What did Dorothy miss when she told Toto “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore”?
Central Kansas. Now that we’re officially in Kansas for a while, it behooves us to learn a little “Kansas-nese” in order to avoid being embarrassed by the locals. It’s important to pronounce the names of the towns correctly! Hutchinson is universally known as “Hutch” (even on the nightly news!), Wichita is pronounced “WHICH-ta”, and Salina is pronounced “Saw –LINE-a”. We don’t want to sound like a tourist, do we???
“Hutch”
Continuing east from Dodge City, out next destination is an RV park just outside of Halstead, Kansas, right on Highway 50. This will be the base of operations while visiting Hutchinson and Wichita. The prairie continues to unfold, intensively farmed with every little town huddled under a great grain elevator. The land is still flat but now trees dot the landscape, following creeks across the prairie or planted as windbreaks on the western side of farmlands. The closer to Hutchinson, the more trees grow and the farms get smaller, a clear sign that the soil is more fertile and there is more water available so that a farmer can make a living on a smaller plot of land. The presence of “prairie skyscrapers” on the horizon announces our arrival in Hutchinson.
Hutchinson was founded in 1871 at the place where the Santa Fe Railroad crossed the Arkansas River in central Kansas. The early history of Hutch is pretty quiet, in no small part due to the fact that the town was “dry” (no alcohol sales allowed) and for some reason the Kansas legislature passed a law that did not allow any cattle drives through town. Instead it steadily flourished as the transportation center of a rich farming area. It was, and still is, a center of a “spider-web” of railroads reaching out in all directions and there are train tracks seemingly everywhere in town.
Main Street bustles with activity, lined with buildings constructed in the early part of the 20th century, many of them of the characteristic brick of the area. The most distinctive building is a not particularly attractive county courthouse, which looms over the southeastern part of town.
Kansas certainly has its’ quirky side, and the public art in Hutchinson certainly reflects that! I have no idea what the significance to the area of the egg is, but it’s clearly near and dear to someone’s heart…
The wealth that flowed into the area allowed the local gentry to build their “palaces” east of the downtown area.
While shipping and agriculture have been key to the prosperity of the Hutchinson area, there is one other thing that has provided a steady foundation to help the town weather the economic ebb and flow over the years, salt. Yes, salt. Turns out that in 1887 while Ben Blanchard was drilling prospecting for oil in the south Hutchinson area, he struck one of the largest salt deposits in the nation and the first discovered west of the Mississippi River. Salt production continues to this day, both that which is refined into table salt and rock salt, primarily used on winter roads. Two different methods are used to produce salt. The first, used by industry giants Cargill and Morton’s, dissolves the salt rock in water, brings it to the surface, and uses evaporation to produce the raw salt. The second, established in 1923 by the Carey Salt Company, mines the giant salt block crystals far underground.
Strataca
The Carey Salt Company has been mining salt 650 feet underground since the 1920’s. The vast underground mine, covering nearly 980 acres, is a spider web of huge vaults with the ceilings being held up by approximately 40 square feet pillars and walls. Two businesses now occupy the mine: the Carey Salt Company continues to mine salt in areas far from the public museum, and the Underground Vault and Storage Company uses abandoned chambers for storage of documents and other unique items (more on that later.) When the storage company decided that it needed to expand in 1999, a new elevator shaft was required. The construction of that shaft lead to the development of Strataca, the Kansas Salt Museum, opening in 2007. The building on the surface just houses offices and a waiting room, even the ever-present gift shop is 60 stories underground. The actual museum is found nearly 60 stories underground in a part of the mine that was dug out in the 1950’s. Put on your hard hat and let’s head down!
Entrance to the mine is via a double-decker hoist which holds 15 people on each level. Prior to getting on the lift riders are required to don a hard-hat and emergency breathing apparatus (which weighs about 3 pounds). A guide waits to load people for the descent, our destination is the area 60 stories underground where you get off the lift.
I have to say that the two and a half minute ride down is a bit unnerving. First of all, this is not a cushy elevator, it creaks and groans as you descend in COMPLETE darkness, and I do mean dark. Plus your ears “pop” because you are going so far underground. Once you reach the bottom, the doors open and you are at the beginning of a long tunnel with lighted displays
along the length.
The floor, walls and ceiling are all solid (I hope!) rock salt. The formation, an ancient sea bed, is approximately 400 feet thick, 150 MILES wide and 200 miles long. The rock is streaked with gray as the mud and slat settled together, but occasionally a block of extremely pure salt is found. The “whiter” the rock, the purer the salt. The block above was found in 2004 and weighs nearly 3 tons. Note that there is a sign that says “please touch”. That’s because in the orientation and all over the place there are signs telling you not to touch the walls or ceilings and, in particular, NOT to LICK the rocks. This is not table salt, folks…
In the early days of the mine workers pushed the rock out in carts, but this quickly proved to be a slow and expensive process so in 1925 this electric train engine was purchase (cost approximately $5.600) that was battery operated. This system was eventually replaced by conveyor belts. Those of you who were disappointed that I failed to ride the little train at the Toy Train Museum in Alamogordo can rest easy, I rode the little train 60 stories underground. The train took us on a tour of the old mine shafts. It creaked, lurched back and forth, and rocked us from side to side on our trip under the ground.
This picture shows a blocked off side tunnel with a display of miners’ equipment, including “two-fingered “ gloves. Turns out that leather was in such short supply during World War II that the workers were only issued one glove. They used it with only two fingers inside so that when one side was worn out, they could turn it over and use the same glove again.
This was one of the more disconcerting stops on the tour and is the picture of the floor adjacent to the train track. It was off to our left and marks a place where the roof fell in. The guide rushed to assure us that the mine was monitored every day and if they found a place where the ceiling was sagging they cut it away immediately. Somehow, sitting there in the dark with my little plastic helmet, not so comforting…
Turns out that taking out the garbage left by workers as well as used toilets left behind when the mine expanded was just too expensive so periodically we passed garbage heaps and the 1950’s version of a Port-A-Potty. Due to the dry climate and consistent 68 degree temperature virtually no decay. This pile was left behind the day this section of the mine closed in 1953 and remained intact as it was left that day when the mine tunnel was opened up in preparation for the museum in 2001.
After the train tour there was a small section about the other part of the business, the Underground Vault & Storage Company. A huge underground facility has been carved out of the salt, and taking advantage of the dry, constant cool climate, companies store a variety of things. To the right is a very bad picture of a mock up of the interior of one of these storage chambers (don’t know why I was so excited that I couldn’t take a focused picture, but it is what it is!).
The poster below explains the design of the storage facility, though the actual details are not public.
Many of the large movie companies store original tapes, costumes, etc. and others store documents. The actual items on display were not that special with the exception of two items that caught my interest. The first one is an entire original April 10, 1865, edition of the New York Herald newspaper, printed a day after President Lincoln’s death. I have never seen a newspaper from this time before and I was struck by how small the print was. It was difficult to read!
The second display that hit home was concerning the history of data storage on computers. This is the same set-up that I used at Linfield College in 1973 when at the time, on the cutting edge of college athletics, I computerized the football recruiting process. There was a machine that you typed on that converted letters to punch cards, and then the large computer processed the cards. There is waaay more computing power in an iPod today then there was in this giant machine of the 1970’s (yes, all of that in the picture makes up the computer, an IBM 38.) Oh, some of us are getting old!
Other displays included some artifacts from various recent movies, Brad Pitt’s shield from “Troy” and the Superman costume from the last version; most of the “good” stuff is hidden away from public eyes.
Before heading back up to the surface, I ducked into the restroom and even there the rock salt walls are present (along with the ever-present little blue sign by the hand dryer asking you to “NOT LICK the walls!”
And with that, we leave “Hutch”, take Highway 50 east to Newton, and then turn south on I-135 for a quick little visit to the big city in these parts, Wichita.
Next up: Cowboy Country and the Big City
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