In the spring of 1907, a stranger approached John Winterbottom as he was planting corn on his farm in the upper part of Osage Township. The man asked Winterbottom if he’d be willing to part with his land, which lay just east of the Katy Railroad. For the right price, Winterbottom said, he would. The man then approached another farmer, a next door neighbor as it were, Hiram Lieurance, and posed the same query, and was honored with the same result.
Within days, the stranger — soon well-known to the area’s residents as Sam T. McDermott, vice-president of the Great Western Portland Cement Company, out of Kansas City — had secured options to purchase 260 acres on behalf of his organization.
Within weeks, an assembly of laborers and surveyors swept into the area. They built a dam across Coal Creek to provide water for the $2 million cement plant and they laid out lots for a town on 40 acres of adjacent land, and they began the construction of homes.
In no time, merchants lined the streets, a school was built; a bank, a hotel, a post office, a movie house, a church, a depot. Dr. R.R. Nevitt became the town’s physician. And residents rattled the boards at a dance hall that occupied the space above the town’s main garage.
This pioneer boom town was called Mildred — after the pretty daughter of J.W. Wagner, president of Great Western — an Anglo-Saxon name, with its brawl of hard consonants, meaning “gentle strength.”
At its height, Mildred — which, today, has fewer than 30 residents — boasted a population of more than 2,000.
“Anyone who does not like a small town ought to stay away from Mildred,” said a correspondent for this paper in the summer of 1917. Anyway, he continued, “it is not the size, but the quality that counts, and Mildred has more ‘live wires’ to the size of the town than any place in the U.S.—bar none.”
But it wasn’t many years after this reporter — who also claimed that “one of the finest baths [he] has ever taken was in Mildred” — that many of these live wires, and probably even some of the duds, began to depart the company town in search of work elsewhere.
The town’s fortunes were tied to the cement plant, and the plant was dying. In 1917, with the First World War occupying the nation’s attention, the building industry slumped and with it the demand for cement. The plant closed for a year or so during this period.
Although it reopened after the war, it would never again run at full capacity. In 1931, the plant was closed for good and, in 1936, the building, which appeared as if from nowhere only 30 years before, was dismantled and its equipment shipped to a sister plant in Fredonia.
“Mildred,” wrote the Register in its centennial edition, in 1955, “Allen County’s youngest town, nearly completed the cycle from corn field to industrial center and back to corn field within three decades.”
FOR ALL the flux and desertion that has characterized Mildred’s last 100 years, there’s been at least one constant: a store widely known as “Charlie Brown’s.”
The store, which in its long history has sold everything from livery supplies to Christmas candy, found its surest footing as a general store and deli during the years when it was owned and operated by the late Charles and Lucille Brown.
In 2014, Loren and Regena Lance purchased Brown’s Store, rescuing Mildred’s last remaining business from certain oblivion. Having rechristened the little building the “Mildred Store” — where they host live music every month and serve up locally renowned sandwiches — the Lances have breathed new life into the depleted town.
On Thursday, Regena Lance entertained a crowd of about 50 residents at the Iola Public Library with stories of Mildred’s beginnings and tales of the town’s celebrated store.
“It’s important to us that we keep the store’s history alive,” said Lance, who herself remembers buying sackfuls of candy at Charlie Brown’s when she was a little girl.
The Lances have retained much of the Browns’ bric-a-brac — from Charlie’s telephone to his butcher’s block — as well as the specific traditions, like “Charlie Brown’s Famous Sandwich” and Lucille’s annual assortment of Christmas candies, that has made the general store an enduring centerpiece of the dying boom town.
Lance, whose husband Loren is a respected area musician, dwelt momentarily on the increasingly popular music nights that the Mildred Store hosts each month. “On the night I snapped this picture,” said Lance, directing the crowd’s attention to a slide showing a band performing on an outdoor stage, “it was pretty amazing: there were people in the street, there were people on the other side of the building, families sitting in the backs of their trucks. … What other place do you know can quadruple the population of a town in one night? We can get 150 people out there for music night. I don’t care if they never set foot in the store. They don’t have to come buy anything. That’s not the point. The point is to bring the community back to town.”
A KIND-FACED old man who sat with his hands resting, one on top of the other, on the head of his cane during the hourlong presentation, had his turn at the end. He pointed to a picture of the Mildred grade school, which hung in display on the library’s wall.
“I was in the eighth grade when lightning hit that building and burned it to the ground on a Friday night,” he said. “And we didn’t miss a day of school! They went to Topeka and got books and everything, and they put us in the high school Monday morning. In 1932, I was in the first grade. I started school there. … My family lived right across the corner, in a two-story white house, when that place burned down. They used an oil-treated sawdust to sweep the floors with, to keep the dust down. So every floor of that building was soaked in oil.” The library crowd gasped; the man had his audience. “Hey, does anyone remember the lumberyard that used to be there?”
“OK. Well, here’s a fact,” piped another man, who recalled Mildred’s old livery stable — a sort of horse and buggy operation — owned by a family called Ross. “Back then, you used to move salt in 300-pound barrels. Listen to this, old Mood Ross was the only person in the country that could pick one up with his hands and set it in a wagon.”
THOSE WERE THE DAYS: Mildred’s colorful past shared
