up and carrying me so I could see above the high counters.

My last stop in Wellington was the river park where Daughter’s father and I decided that marriage was a distinct possibility; it is now a golf course.

As I left Wellington and headed back to Winfield, I declared that I had had enough of memory lane; it was time to return to the present with full speed ahead to the  future.

On the way back to Winfield I noticed more fields of cotton.

Traditionally, the main crops in this area have been wheat, oats, kaffer corn, soy beans, and alfalfa. Cotton is a fairly new crop to this region. The warmer temperatures have pushed cotton growing 100 miles further north from its usual growing area in the south. Cotton requires less water than wheat, but more chemicals. The other evening I had Googled “Kansas cotton” and discovered among other things that there were three cotton gins in Kansas; what’s more, one of them was in the Winfield area. I couldn’t believe there was an actual cotton gin in Winfield! I had often taught the Civil War to my fifth graders but had never come close an actual cotton gin. With the help of Google Maps and well marked country roads, I found this:

One of the employees gave we a marvelous conducted tour of the gin. All I could think of was the huge machinery and the amount of work and cotton it required to keep that machinery running and to make it pay for itself and its employees. Truly impressive especially for my Eastern Kansas hometown.

The cotton is unloaded and enters the ginning process here:

It goes through many different processes: extreme heating and drying to blow the debris from the cotton fibers, multiple combings and lint fiber removals, and separating more and more debris. The final products are clean cotton fibers used in cotton fabric; not so cleaned cotton—the kind that is used in string rag mops (note the dark specks in the string rag mop) and papers made from cotton fibers; cotton seeds which still have some cotton fibers on them that are used for cattle feed (cattle feeders now prefer to have some of the fiber left on the seed as it slows down the cow’s digestion of it and allows more nutrients to enter the cow’s system. I can remember my father feeding cotton seed cake to our cattle. I think they were pellets); and the hulls, etc. that are used in a compost or for decorative ground cover.

Click here for someone else’s excellent diagram and short explanation of the  ginning process.

This venture was one of the major highlights of my week in Kansas!

By this time I had worked up an appetite, so it was off to the Little Hooker Bait Shop and Café for supper—another/my last barbeque beef sandwich and fresh pie.