SCHGS to host ‘These Old Bones: The Stories of Caldwell Kansas’s Main Street’ presentation
Sumner Newscow report — The Sumner County Historical and Genealogical Society, Wellington, will host “These Old Bones: the Stories of Caldwell, Kansas’s Main Street” presented by Michelle Schiltz and Lou Ann Jamison, on Monday, October 16, at 6:30 p.m. at the Wellington Memorial Auditorium, 208 North Washington, Wellington.
The program is free and open to the public. For more info, visit www.ksschgs.com or contact the SCHGS at 620-440-4245 on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. After hours: Jane at 620-447-3266; Sherry at 316-833-6161.
Michelle Schiltz and Lou Ann Jamison are no strangers to working together. For 13 years, the two sisters were co-owners of Sugar Sisters, a restaurant and venue in Caldwell. Currently, Jamison serves as the President of the Caldwell Historical Society, and Schiltz, past President, serves as Secretary. Schiltz is also an actress in the Opera House Theater Group, has a Master’s Degree in History & Archival work, and writes a column on Caldwell history for the Caldwell Messenger newspaper.
Schiltz still co-owns Sugar Sisters with a cousin, and Jamison teaches Leadership classes and shares Caldwell’s history with Middle and High School students.
“We’re proud of our Caldwell history,” Schiltz said, adding that they’ve had a renewed interest in their downtown historic district.
“We worked to get a Historic District Grant,” Schiltz said, “we had to select the buildings, research them, and take pictures.”
“We had to jump through a lot of hoops,” Schiltz said.
Schiltz said that she has always been fascinated by Caldwell’s history, and while researching for the Historic District Grant, they decided to turn their findings into a photo and history book to preserve and share the history of Caldwell.
“There are all these fun stories and all these fascinating back stories,” Schiltz said. “We had the book printed at KanOkla at Caldwell, and we put it together the way that it is so that we can add more pages every few years.”
Schiltz stated that she would share the “mechanics” of how they found the information about the roadblocks they ran into, such as the fact that the early businesses in Caldwell identified their locations in ads by saying “two doors south of Noah Dixon’s retail store” etc. and that some businesses were only in business for one year.
Schiltz said they researched newspapers, old yearbooks, old phone books, and when all else failed, they appealed to the readership of the Caldwell Messenger. Their readers came through, with information coming from a California reader and a ninety-two-year-old gentleman from back east.
“My sister and I felt like detectives,” Schiltz said, “we’d get our magnifying glass out and go over the print in the newspaper ads.”
“There are secrets in the buildings,” Schiltz said, “secrets that even the store owners today don’t know about.”
Schiltz said that she would share some of these secrets and stories of the buildings at the meeting.
Schiltz said that they didn’t learn why the livery stable (which was across the street and down from where the Impact Bank is now) was named the Two Orphans Livery Stable, but there was a catastrophic fire in the stable that killed twenty-eight horses.
“It was tragic,” Schiltz said, “and I will share what the loss of those horses meant in that time period.”
Schiltz said there have always been stories about the tunnel, or tunnels that ran under Caldwell’s Main Street in the late 1800s. What the original purpose of the tunnels was, whether they were one building-to-another tunnels that allowed the outlaws to escape, or whether they were used for gambling and later during prohibition, is unclear at this time.
As a youngster, Schiltz’s father entered the tunnels through the basement in what was the Puck Hotel, and the tunnel led to what was the Leland Hotel. Neither the Puck or Leland Hotels exists today.
Schiltz said that 25 years or more ago when Main Street was resurfaced and new sewer lines installed, one of the workers jumped off of a truck and broke right through the sidewalk into a chamber where a tunnel supposedly crossed the street, and in their Opera House basement there is a door and window, now bricked in, that faces out into the street.
“There are a lot of big flashy stories about Caldwell people,” Schiltz said, “there is Henry Brown, who robbed the Medicine Lodge bank and George and Maggie Wood, who were the brothel owners, but I wanted to focus on the people who were the backbone of our town, the shopkeepers and the people who came here, stayed here, and built the businesses and the churches and raised their families here.”
“They are the ones who built the town,” Schiltz said, “and that’s why we still have a town.”
