Kansas History - Autumn 2025
Autumn 2025
(Volume 48, Number 3)
“European German Settlement of Marshall County, Kansas, 1855-1890”
by Roberta Reb Allen
While individuals of German heritage form the largest ethnic group in Kansas, there has been little research on the settlement of European Germans in the state. Here Roberta Reb Allen interweaves a family story of emigration from Württemberg with the larger story of German settlement of Marshall County, beginning in 1854. Because the 1850 federal census was the first census to list the place of birth of individual residents, along with territorial and state census data, Allen is able to address German immigration from their very first arrival. This is not possible in states which began settlement earlier. The frontier in Marshall County remained fluid for some forty years and the changing demographics particularly pre- and post-Civil War are explored here, including marital status, family size, and German state of origin. The development and role of German newspapers, including the Kansas Zeitung and the Marysville Post, helps readers understand the dissemination of information about and supporting the Volks-Verein, which organized to overturn the prohibition amendment to the Kansas constitution.
“A Window into Nineteenth-Century Domestic Life: The 1881 Diary of Cora Kimble”
edited and introduced by Danielle N. Hall
In 1881, eighteen-year-old Cora LaFond Ulrich Kimble began writing in a small leather-bound diary, a gift from her new husband, Judge Samuel Kimble Jr. What she recorded was far more than household chores and social calls. Across seventy-eight handwritten pages, Cora revealed the joys and strains of marriage, the weight of family expectations while grieving, and the quiet resilience required of women in a world that prized composure over candor. Unlike the women who filled headlines with activism and reform, Cora lived firmly within the private sphere; yet, her words challenge the notion that domesticity was passive or apolitical. Cora's writing opens a window into the hidden complexities of nineteenth-century womanhood. Her diary, now preserved in the Richard L. D. and Marjorie J. Morse Department of Archives and Special Collections at Kansas State University, offers an intimate portrait of life in during a time of shifting gender roles and cultural change.
“A Terror Has Been Removed?: White-on-White Lynching and the Targeting of Alleged Bullies in Kansas”
Brent M. S. Campney
This work investigates the white-on-white lynching of brothers Henry, Philip, and Oliver Weaver, in Anthony, Kansas, in 1886. The incident highlights a tendency among nineteenth-century Westerners to use mob violence to dispose of those whom they regarded as bullies. It details the precipitating clash between the Weavers boys and another man, Del Shearer, in February 1886, and the police?s subsequent effort to protect the brothers from the mobs threatening their execution. It also analyzes the lynching and its aftermath, and how this lynching typified the cultural war over criminal justice and amplified preexisting local social tensions connected to the county seat wars. Campney's study also places the Weaver lynching into conversation with another white-on-white lynching of an alleged bully in Lincoln, Kansas, in 1889, drawing broader conclusions about the meaning of these incidents and their frequency.
Editor's Note
Book Reviews
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