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Opera at the Hitchin Post & the Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade in Kansas
A small town with a big heart in the middle of the Flint Hills
Matfield Green, Kansas 66862
COMMUNITY DIRECTORY
Exit 1: Matfield Matters
206 N. Reed Street
Exit 3: Matfield Community Church
Sunday Service: 10:30 AM
Carry-in dinner: Last Sun. of month, noon
Exit 4: Hitchin Post Grill & Bar
Hours: Tue-Thursday, 11 AM - 9 PM
Fri-Sat, 11 AM - 10 PM, Closed Sun-Mon except for Motorcycle Sunday (1st Sun.)
See newsletter for specials
North of Matfield Green
Pioneer Bluffs/Maud's Market/CSA
Fresh vegetables in season
Historic rock sign built by Matfield Rural High School students during World War II era. “Matfield” rocks laid in 1941; “Green” added in 1944. Letters are 50 feet high. Photo taken by Kathy Miller from the historic Santa Fe Bunkhouse on Scenic Byway 177, Spring 2004.
Matfield Green may have gotten smaller over the years (about 60 souls at last count), but it has a long history and a big heart. Since the first post office was established in 1870, Matfield Green has been home to many enterprises: schools, churches, general stores, drug stores, hotels, doctor’s offices, bank, library, newspaper, creamery, grist mill, meat market, lumber yard, hardware & implement, livery, wagon and blacksmith shop, real estate & loan office, pool room, barbershop, tobacco shop, gas station, boot & shoe repair, jeweler, milliner, canary breeder, and other small businesses.
In 1901, there were five grocery stores. Less than a century later, in 1994, the post office closed its doors. The last surviving community institution is the Matfield Green Community Church. The only remaining business is The Hitchin Post, a no-frills grill and bar housed in what was once a gas station. If you want a rare taste of smalltown hospitality, come on down to The Hitchin Post. You may just get to rub elbows with cattle ranchers, cowboys, farmers, trappers or, in the middle of December, an opera singer.
If you come to visit, you're likely to notice that there's something special about our town and the surrounding tallgrass prairie. Some call it that Matfield magic or the Matfield mystique. Whatever it is, nobody has exactly put a finger on it yet, although several have tried. Perhaps it has something to do with a 150-year tradition of digging in and—with the help of your family and neighbors and a good bit of ingenuity—cobbling together a decent-enough life out of what's on hand.
How special is Matfield Green? Check out the literary references below and ask yourself how many other American towns with so few residents merit this much notice.
Matfield Green, the words spelled out in rock letters high on the eastern slope, got its name from settler and first postmaster David Mercer of Kent, England, who remembered a place called Matfield, a collection of fine houses around a big green where he played cricket, just east of Tunbridge Wells. If by "green" you understand a mowed sward at village center, then the Kansas Matfield is greenless, but with the grasses around it for miles, a common here would be like a pond in Venice. The hamlet burned several times, the last big fire in 1933 when, people believe, a window-pane concentrated a beam of sunlight in the second floor of a shop. Much of what has been here is gone, yet Matfield retains just enough structures to be picturesque in the prairie manner. [p. 247].
Prairy Erth: A Deep Map (1991)/William Least Heat-Moon
Matfield Green is on the edge of the Kansas Flint Hills, just a few miles off of the Kansas Turnpike along the highway that leads to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the nation's only park devoted to the grasslands. The preserve draws an increasing number of visitors each year. Twenty-five years from now, who knows what the visitors will see at Matfield Green, or in the rich creek-bottom fields along the highway, or on the upland prairie itself. [In his essay Wes] Jackson wants us to imagine that the grass, the crops, the cattle, and the people will still be there, living lightly, sustaining the land and their communities on the tallgrass prairie. [Introduction to essay by Wes Jackson, The Land Institute, entitled "Matfield Green," 1994, p. 712]
A Great Plains Reader (2003)/Diane Quantic & P. Jane Hafen
When the editor of the Chase County Leader toured Matfield Green in 1880, he praised farming improvements and "the large herds of cattle and hogs." He was unimpressed with the village, however: "I went up the valley to Matfield Green—a store and a blacksmith shop." Sensitive to the slightest misrepresentation of the town's assets, the Matfield Green correspondent...chastised the editor for his "underreporting" by noting, "Matfield Green has two stores, two blacksmith shops, a wagon shop, barber shop, shoeshop and bakery." Although such incidents admirably suited the village's emerging cowtown image, it probably did not help the village's reputation when several months later a town father became involved in a shooting melee...and "was arrested for selling whiskey and tobacco without a license." [p. 128]
Ghost Settlement on the Prairie: A biography of Thurman, KS (2003)/ Joseph V. Hickey
Click to read PDF version:
USEFUL & ENTERTAINING LINKS
Matfield Green Glimpses, Past & Present (click on any thumbnail)
©2010 Republic of Grass
Permission is required to use any text, photography or image from this website.
MATFIELDIANS OF NOTE
Erastus B. Crocker (1840-76) Kansas Representative (1869)
Captain Henry Brandley (1838-1910) State Senator (1873-74)
Henry Rogler (1877-1972) Kansas Representative (1915) and Senator (1929-31)
Edward Grey Crocker (1872-1944) Kansas Representative (1913, 1915)
Arthur Thompson Crocker (1874-1953) Kansas Senator (1917, 1919-20)
Wayne Rogler (1905-93) Kansas Representative (1939, 1941, 1943) & Senator (1956-57)
E.C. Crofoot (1902-2000) Kansas Representative (1945, 1947)
Helen Rogler (1902-99) appeared in several TV commercials (Schlitz, McDonald’s, United Airlines, Swift’s Butterball), films, stage productions and TV shows (One Day at a Time, General Hospital, All in the Family, Maud) in the 1970s
Tanner Swift (1979) Weekend Meterologist at KAKE-TV/Wichita
Do you know of any other famous or semi-famous persons with a link to
Matfield Green? Let us know
Click on the map for the boundaries of the Flint Hills eco-region. The heart orients you to the location of Matfield Green.
Read an award-winning story about the first Opera at the Hitchin Post (2006 Kansas Writer's Association, First Place, Criser & Mardis Prize in Creative Non-Fiction)
Addie of the Flint Hills: A Prairie Child During the Depression (2009)/Adaline Sorace
On Saturday nights Snedegar's and the other little local grocery and dry goods store, Largent's, stayed open late—9 o'clock as I recall. Then the village people and those on the surrounding farms came to town, all neat and clean (but still in work clothes), to shop and visit. The local farmers often used this as the time to buy a week's supply of provisions. In the summer the shoppers would sit on the benches outside the stores, and in the winter they would sit by the stoves; they would stand and chat and wait for orders to be filled. It was a low-key but important social occasion.
Looking back it was amazing how self-sufficient our little village was. We did not rely on the outside for food, nor for entertainment. Like most of the rural villages around us, we were mostly self-contained. [p. 50]
On the Flint Hills Scenic Byway, Journey over the Grassland Sea, KS-177
THE LOST GIRLS OF MATFIELD. If you can identify these members of the welcoming committee, let us know who they are!
HOW ABOUT SOME 100% HOMEGROWN NEWS?
Brought to you by:
- Phil Miller, Chief Correspondent
- Kathy Miller, Editor
- Marva Weigelt, Production
- Supported by big-hearted people
- Printed by our friends at Kansas Graphics in Cottonwood Falls (email Phil if you'd like to subscribe to the print edition)
