Finding Austen in unlikely places
Sometimes I find Jane Austen in unlikely places. Most recently I found her in Onaga, Kansas, on a recent trip. My husband’s father died last March, but the inurnment service was delayed until this June at the National Cemetery in Leavenworth, Kansas, so that Jim’s uncle could attend. We drove from Denver to Great Bend, Kansas, where we collected Jim’s mother and sister and then drove to the Kansas City area. On the way, we stopped in Onaga to see the homestead where Jim’s mother, Phyllis Kolterman as was, grew up.
We also visited the cemetery where my mother-in-law’s forebears are buried. The area was settled before the Civil War by (among others) William Kolterman and became the town of Duluth (named after Doelitz, a town in what is now Germany). Duluth no longer exists as a township, although St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and several homes remain and the nearest town is Onaga, where my mother-in-law went to high school. She went to elementary school at St. Paul’s, however, riding her pony Nancy.
My perception of Kansas has always been flat, hot, dry and treeless, and that’s a pretty good description of Great Bend, but Duluth and Onaga are in the Flint Hills of Kansas with nice pasture land and plenty of trees growing along the banks of Dutch and French creeks. The Duluth cemetery was miserably hot and humid as we pushed Phyllis in her wheelchair, looking for the graves of her relatives. We found names like Brunkow (her mother’s maiden name) and Teske and Buchholz and Falk and Honig and Knipp. It’s a small cemetery, nicely maintained by the church and regularly visited by those families that still remain in Onaga and Wamego.
Inevitably I thought of “three or four families in a country village,” and the site of St. Paul’s spire visible from the homestead and the image of my mother-in-law on her pony put me in mind of the Bennets. The Kolterman family might not have had the relative wealth of the Bennets, but they were landowners (by dint of the Homestead Act) and a Kolterman (probably Phyllis’ grandfather) donated the land for St. Paul’s, which seems a very landed gentry thing to do. The Kolterman house (unnamed as far as I know) doesn’t look as impressive as one imagines Longbourn would look, but it was large enough to house eleven children (her father was number eight) and had three bedrooms on the second floor.
The current owners of the farm weren’t home, but we drove up to the house and I took this panorama. If you look very closely, you can just see the spire of St. Paul’s just above the left edge of the pond. Looking at the bucolic scene, I couldn’t help but mutter, “Netherfield Park is let at last.”