I walked deliberately through Eastside Cemetery Saturday night during the 18th performance of Talking Tombstones, produced by the local theater organization Stage 9.
The evening was beautiful, with temperatures near 70 even after sunset and virtually no wind. The audience was divided into groups, which followed a guide to the grave markers of several of Hutchinson’s historical figures. Actors interpreted the historical figures’ stories by kerosene lamplight as a waning autumn moon watched overhead.
The stories ranged from a Civil War veteran and pioneer to Hutchinson’s first public school teacher to a prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to a man who hopped off a train and built what became the largest men’s clothing store in Kansas, to a police matron who took in and reformed wayward girls, to the first Hutchinsonson police officer and firefighter to die in the line of duty.
Their lives mattered, and their actions bear consequences even today.
History happens, regardless. Time marches on, and the true ramifications of some decisions only reveal themselves decades afterward.
We are watching history unfold before our eyes throughout Hutchinson and Reno County. We are living that history every single day.
The temporary barrier fences at The Atrium Hotel went up this week in preparation for the asbestos abatement work needed before demolition. The once-glorious Holiday Inn Sundome became a run-down, mold-riddled eyesore through years of absentee landlord neglect. Soon, it will be wiped away, but with a whimper, a gasp of its fallen status.
Once a convenient way to cross the levy containing a raging Arkansas River, the Woody Seat Freeway will soon be torn down. The new road will dissect a historic neighborhood and connect to South Hutchinson over an increasingly drought-riddled riverbed.
Significant wind power projects have been snuffed out by county elected officials who live in the past and fear the future, and large-scale solar power has faced the same fate.
Our elected officials’ decisions today, based on the best information available and within budgetary constraints that reflect today’s economic reality, will become part of the city’s written record.
History will not reveal how it interprets the wisdom of those decisions for at least two decades. History is best understood in the rearview mirror.
I ask my fellow Hutchonions to live your lives with dedication, purpose, strength, and courage so that in ten or twenty or one hundred years, your story will be told by lamplight on a warm autumn evening to strangers wandering through a graveyard.
Tomi Ann Foust / October 20, 2024
Well done, Gina.
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