Polk Topeka, Kansas, city directory, 1896-7, Part 2

Author:
Publication date: 1896
Publisher: Polk
Number of Pages: 792

USA > Kansas > Shawnee County > Topeka > Polk Topeka, Kansas, city directory, 1896-7 > Part 2

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There is some subtle odor of the prairie; some sniff of landscape ; some memory of plain, that stretches off into distance, growing faint, and dim and blue, at the line of the horizon ; some hope for office ; some desire of the prodi- gal for his father's house, that tethers him to Topeka ; some spell of the roaring Shunganunga ; some fragrance of sewer ; some lively touch remaining in the nostrils concerning our packing-house industry, that follows the wanderer, and pursues him into palace or ducal residence abroad, and makes him ill and home- sick. "And whether in Naples, Venice, Monte Carlo, or where else, the very Milky Way above brings to his suffused eyes the white-covered dairy wagons of Topeka, and away down in his soul he knows that its shining pathway bends over and leads to Topeka.

Subtle and occult forces are as easily recognized by results as if the machinery were visible and we saw the cogs whir and the great wheels spin. Topeka never loses a citizen, from any cause. Migration and death, assiduously worked, will decimate any town but Topeka. There is no such thing as permanent migration, and Topeka is even measurably victorious over death ; for it would be a grim specter who would not hold it a serious second to any celestial loca- tion for an outing, summer resort, or opportunity for a statesman.

. When a fire occurs, a suicide happens, or a floater is found, we have with- out cost the chariot races of the Roman over again. Away speed the fire teains to the conflagration, and away fly the undertakers' hoodlum wagons to pre-empt the corpse. Such things have been characterized as the Race of. Death. The defunct will not escape; he will eventually take up a permanent residence here, if the warring factions permit the family to at last go on with the funeral.

In alien lands long may he roam, Across the boundless earth and wide. Just let him be, for he'll come home- No other place dare he abide.

HE KANSAS MUTUAL LIFE has stood the test of time, and by its prompt payment of death losses and fair dealing with the public has proven itself worthy of the patronage of tho public.

AS, -I MONEY.

T. E. BOWMAN & CO.

MINIMUM EXPENSE TO BORROWERS.

RADGES' TOPEKA DIRECTORY. 13

Every other city of its size on the face of the earth has its slums: Topeka has none. Every other city on the face of the earth has its pauper population: To- peka has none. Our kodak fiends are compelled to go down to Kansas City, Kansas, for scenes of utter destitution; and an artist on the hunt of hopeless de- spair tinged with solitude, night, and misery, never saw in all his born days a more beautiful and bewitching, a more lean, lank, hungry, satisfying picture of dilapidated poverty, chronic helplessness, and grimy filth, than the residence portion of that town, that lines the river-bank with its aristocracy of mendicant citizenship.

Topeka has less of the criminal class, fewer persons who cannot read or write, than any other city of its size on the earth. The people in Topeka own their homes. There is not a millionaire in the city. There has been less percentage of failures among our merchants than in any other town of our size in the United States. And while this is not the place for economics, theosophy, or politics, but for facts only, we have this strange and remarkable-statement to make: To- peka is the only city of its size now on the earth, or ever has been on the face of the globe, that has not one open saloon within its borders; and this has been its condition for the last ten years. Our resubmission friends declare that it will be the last city of that kind on the face of the earth. There are lots of our people who believe in prohibition. The Methodist church has changed its requirement from six months on probation, to six months on prohibition. Give me some Boanerges, such as I have in mind, in the saddle, with some object just above the horizon that claims attention and is of interest to him in the shape of a good fat office, and up from the heather, cavorting down the dirt road, suddenly ap- pear about three hundred thousand of that fraternity, riding in farm wagons without spring seats, to the polls, to vote against any resubmission of that ques- tion. This historian is not biased, gored, nor prejudiced. There will be joints, boot-leggers, and spasmodic cellars where liquor may be bought; but the mil- lennium is easy, and give us another one before this law is busted. To appease the resubmissionists, I hope it may be busted, and that quickly. To reassure the Social Purity Society, the Methodist Church, the Y. M. C. A., the W. C. T. U., and the Topeka Club, I hope it may continue so long that Gabriel at the last day will find it impossible to obtain a single horn. There's nothing like being considerate to both sides when you have got a book to sell.

There are many concurring things to help make Topeka the delightful and attractive city that it is.

Kansas is a beautiful State ; her climate is exquisite ; her soil as exhaustless and prolific as the inundated Nile lands. Her harvest of corn this year is over four hundred millions of bushels. Suppose one bird should be compelled to carry this crop, kernel by kernel, to the dog star ! But you can make the com- putation yourself. There has been every kind and sort of crop raised in the State this year, and we are in a series of fat years. All kinds of stock do well

The hansas Mutual Life, of Topeka, issues the latest popu- lar forms of Return Premium policies.

No Charge to BORROWERS for Exchange.

T. E. BOWMAN & CO.

Lowest Shawnee Farm Loar.

RADGES' TOPEKA DIRECTORY.

here, and I figure that the yield this year in this State is correctly given as fol- lows :

400,000,000 bu. corn.

$80,000,000

Hay ( half as much ).

40,000,000

Stock.

60,000,000

Butter, eggs, and poultry.

10,000,000

All the lesser crops.

50,000,000

Hell raised by calamity-howlers.

000,000,000

$240,000,000

Topeka is situated easy of access to all parts of the State, and no man in the State who reads a newspaper or patronizes a postage stamp, but what takes a periodical visit to Topeka. Kansas people travel, and visit, and go, and keep coming, traveling, and going.

Kansas has formulated a code of laws which, in my judgment, is as near the attainment of human needs and civilized life as is within the power of man to make. This is no idle statement; the school, the family, the home and the la- borer are protected, and the bowelless corporations likewise restrained. The most vicious and rasping trust law is on our statute books. And Topeka is the capital of this magnificently infernal State; for there is just enough of the vary- ing elements in her composition to justify hurling a mild aperient of diluted anathema with the compliment to her great achievements and greater expecta- tions, and which any man who knows her is compelled to utter if he opens his mouth. The people of all the Western States are unusually intelligent ; for they have come from everywhere, and this admixture of fresh blood, vigor and political methods from many lands, with the courage and adventure that brought them here, is bound to make a bright people. And Topeka has obtained the pick of the lot. Twelve suicides happened this year in the city within a period of ninety days. They were all strangers who sacrificed life rather than go back to the beggarly elements of the world and give up Topeka. The schools of - Topeka are her pride ; magnificent buildings, thoroughly equipped, and with at least 300 teachers in its different schools, institutions and colleges; a gem of a public library, that we always take a stranger to see, and which has been and will continue to be, a very gracious help to the poor boy and girl of the city, many happy hours of the day, and will be the means of opening up to them the avenues of art, science and skilled mechanics, that otherwise would be shut books to them. And to the continued, patient, unwearied exertions of one man for nearly a quarter of a century, we owe it all. The library would have stumbled and fallen, if Edward Wilder had thrown up the sponge and quit. It is housed in an elegant building, and in these miserably depressed times is sup- ported by a city tax that is not felt by our citizens. This town lives on barbe- cued meats, I tell you. Bethany College is at the head of all Western schools for girls. Good old Bishop Vail made it his life-work. It has girls from almost every State and Territory, and by the hundreds. And the remarkable thing in

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RADGES' TOPEKA DIRECTORY.

its career is that no escapade, scandal, rumor or suspicion has ever stained its history.

And newspapers and newspaper quarrels until your feet grow weary. If a newspaper dies, two come from the hydra-headed monster as its successors. They all try to put fat on their ribs during a political campaign. It is their trade season. One of them is an Africo-American and its editor is a classic on the perversion of the United States language, to the purpose of a misfit. Unlike Browning, there is nothing between the lines or under them ; and considering his nightmare and folly, the false syntax, decrepit etymology and skewed inten- tion, Macaulay and Addison are not trotting in the same class.

Churches of every kind, with and without spires, mortgages and pastors. The prevailing religion is a good square orthodoxy, with brimstone in the fire- box. There are infidels, heathen, and Unitarians also. There is more room in the churches than is needed, and I attribute the difference between the supply and demand to arise solely by reason of dampness in the church-walls.

There is everything in this town : Axminster and sawdust clubs, society clubs, social clubs, dancing clubs, business clubs, intellectual clubs ; and the man who does not belong to a club is either secretary or recorder of a fraternal aid society, of which there are two thousand in round numbers. Whenever a man gets out of work here he founds a new order and lives on the proceeds as founder. And they all go back to the remote past for title ; the Pyramids, Sphynxes, Druids, recently domesticated in Kansas, lead strangers to think that Egypt has taken out naturalization papers. But antiquity has its limits, and the line is drawn at politicians. No old fossils go here. Office, emoluments and political honors are open without handicap to the world. As encouragement to the man who has expectant or kindly eyes on Kansas, truth compels the remark that some mighty mean men have occasionally slipped into office here. Come any- how, and take pot-luck with us.

We have a poet who sings mellifluously and well of peace, but talks war. The high school flung its banner out, and got 'Gene Ware to come and spout. He told them what its glories are, and then they up and cheer our Ware. He asked them all what we are for ; some for scads, but he's for war ; dead loads of wounded, maimed and slain ; let bugles sound the charge again. He trod the English lion's tail, and then for England wished to sail ; and there upon the Irish sea, with shotted guns make Erin free. Oh ! Ware, beware ! Mind what you say ; it's told the boys, that very day, ten fights they had upon the street, and every one they chanced to meet was asked, as high their voices ran, where they could find an Englishman. Ware's trouble is just simply here : the man is bold, and has no fear ; for into war he'd not be tricked, if just for once he had been licked.

We must venture a word on the industries of Topeka. We have had a cot- ton mill, built 200 years before it could obtain the cotton to bale, and it is now a

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RADGES' TOPEKA DIRECTORY.

crumbling ruin. It will soon be a relic. It is located two miles from any rail- road, and seems to have had an eye to the restoration of traffic by Conestoga wagons. The ground around it, once platted to accommodate the human hive of its industrial army, has been restored to the stirring-plow.

We have a woolen mill-a great big building, and empty as a beer-keg returning to Kansas City. The machinery was shipped two years ago, and the railroads have a tracer now on the hunt for it. When it arrives and there is an adjustment of some slight differences about mechanics' liens, laborers' wages, and pay for land, lumber and material, and contributions from stockholders, it will begin. Our experiences suggests that textile fabrics are not fashioned to our hand.

We had a starch factory, a cracker factory, a match factory, an implement factory, and ordinary vicissitude or a trust took each one of them in. We are certain it was not the horizontal reduction of the tariff that leveled them.

But we have many prosperous industries. The coffin factory and the morgue are live concerns and do a healthy, prosperous business. Kansas cottonwood, fashioned into shape, planed, glued, and covered with black broadcloth, is shipped all over the West, and many a fine old Arkansas gentleman, when he becomes aware that his double-breasted wooden overcoat came from Topeka, Kansas, will just deliberately kick the dashboard out.

We have a wholesale grocery house here that ranks second or third of all the houses engaged in that line in the Missouri valley.

In the printing and book-binding business we have three of the largest and most complete establishments in the country. Their trade extends to and takes in the northwest quarter of the United States, and continues to increase at a rapid pace. One of these institutions has become widely noted through its voluminous legal blanks originally introduced about twenty-five years ago by a sprouting limb of the law who, while waiting for clients, devoted all his time in framing legal blanks and forms, which have been circulated so numerously and widely since that the State could raiment itself with his blanks concerning es- trays. Many an old citizen of Kansas, as he breaks sod on resurrection day, will be pleasurable surprised at seeing some fragment of the bleached anatomy of that gifted pettifogger lying around bearing his publisher's imprint.

. The courts all sit here : the Supreme Court, the Kansas Court of Appeals, the District County Court, the United States Circuit Court, the United States District Court, the Probate Court of Shawnee county, which, since the now judge has mounted the woolsack, has taken enough jurisdiction to make it really a judicial tribunal. As part of the judiciary the police court is not counted in the estimate. It has no bowels of compassion. No mercy there goes unstrained. There is but one precedent ever quoted in that court with effect, and that is usually followed by a fine. But as a flourishing industry it is a success. We have forgotten the big court of all. Beyond and over and above all this rami-

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RADGES' TOPEKA DIRECTORY. 17

fied and intricate mesh-work of justice is the court of final resort, over which, by the grace of God, His Honor, long a celebrated and distinguished lawyer, presides. Beyond this court there is no redress ; if the litigant is still dissatisfied, he has such arrows in his quiver as secession, anarchy, revolution, and the new silver party, with which he must be satisfied. But, however this may be, may all the centuries turn pale and be gathered into the bosom of their fathers, be- fore this eminent jurist's light shall fail us, and his presence be withdrawn.

The foundry and iron interests of the city are prosperous and growing, and have been. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad Company is, how- ever, the Great Thing for Topeka, Kansas, and the principalities round about us. Two thousand men in the shops, and eight hundred in its general offices. They would make a respectable Topeka colony in heaven. Go where you will in Topeka, you strike it at every turn ; among all classes it bobs up. A man marries, gets divorced or dies, shop ; crackajack bicycles, general offices ; it mat- ters not what happens, the event is somewhere sandwiched between these two places. The crowds, excursionists, visitors, delegates, legislators, burglars, tramps, and all come in over its lines, and according as the traveler's wants and purse, he touches the velvet plush, satin and mahogany of a Pullman or partici- pates in a milk-shake on the brake-beam.

We forgot Washburn College ; an old-fashioned, conservative affair ; more of the Puritan than Cavalier ; uses stoves, and kerosene ; has prayers in the chapel ; and keeps down strictly to the business of having its students make a success of it. There is no vice open to its scholars, unless gum-chewing be a vice. It has a large number of students, and deserves all who can crowd its walls or tenant its campus.

Topeka is a city of superb hotels. The Copeland, Throop and National are as good as you deserve. They have every convenience and luxury ; tomatoes and game in their season, and the visiting politician the whole year. Their landlords are ideal Bonifaces. The learned Irish cooks give you Latin for breakfast, and so mingle it in with the hash and entrees that an interpreter is necessary. The old-fashioned dinner at midday is an obsolete repast, and luncheon takes its place.

While we have lots of good things, we need a public park, convenient for use, where people can go and return the same day. We have not got it. The enterprise and public spirit of the citizen is best shown in parks and public com- mons. Topeka would be an earthly paradise if we had a broad, massive, elegant bridge, a few public fountains at the intersections of our streets, and a park. There is nothing else we could desire, unless it is a first mortgage or two.

Topeka is noted as a convention city. There are so many conventions, and so many kinds of particular gatherings, that the streets are filled with people wearing badges and emblems, or striving to prevent regalias and uniforms from suffering collapse. Conventions are good things; they are kindergartens of -3

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RADGES' TOPEKA DIRECTORY.

oratory. It is as a talking delegate that the art of elocution and stump-speaking is learned. It is by often appearing before the Grand Lodge of Antiquated Sun-Gazers, and participating in moving previous questions and early adjourn- ments, that the young lawyer catches on and gets that grip on human utterance which designates him in after years as a rabble-rouser.

The temperance people make a pilgrimage to Topeka regularly twice a year to advise the Attorney-General, or to give out the programme for the next six months to the Governor. The county of Sedgwick is never called in asking for credentials. We have a daily paper whose editor starts a new party in defense of American liberty, announces the platform, takes a journey East to find a can- didate, makes a judicious selection, hoists him to the mainmast and keeps him there until he vacates and gives place to the editorial reason for his defeat. Give him one plank in a political platform which he himself writes, let him nominate his own man, and, without a brass band, stump speech or voter to carry a single transparency, he can make it an exceedingly hot campaign with a look of ap- parent success plumb up to the time they commence to count the vote.

And another thing or two and we are done. We have forty miles of elec- tric railway, which having the advantage of the finest streets in the world, is the best equipped and most sightly line of street railway on this habitable hemi- sphere. We have a Water Company that is an ornament and a dandy, if scrofula, tetanus, and ipse dixit count. With some of our people, and especially the writer of this, the original creation of water was a mistake on the part of the Almighty, if it has to be prostituted to such uses as its employment by this Water Company, as a means of revenue. We have ten miles of paved streets, and every street and avenue in the city is a broad, delightful thoroughfare, that a man does not have to unbutton his shirt-collar to breathe in. We own our electric light plant. And finally, here is a town that obeys the laws, believes in refinement, progress, art, civilization, and everything else that makes life worth having or living, domiciled in comfortable homes, too healthy to make the cemetery business profitable, where every prospect pleases and only the Water Company is vile, going ahead year after year, paying its expenses and living within its income, on legitimate revenues ; while all around.us, bogus metro po- lises, pretended commercial centers, and alleged emporiums of commerce, are arraying themselves in sackcloth and ashes, over the absence from their city treasuries of the saloon-keeper from Missouri. Some things can be done by anybody, and somebody can do anything it wants to, when it braces its heels, and cambers its backbone for a strain. The great heathen, barbaric world be- yond our borders ! Those who have never had the knowledge and sit in dark- ness, playing dominoes in a beer basement ! Topeka wants you! Topeka awaits you ! And her population, with a unanimity that sounds like one voice, greets you with, " WELCOME STRANGER !"

Call at the office of THE KANSAS MUTUAL LIFE, 700 Kansas Avenue, and get rates on the most attractive Life and Endowment Policies.

REAL ESTATE LOAN BROKERS. NO ACCEPTED APPLICATION HAS EVER HAD TO WAIT A DAY FOR MONEY.

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Street and Avenue Guide. [ COPYRIGHT. 1895, BY SAM. RADGES.]

THE houses throughout the city are numbered in accordance with what is known as the Phila- delphia or decimal system, the base or dividing-line for streets running north and south being Kansas avenue, the principal business thoroughfare, and First avenue for all streets running east and west.

Under this system, one hundred numbers are set apart for the houses between every two streets in the city-except Huntoon and King streets, which run parallel with the numerically-named streets. Commencing at First avenue with 100, numbers increase, with the odd figures on the west side, to 135, where Second street is reached ; here 200 commences, and so on, increasing one hun- dred to the block, to the city limits. North of First avenue the numbers also commence at 100; at Crane street, 200, and on the north bank of the Kansas river at 500, allowing the intervening two hundred for the bend in the river in the eastern portion of the city; where there are streets north of Crane street, south of the river. At Kansas avenue, all streets running at right angles with it are divided east and west, the even numbers being on the north side of the streets. Commencing at 100 on the first twenty-five feet of ground fronting south, regardless as to the frontage of the build- ing located thereon, the numbers increase two for each twenty-five feet of space in the block, 122 being reached at the intersection of the next street. Two hundred then commences on the opposite corner, and increases in like manner for the next block, and so on, increasing one hundred for each block, Topeka avenue being reached at 500 on the west, and the same number on the east side of the city at Jefferson street.

The simplicity of this system enables every person to readily locate any address, and it at the same time furnishes an idea of the distance to the locality. If the desired number is 320, on any street running east or west, it is on the third block from Kansas avenue, No. 720 on the seventh block, and so on ; the hundreds designating the number of streets distant from Kansas avenue, and the tens and units the exact house in the block.

Adams St., 5 blocks east of Kansas ave- nue ; runs south from the river to city limits.

Antioch Ave., runs north and south through Deer Park add.

Arch St., Stilson & Bartholomew's add., 14 blocks west of Kansas ave- nue ; runs north and south from Tenth avenue to King street.

Ash St., Bradford Miller's add., II blocks east of Kansas avenue ; runs north and south from Chase street to Seward ave.

Ashland Ave., Potwin Place, runs east and west between Greenwood and Elmwood avenues.

Ashmond Ave., runs east and west through Cottage Grove add.

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Polk Topeka, Kansas, city directory, 1896-7, Part 2

Author: Publication date: 1896 Publisher: Polk Number of Pages: 792

Author:
Publication date: 1896
Publisher: Polk
Number of Pages: 792