PIQUA — Piqua’s population is listed at 80. For a few hours Saturday, it more than doubled.
About 100 people from throughout eastern Kansas, many of them members of the Kansas Explorers Club, came to town to learn how a small unincorporated town gets along.
Quite nicely, Shelia Lampe, a resident and director of the Iola Area Chamber of Commerce, said.
She explained being unincorporated means Piqua “really is considered a village. We don’t have a city council” and regulations come from Woodson County.
Jan Eckroat, Lampe’s mother, accentuated her daughter’s description of Piqua, chugging up on a lawn mower to join the crowd.
“That’s the thing about Piqua,” Lampe quipped. “We don’t have anything against people riding lawn mowers on our streets.
“Just about everyone is related to everyone else and for the most part we get along,” she observed. “We have a few arguments, but it’s just like what you’d have in a big family.”
Lampe gave some statistics. In Piqua and its surrounding area are 14 business with 48 employees. Several are single-employee and home-based; the Piqua Farmers Cooperative, with an elevator and farm store, employs 13.
Marci Penner, who founded Kansas Sampler Foundation, the parent organization of the Kansas Explorers Club, moderated a 90-minute gathering on a grassy area in the shadow of several large silos where area farmer Bryan Specht stores grain.
“In how many towns can you get a haircut at the farmers co-op,” Penner asked.
Jay McNett, barber, said he has been “a part of the community forever and I’m comfortable here.”
McNett has cut hair of four generations in some families and moved into a corner of the co-op’s farm store when a building housing a bar, cafe and his shop burned about 20 years ago.
Penner told about her first visit to Piqua several years and how she had some reservations about going into the Silverado Bar and Grill, the only restaurant in town.
“Here I was a Mennonite girl looking at a bar and grill with a front door that was beat up,” she said.
With hunger winning out, Penner found “great people and great food. Later I wrote about it on my blog and the next time I was here, there was a new door.”
Most of those attending Saturday’s tour had lunch at Silverado’s, after casual walking tours of Piqua. In the afternoon they drove to Kalida, original Woodson County seat, and its cemetery. Kalida is southwest of Yates Center.
