Girard, Kansas
Encyclopedia
Girard is a city in and the county seat
County seat
A county seat is an administrative center, or seat of government, for a county or civil parish. The term is primarily used in the United States....

 of Crawford County
Crawford County, Kansas
Crawford County is a county located in southeastern Kansas in the United States. As of the 2010 census, the county population was 39,134. Its county seat is Girard, and its most populous city is Pittsburg. The county was named in honor of Samuel J. Crawford, Governor of Kansas...

, Kansas
Kansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...

, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 2,789.

History

Girard was founded in the spring of 1868, in opposition to Crawfordsville, and named after the town of Girard, Pennsylvania
Girard, Pennsylvania
Girard is a borough in Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 3,164 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Erie Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:Girard is located at ....

, the former home of trustee Charles Strong. It was based around the surveyed line of the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Gulf Railroad, in an attempt to gain an advantage over its rival.

The first buildings erected in Girard were a general store, a dwelling house, an Eclectic Physician and Surgeon, and a drugstore. Some time during this year the first blacksmith shop-Boyle Blacksmith-was opened on the North side of the square, followed by White Blacksmith on the Northwest corner of the square. The first birth in Girard was that of Mary Fletcher, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. A. Fletcher, and the first death that of Mrs. L. Crawford in the spring of 1869. Immediately after the death of this lady, the Judge, McIntosh, located the cemetery southwest of the city.

The first celebration in Girard occurred on July 4, 1868. It was a Sunday school celebration and a celebration of the nation's natal day, both in one. Under a law passed in March, 1871, Girard became a city of the third class, and in the early part of April elected her first city officers. The last meeting of the trustees was held April 5, and the first meeting of the new Council was held on the 7th.

Banks
Frank Playter started the first bank in Girard in June, 1871. In 1872, he erected for the accommodation of his business a two-story brick building, the first brick building in the city. In June, 1879, this bank was succeeded by the Bank of Girard, established by E. R. Moffit. The Bank of Girard was succeeded in 1882 by the Girard Bank.

The Girard Press was moved by Warner & Wasser from Fort Scott to Girard in November, 1869, the first issue appearing at the latter place on the 11th of the month. The paper took strong ground in favor of the validity of Mr. Joy's title to the neutral lands, and on this account its office and material were set fire to on July 14, 1871, and destroyed. The loss was $4,000. New material was obtained, and the paper, enlarged and improved, re-appeared August 13, and has since been published as a nine-column folio weekly.

Mills
The Girard Mills were built in 1870, and began operations in the spring of 1871. The first building was a -story frame, costing, with the machinery and power, $10,000. The property was owned by Tontz & Hitz. In 1879, Tontz retired from active participation in the management of the business, and in 1882 sold his interest to Hitz who thereupon erected a -story brick mill, put in five run of buhrs, and two sets of Gray's patent rollers, thus making it a combined mill.

The Crawford County Mills were built in 1870 by a stock company. These mills are two and a half stories high, contain three run of buhrs and one set of rollers, thus being also a combined mill, and the machinery is propelled by a twenty-five horse-power engine.

Mining
Carbon Creek was the location of the first mining camp of the county. No shafts were sunk at first, but several strip pits were opened, and from the strip pits slopes were run along the veins, and coal operations opened on a small scale. By 1877 perhaps one hundred miners were working along Carbon creek, getting out coal.
In the 1960s many of the mines closed. Today the landscape of southeastern Crawford County is covered with long strip mines now full of water and serving as fishing lakes & unfarmed wildlife habitat. The ruins of abandoned zinc & lead smelters can also be seen. Many of them being Superfund
Superfund
Superfund is the common name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 , a United States federal law designed to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances...

 sites polluted with the toxic remains of smelter operations. The economy that was driven by industrialized mining & smelting during the first half of the 20th century has now (2007) largely reverted to an agricultural basis.
The Girard Public Library has several record books and other resources pertaining to mining operations in Southeast Kansas.

Immigration
With the growth of the mining industry in Crawford County, large numbers of immigrants from Southern Europe and the Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...

 were brought in to work in the mines. These immigrants were more often adherents of Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

 in contrast to the generally Protestant population previously in the county. At the time this created social tension but today Crawford county celebrates its South European heritage with the annual "Little Balkan Days" event.

To dig the coal, the city began a concentrated effort to attract coal miners from other areas of the United States and from the coal producing nations of Europe. Overseas, broadsides were distributed along the Mediterranean, promising prosperity in the coal fields of southeast Kansas. Steamship companies sent agents throughout Europe to enlist workers, underwriting one-way passage. From 1880 through 1915 huge waves of immigrants came to southeast Kansas. In all, over fifty nationalities came to mine coal and work in the area's smelters and other industries.

Socialism in Girard
In the first decades of the 20th century Girard became a hub of socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 politics. In 1896 Julius Wayland
Julius Wayland
Julius Wayland was a Mid-Western US socialist during the Progressive Era. He is most noted for publishing Appeal to Reason, a socialist publication often deemed to be the most important socialist periodical of the time....

 moved to Girard from Kansas City
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...

, Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...

 and brought with him his socialist periodical Appeal to Reason. In 1900 he employed Fred Warren as his co-editor. Warren was a well-known figure on the left and managed to persuade some of America's leading progressives to contribute to the Appeal to Reason. In 1904 Warren commissioned Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

 to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicago meat packing houses. Wayland provided Sinclair with a $500 advance and after seven weeks research he wrote the novel, The Jungle
The Jungle
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking...

. Serialized in 1905, the book helped to increase circulation to 175,000. When published by Doubleday in 1906, As the popularity of the Appeal to Reason increased, so did the attacks on Wayland and Warren. The phenomenal success of Wayland's newspaper meant that Girard came to have a printing plant capable of handling a weekly newspaper of huge circulation; on occasion over 400,000 copies per week. It also meant that Girard appeared in the imprint of many radical books and pamphlets, for the Appeal to Reason Company issued hundreds of other socialist publications in addition to the Appeal.

During the decade of the 1900s Eugene V. Debs
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World , and several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States...

 lived in Girard and worked on the Appeal to Reason. He was the Social Democratic Party
Social Democratic Party (United States)
The Social Democratic Party of America was a short-lived political party in the United States, established in 1898. The group was formed out of elements of the Social Democracy of America , and was a predecessor to the Socialist Party of America, established in 1901.-Forerunners:Following the...

 candidate for President of the United States
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....

 in the election of 1900. He ran for President again on the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...

 ticket in 1904, 1908, and 1912. Debs received 901,000 votes in the election of 1912
United States presidential election, 1912
The United States presidential election of 1912 was a rare four-way contest. Incumbent President William Howard Taft was renominated by the Republican Party with the support of its conservative wing. After former President Theodore Roosevelt failed to receive the Republican nomination, he called...

 (6% of the vote). In 1908 he kicked-off his campaign for president from the steps of the Crawford county courthouse in Girard. In 1912 he carried Crawford County (one of four counties he carried nationwide). During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 Debs was a subject of efforts by President Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...

 to suppress dissent against the war. He was convicted of violating the Smith Espionage Act
Espionage Act of 1917
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18, Crime...

 and, in September 1918, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1920 he ran for President while still incarcerated in the Atlanta Penitentiary. He received 919,799 votes (3.4% of the vote) despite his imprisonment. President Warren G. Harding
Warren G. Harding
Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th President of the United States . A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential self-made newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate , as the 28th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and as a U.S. Senator...

 pardoned Debs in December, 1921.

In 1915 Emanuel Julius
E. Haldeman-Julius
E. Haldeman-Julius was a Jewish-American socialist writer, atheist thinker, social reformer and publisher. He is best remembered as the head of Haldeman-Julius Publications, the creator of a series of pamphlets known as "Little Blue Books," total sales of which ran into the hundreds of millions...

 was invited to move to Girard and write for Appeal to Reason, then the largest socialist periodical in the country. Julius married [Anne]Marcet Haldeman in 1916 and, at the suggestion of Marcet's aunt, Jane Addams of Hull House, both assumed the surname Haldeman-Julius. In 1919, Emanuel became co-owner and editor of Appeal to Reason and began printing in Girard the first of the small paperback books which soon became the foundation for his Little Blue Books
Little Blue Books
Little Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas . They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of more than 300 million booklets sold over the series' lifetime...

 series. His vision was to make good literature available to the masses at a cheap price. At the end of nine years the small project had become a gigantic publishing venture; Emanuel Haldeman-Julius became known as "the Henry Ford of literature". Following World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover viewed the Little Blue Books' inclusion of such subjects as socialism, atheism, and frank treatment of sexuality as a threat and put Haldeman-Julius on their enemies list. This caused a rapid decline in the number of bookstores carrying the Little Blue Books.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius
E. Haldeman-Julius
E. Haldeman-Julius was a Jewish-American socialist writer, atheist thinker, social reformer and publisher. He is best remembered as the head of Haldeman-Julius Publications, the creator of a series of pamphlets known as "Little Blue Books," total sales of which ran into the hundreds of millions...

 died July 31, 1951 at his home in Girard. He was found drowned in his own swimming pool by his second wife of nine years, Sue Haldeman-Julius. The Little Blue Books continued to be reprinted after Haldeman-Julius' death and were sold by mail order by his son until the Girard printing plant and warehouse was destroyed by fire in 1978.

Recent history
In 2003, Girard suffered the loss of belongings due to an F4 tornado. The tornado passed east of the city, affecting unincorporated parts of Crawford County, such as Ringo and Franklin.

Geography

Girard is located at 37°30′37"N 94°50′39"W (37.510204, -94.844157). According to the United States Census Bureau
United States Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau is the government agency that is responsible for the United States Census. It also gathers other national demographic and economic data...

, the city has a total area of 1.9 square miles (4.9 km²), of which, 1.9 square miles (4.9 km²) of it is land and 0.52% is water.

This city is located on a gently undulating prairie at the center of the county. It is regularly laid out, has a public square in the center.

Demographics

As of the census
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...

of 2000, there were 2,773 people, 1,063 households, and 723 families residing in the city. The population density
Population density
Population density is a measurement of population per unit area or unit volume. It is frequently applied to living organisms, and particularly to humans...

 was 1,461.4 people per square mile (563.5/km²). There were 1,219 housing units at an average density of 642.4 per square mile (247.7/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 96.93% White, 1.05% African American, 0.54% Native American, 0.11% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.22% from other races
Race (United States Census)
Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, as defined by the Federal Office of Management and Budget and the United States Census Bureau, are self-identification data items in which residents choose the race or races with which they most closely identify, and indicate whether or not they are...

, and 1.12% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.69% of the population.

There were 1,063 households out of which 32.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 53.2% were married couples
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...

 living together, 11.4% had a female householder with no husband present, and 31.9% were non-families. 28.2% of all households were made up of individuals and 16.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.42 and the average family size was 2.95.

In the city the population was spread out with 24.8% under the age of 18, 9.4% from 18 to 24, 25.9% from 25 to 44, 19.8% from 45 to 64, and 20.1% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 38 years. For every 100 females there were 92.0 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 90.2 males.

The median income for a household in the city was $32,847, and the median income for a family was $37,014. Males had a median income of $26,431 versus $20,682 for females. The per capita income
Per capita income
Per capita income or income per person is a measure of mean income within an economic aggregate, such as a country or city. It is calculated by taking a measure of all sources of income in the aggregate and dividing it by the total population...

 for the city was $16,668. About 8.1% of families and 13.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 20.4% of those under age 18 and 5.5% of those age 65 or over.

Notable people

  • Dennis Franchione
    Dennis Franchione
    Dennis Wayne Franchione , also known as Coach Fran, is an American football coach. He is currently the head football coach at Texas State University, a position he held from 1990 to 1991, when the school was known as Southwest Texas State University, and resumed in 2011...

    , college football coach
  • Dennis Hayden
    Dennis Hayden
    Dennis Hayden is an American actor. He was one of five brothers and one sister born in Girard, Kansas on a pig and soybean farm....

    , actor, producer
  • Charles A. Holland
    Charles A. Holland
    Charles Alfred Holland , who went by Charles A. Holland, was a University of Southern California football captain, a businessman and a Los Angeles, California, City Council member between 1929 and 1931.-Biography:...

    , Los Angeles, California, City Council member, 1929–31
  • Ron Kramer
    Ron Kramer
    Ronald J. Kramer was a multi-sport college athlete and professional American football player. Before embarking on a career in the National Football League, he lettered in football, basketball, and track at the University of Michigan in the 1950s...

    , football player

Further reading


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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