Hidden History of Kinsley

The Story Behind the City
Settlers in Kinsley, Kansas, predicted that their home would be the next "great metropolis." Booms and busts came and went, and Kinsley never realized this dream. Instead, this town, once described as "Wild and Woolly," much like its neighbor, the infamous Dodge City, fostered the cultural activity of a city many times its size. Its poets and artists intermingled with vagabond entertainers, snake oil swindlers, hypnotists, multilingual automatons, elocutionists and Shakespeareans. By the 1910s, there was a published poet on every street and an aspiring actor around every corner. Local stars even went on to Hollywood and New York. Historians Joan Weaver and William Wolfgang explore how this remote community earned its recently rediscovered title, the "Drama Capital of the West."

Joan K. Weaver recently retired as the director of the Kinsley Public Library in Kinsley, Kansas. She has conducted eighty-five oral histories of local citizens, which capture life in Edwards County from the Dust Bowl days through World War II. Originally from Michigan, she earned her degree from Eastern Michigan University and spent many years teaching English, speech and drama.
William Floyd Wolfgang, PhD, is a full-time lecturer in English literature at Stevenson University in Owings Mills, Maryland. After serving as a special researcher at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the United Kingdom, he completed the first major study of community-based Shakespeare performance in the United States. For the last six years, his studies have taken him to Kinsley, Kansas, where he continues uncovering early twentieth-century Shakespeare festivals and community-based arts.