Museum Minute presents This Week in History
(According to Eddie Herrman Archives)
December 25, 1873 – The Grand Calico Ball is held in the Courthouse. The invitations are printed on white with green stripe calico. (an original invitation is on display at the Museum) /// 1926 – D. Miller’s team of 12 beats A. H.Duvall’s dozen, 410 points to 314 ½ points in the first ever Christmas Day Team Hunt. Both teams bagged 78 quail, 127 rabbits, 2 opossums, 2 squirrels, and 1 jack rabbit. Butler.
December 26, 1894 – Christmas is marred when all of the old frame buildings on the west side of the Hume square burn. /// 1882 – Officer Beal, of Rich Hill, arrests 12 men at Shobe (Old Rich Hill) for destruction of property in yesterday’s fracas in Shobe. /// 1903 – Burglars take 15 turkeys from Cheverton’s Meat Market and cigars from the James Nafus grocery in Rich Hill.
December 27, 1926 – The quail shot in the Christmas Day Team Hunt is served to the members of both teams, at the expense of the losers team, at Smith’s Café in Butler. /// 1898 – While taking a tour of the Lansing, Kansas pen, Bates County Sheriff Mudd spies an inmate who had escaped from his Bates County jail a year or two ago.
December 28, 1880 – Bates County has 34,478 hogs and 42,244 head of cattle. /// 1907 – Ethel Pratt drives the first automobile to ever be driven on Rockville streets.
December 29, 1880 – Butlerites awaken to a minus 26 degrees temperature. /// 1884 – The famous “Blind Boone” and his troupe perform to a standing room only crowd at the Butler Opera House.
December 30, 1859 – Eli Snyder leads 30 jayhawkers from Kansas to raid Jeremiah Jackson’s store in Mulberry, near West Point. /// 1863 – A Ft. Scott newspaper reports, “There is not one family left in Bates Co, since General Ewing’s Order # 11 in August.”
December 31, 1889 – Noah ‘Bunk’ McGinnis, of Rich Hill and Oklahoma Territory, is hanged, at the Bates Co. Jail, for the murder of F. M. Bercherding, of the Round Prairie community of Hudson Township. (Note: The out of town Hangman was unable to get to Butler due to a snow storm that halted train travel. On his last day in office, Sheriff Mudd had to personally perform the execution. It is told that he never got over having to personally execute a man and that he was haunted by it the rest of his life.)
