Trip Report | Day 12: Greensburg, Kansas
“Are you into green?” asked the lady working the museum store at the home of the largest hand-dug well in the world. Completed in 1888, the well was Greensburg’s biggest claim to fame until an EF5 tornado killed twelve people and wiped out almost all the buildings in 2007.
The town has since rebuilt with a commitment to green energy and sustainable materials, but the store clerk slightly wrinkled her nose when she asked, so I tried to look like I was considering the pros and cons. Dave, however, didn’t hesitate. “Yes I am,” he said.
“I am, too,” I admitted.
“I’m not really a green person,” she said. The town’s commitment, while garnering national attention, had required her to buy more land than she needed to rebuild after the tornado destroyed her home, two cars, and her late husband’s fifth-wheel. “He was a nice person,” she said. “If he had been alive in 2007 he would have been trying to hitch it up and get it somewhere safe. I would’ve been saying, ‘Hurry up!’ And he would have said, ‘Well, I am.’”
She survived the tornado by hunkering down in her front hall. “People asked me if my new house was gonna have a basement. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but it will have a hall.’”
The museum houses the well itself plus stories from tornado survivors.
Next, we stopped at the only building on Main Street that survived the tornado. Where’d You Find That? occupies the S.D. Robinett building, named for a man who went by his initials to avoid associations with Abraham Lincoln’s Democratic opponent in the 1860 election.
These steps survived the tornado but the building they lead to didn’t.
We found a Francisco kiln trivet and a fireside brass cat in this beautifully curated antique store. While ringing them up, the clerk told us Robinett had left the building to his secretary for her lifetime though it reverted back to his family after her death, which struck me as typically Republican behavior. Here’s something, but you can’t really have it.
S.D. probably wouldn’t approve of dogs inside either.
Gas: 40.6 gal. Miles: 332.9. MPG: 8.19. Next stop: Shawnee Lake, KS.