Butler County, Kansas

Adams Family Cemetery

Cemetery Plots Adams Family From a distance, the Adams family cemetery north of Potwin looks like it might be the world's smallest. When you get up close, it doesn't look much bigger. Amy Adams' pipe-smoking grandmother isn't buried in the cemetery, but her grandfather, Joseph H. ADams, is one of several relatives who are. "Grandfather got a pipe for his 6th birthday", Adams said. "They had to hold it up for him to smoke it."

For the surviving members of the Adams clan, the cemetery is just a page in a colorful family history. The patriarch, Joseph H. Adams, became one of Butler County's first settlers in 1860, when he homesteaded a 160-acre farm that's still in the family.

"He staked the best quarter section in Butler County," said Olin Claassen, whose farm is just west of the Adams cemetery.

"And we pay the highest taxes," Amy Adams countered with a grin.

For passers-by who stop to read the single gravestone that marks the cemetery, the dates are a reminder of how fragile life could be in Butler County's frontier days.

There's another Amy Adams buried there. But the present-day Amy Adams doesn't know why her would-be aunt died in 1873, at the age of 2. The present-day Amy Adams wasn't born until 1904, and she said the stories she tells about her ancestors have been passed down from older generations.

But Adams did spend 24 years in the area before leaving to pursue a career in nursing. She remembers the day that Worth Kemper came by to show off his new Model T, the first horseless carriage in the area.

"He had some little bitty goats that would get on top of it, and they just about ruined it," she recalled. "We got the goats."

Adams, who lives in El Dorado, said she's "tired but not retired" and still does some work at the Knutson Manor Nursing Center. And she said she's still trying to fill in a few of the blanks on her family tree. She doesn't know anything, for example, about the George W. Adams (1840-1884) listed on the gravestone.

"I can't find any place where he's mentioned," she said. "He could have been the son of dad's father, but I never heard my father speak of him."

One thing she does know is that the Adam family cemetery wouldn't be in Butler County today if news of the California Gold Rush hadn't reached her grandfather in Virginia back in the 1850's.

"He was on his way to the Gold Rush, and he put his stake down when he was going through," she said.

But like a lot of the Easterners, he didn't find much gold out West. In 1860, he returned to Kansas and built a log cabin on the land he had staked. Henry Creek still cuts through the north end of the farm and it still floods every three years or so, adding a fresh layer of silt to the rich topsoil.

When Amy Adams was growing up on the farm in the early 1900's, the Adams family cemetery was one of a handful of private cemeteries in the area. Some of the other cemeteries have since grown into larger community cemeteries, but the earth around the Adams cemetery has remained unturned for more than 80 years.

Adams' parents, Joseph A. and Rena Adams, are buried southo f Potwin, and her grandmother is buried in a community cemetery north of the family farm.

The gravestone at the Adams cemetery, about three miles north of Potwin at a bend in a dirt road, bears the names of Joseph A. Adams and four of his relatives. Amy Adams' uncle, Johnnie Adams, put up the gravestone shortly before he died in 1933, she said.

Dinah was Joseph H. Adams' first wife, and Margaret Pitzer--Amy Adam's grandmother---was his second. It also was a second marriage for Pitzer, and the resulting string of half-brothers and half-sisters added some complications to the family tree.

Although Dinah's name is listed on the gravestone, Adams said she wasn't sure her grandfather's first wife really is buried there. The name may have been included for historical reference, she said.

There are some other graves under the elm trees behind the fenced-in graves, Adams said. Some were children. Elsie and Jimmy Wiggins, a brother and a sister, died in February 1898 from smoke inhalation during a prairie fire. An infant of a neighbor named Frank Smith was buried there, as was Joseph's 8-year-old nephew, Jimmy Rodman.

Eva, who was 32 when she died in 1882, was the daughter of Dinah and Joseph.

In those days, Adams said, when one family couldn't afford a burial plot, it wasn't uncommon for another family to step in and offer a spot in their cemetery.

Somewhere along the line, family cemeteries in Butler County went the way of pipe-smoke grandmothers. And there's at least one Butler County resident who wouldn't mike seeing the pipes, at least, make a comeback.

"I wish they'd go back to pipes," Adams said. "It's better than the cigarettes they're smoking nowadays."
(article from Wichita Eagle newspaper - date of article unknown - submitted by John Brown)

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