What May You Be Missing?

Learning about history is available in places you may overlook.  Sometimes our own hometowns have history to share as we go about our daily tasks, but we are often too busy to notice.  For example, consider the town of Kingman, Kansas.  Most people hurry through Kingman on Highway 54, going someplace else, hardly glancing at the things to be seen from their car windows.  Yet, in Kingman there are outdoor murals, easy to see without leaving your car.  From Highway 54, if you look to the south you can see a beautiful 1888 building with its towers and ornate stone and brick work.  Once it was the firehouse, jail, and city hall, but today it is the Kingman County Historical Museum.

The contents inside are worth a visit, but even without entering the building you can appreciate the history depicted on the north side of the building.  Artist and Kansan Stan Herd was commissioned to create two murals:  a 40' x 20' depiction of Clyde Cessna making his maiden flight in his first airplane, and a 15' x 10' mural depicting William "Cannonball" Greene driving a stagecoach between Kingman and Pratt.  (There is also a 30' long mural inside on the second floor of the museum by D. Stoneberger.)

Clyde Cessna was born on a farm in Kingman County, but he is not famous for that.  Rather, he left the farm and began building airplanes, and he founded the Cessna Aircraft Company whose planes continue to make his name famous.

The name "Cannonball" Green also has notoriety--in fact, in triplicate!  Kingman's visitors' literature identifies the driver in the mural as William "Cannonball" Green, but Greensburg, Kansas to the west claims its town took its name from D. R. "Cannonball" Green, and movies have depicted James "Cannonball" Green.  Chasing down the explanation for the three different "Cannonball Greens" is beyond this blog, but whether it was William, D.R., or James driving the coach, there was a stage line that traveled the route called the "Cannonball" in its day.  The operation of the stage line was cut short by the arrival of the railroads.

What is particularly interesting about the two murals on the north side of the History Museum is the artist that painted them.  While he began as an outdoor mural artist, today Stan Herd is probably best known for his earth-work and crop art.  Sun and weather shorten the lives of outdoor murals, but Herd's current outdoor art has an even shorter life span.  Created from plants and earth, manipulated by the artist through mowing, burning, and plowing, the art is quickly reclaimed by nature.  However, photographs preserve the art in books.

One of Herd's works, which depicted a pastoral Kansas landscape on a large barren lot near an underground railway tunnel in New York City, transformed what had been a trashy site into a work of rural art.  Of particular interest today is the coinsidence that the barren lot on which Herd worked belonged to Donald Trump!  The work was called "Countryside" and filmmaker Chris Ordal created an independent film called "Earthwork," creating a filmed work of art from Herd's creative artistic process.