BARBER COUNTY -- Famed prohibitionist Carry Nation launched her attack against alcohol in the early 1900s from her home in Medicine Lodge.
Much has changed in the 100 or so years since Nation died, including Kansas laws surrounding alcohol. What would the hatchet-toting Nation -- also known as ”Your Loving Home Defender” -- think now?
“She’d be horrified and very, very upset I think with the way things have come,” said Ginger Goering, executive director and manager of the Medicine Lodge Stockade Museum and Carry Nation Home.
“She would be most disheartened … Carry strongly believed that alcohol was the work of the devil.”
Buster’s, a local saloon in Sun City, advertises it’s been pouring beer since 1946. It’s about 25 miles northwest of Medicine Lodge.
On a sleepy summer’s day, three dogs snooze on the wood floors as ceiling fans whirl. For now, the bar is quiet. That will change when the evening and weekend crowds come in for beer, food and music.
It’s become a gathering spot for area ranchers, oil workers, bikers, birders and tourists.
Both the Carry Nation Home and Buster’s are among the top tourism draws in Barber County.
“When I was about 10 or 12 years old, I asked my grandfather about her,” said Harry Dawson, the owner of Buster’s and a lifelong resident of the area. “She’s maybe a little bit of a wingnut. And so, at this point, let’s just move on.”
Still, Nation helped make Kansas famous long before prohibition became a household word.
She became active in the local Medicine Lodge Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the 1890s when she and her husband, David, moved to town. Within a decade, she had become not only an outspoken advocate against alcohol but she championed women’s rights and protested the wearing of corsets and short skirts. She not only admonished people not to drink alcohol but also coffee and tea.
In 1881, Kansas became the first state to constitutionally prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol – and the last to repeal it, in 1948.
Nationally, prohibition was in effect from 1920 to 1933.
Goering, the museum director, said local residents who were contemporaries of Nation revered her. Some recalled how her husband was the preacher at the Christian church; Nation was the organist.
“He was not really what you would call a man of the cloth,” Goering said. “He’d been trained as a lawyer and journalist, and now he was trying to be a minister. … He was just not much of a preacher.
“Carry would tell him, in church, that he needed to correct his statements … ‘That’s not what the Lord said.’ If the prayer went too long, she’d tell him, ‘Mr. Nation, it’s time to put your hat on. Let’s go home.’
“She hassled him a lot during his service, and so he was fired.”
That may be one of reasons why the couple divorced in 1901.
But by then, she was in demand as a speaker. Even though Kansas already had enacted prohibition, beer and liquor were sold openly. Nation wanted to stop that.
Headstrong and opinionated, she wasn’t afraid to carry a hatchet into a saloon and perform “hatchetations –” the term used to describe how she could wreck a perfectly good bar.
In Wichita, Nation made local news when, on Dec. 27, 1900, she smashed mirrors and numerous bottles of alcohol at the Carey Hotel, at Douglas and St. Francis. A statue outside the building – now the Eaton Place apartments -- commemorates the event.
A local reporter for The Wichita Eagle, David Leahy, was rumored to have encouraged Nation to carry a hatchet instead of the bricks and bats she initially used in her early days of saloon destructions.
The Carry Nation Home in Medicine Lodge is filled with her personal items. One room contains a life-size portrait of Nation and her writing desk. Another room holds one of the three hatchets she nicknamed “Faith, Hope and Charity” and carried with her to perform her hatchetations.
Nation died on June 9, 1911. She is buried in Belton, Mo.
In the decades since, beer and hard liquor have returned to almost all areas of Kansas.
And yet, Carry Nation’s presence all these years later is still wrapped into not only the history and legacy of the dark Red Hills of Barber County – but of Kansas