Biography ghost kansas prairie settlement thurman
Biography ghost kansas prairie settlement thurman ohio...
Ghost Settlement on the Prairie
Four miles southeast of the village of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansas—the heart of the Flint Hills—lies the abandoned settlement of Thurman.
Biography ghost kansas prairie settlement thurman
At the turn of the century Thurman was a prosperous farming and ranching settlement with fifty-one households, a post office, two general stores, a blacksmith shop, five schools, and a church. Today, only the ruins of Thurman remain.
Joseph Hickey uses Thurman to explore the settlement form of social organization, which—along with the village, hamlet, and small town—was a dominant feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life.
He traces Thurman’s birth in 1874, its shallow rises and falls, and its demise in 1944. Akin to what William Least Heat-Moon did for Chase County in PrairyErth, Hickey provides a “deep map” for one post-office community and, consequently, tells us a great deal about America’s rural past.
Describing the shifting