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KAW MISSION COUNCILS 2008 Our Fabulous Flint Hills:The Flint Hills are Alive!The fifth and final program in the Kaw Mission Councils 2008 educational program series, Our Fabulous Flint Hills: The Hills Are Alive! features Marva Weigelt presenting Ghosts in the Grass: In Search of Forgotten Voices. The program will be presented at 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at the Kaw Mission State Historic Site in Council Grove, Kansas. All Kaw Mission Councils 2008 programs are free and open to the public. Join presenter Marva Weigelt for a trip back in time—deep into the landscape of the Flints Hills—for provocative, poignant, funny and inspiring glimpses into the lives of the area’s early inhabitants. If you gaze across vast, uninhabited expanses of open prairie today, it’s challenging to imagine that hundreds and hundreds of abandoned homesteads, schools, flint quarries and campsites hide quietly in the grass, telling their stories to the wind. If, however, you dedicate yourself to exploring a particular area, as Marva has done in southeastern Chase County, you begin to see ghosts in the grass and hear voices from the past. Nearly every stone tells a story—fossils in limestone, the broken flint tip from a hunter’s throwing-stick, the outline of an old foundation, a crumbling root cellar, the cistern for a schoolhouse, gravestones in neglected cemeteries—and Marva loves tracking down old maps, ownership records, newspaper clippings and other historical details to combine with her intuition and imagination as she weaves creative, evocative tales about people whose names and voices might otherwise be lost. Weigelt lives and works on Homestead Ranch, where she assists with managing a cow-calf operation and provides support for the Homestead Range Renewal Initiative, a private effort to develop more sustainable range management techniques to preserve and enhance the diversity of native flora and fauna. Marva is an amateur historian and naturalist, with a background in communications and a long habit of letting her curiosity and imagination run away with her pen. She is currently working on the history of Charles Rogler’s 1859 homestead for the Pioneer Bluff’s Foundation. You can find out more about life on Homestead Ranch and read some of Marva’s writing at www.republicofgrass.com The Friends of Kaw Heritage, Inc. and Kansas Historical Society
sponsor the Kaw Mission Councils 2008 educational program series. Free
refreshments compliments of FKH. The
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