Standing between the Pleasant Valley cemetery and schoolhouse in southern Woodson County, I lost myself in the immensity of the sky.
Always looking, looking … but for what?
According to the sign above the doorway, the sandstone schoolhouse has been surveying this same horizon since 1881, but the district is even older.
First known as “The Brush School,” as it convened in Alva Brush’s house, District 18 had its start in 1867 in a little room about a mile to the north.
Laura Dumond was the district’s first teacher at the subscription school, and would witness not only construction of its “box building” replacement, but the replacement’s replacement, the iconic sandstone structure that stands still today.
In “Memories of My Valley,” Edith Mentzer recalled spelling competitions and other contests between Pleasant Valley and neighboring schools, and noted, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that “the debates became so interesting that it was necessary to limit the time for each.”
Pleasant Valley closed its doors to students in 1952, but has hosted countless 4-H meetings, weddings and family reunions over the years.
Yet its existence points to something even more intriguing nearby.
That something is the ghost town of Rose, founded in June 1870, which along with the rest of Pleasant Valley, is situated in the mouth of an ancient inactive volcano.
During the Cretaceous Period, last in the Age of Dinosaurs, veins of magma crept to the surface, and after the resulting formation expanded and collapsed, what remained was eventually termed the Rose Dome intrusion.
A similar expansion and collapse took place in relation to the town of Rose itself, though, and that’s what concerns us here.
Indeed, its population exploded after the Verdigris-Independence-and-Western railroad arrived in 1882, but by the middle of the Twentieth Century was a shell of its former self.
Over the course of 140 years, Rose went from numbering hundreds of residents, especially during hay season, to less than a dozen.
The name Rose comes from the daughter of the town’s first postmaster, George Trimble, who named the post office in her honor.
Today Trimble rests in Brush Cemetery, hidden northwest of Rose in the middle of a pasture. The burial ground started when Alva Brush’s daughter died suddenly.
I’ve only visited their graves once, however, as it requires tromping through grass six feet high and what feels like several feet thick.
Crouching amidst the tangle, I marvelled at blazing yellow sunflowers and the fact that the person who christened an entire town had met with such a clandestine end.
