Today’s Postcard

Mt. Hope, Kansas, eighteen miles northwest of Wichita in Sedgwick County, was founded in 1887. The photo on this postcard looks old; no street lights and Ohio Street appears to be unpaved. Though, without vehicles, its age is hard to establish.
It was probably taken looking south near the intersection of Ohio and Main Streets, as this current view (courtesy of Google Maps) shows. The corner buildings have persevered, though degraded by “repairs” no doubt inspired by a narrow expediency. It’s striking to me how the two photos, unpopulated and spare, evoke similar senses of desolation and quietude.

I can’t tell you much about Mt. Hope. Neither the public library’s nor the town’s website offer any local history, and the sites for Sedgwick County and the Kansas State Historical Society don’t include much about the town. The last census counted 830 residents, and demographically it is a fairly average small Kansas town. A two man police force and a volunteer fire department.
One interesting thing is that an all-female debate team from Mt. Hope won the state high school championship in 1917. The Kansas Debate League was started in 1910, and the competition was dominated by small schools at the outset. No school serving a town with a population over 1,000 won until 1921. The popularity of the debate competition in small towns and rural areas and its accessibility to young women was something of an anomaly, in that it was a secular pursuit thriving in a strongly religious and gender-role restricted educational environment.

Today’s Postcard

“How would you like to take a swim,” wrote Mama, from Hinton, WV, in August of 1908. Strange she sent a postcard of Long Island.

Hinton sounds like a pretty town:

Woven into the mountains of Appalachia, along the scenic New River in
Southern West Virginia, is the quaint city of Hinton.

Hinton is a “Railroad Town”, formed about 1871 with the tremendous
building boom that occurred during the Gay ’90s period from 1890 to1920.

The glory of the train days have come and gone, of course, leaving in its
wake a community that today is rich in history and natural beauty.
The downtown Historic District, officially listed on the National Register
of Historic Places on February 17, 1984, is an architectural gem waiting
to be discovered.