People who live in more wooded parts of the nation enjoy making jokes about our tree-challenged prairie landscape. But because Kansas has fewer trees, a higher percentage of them have interesting stories. The small town of Council Grove has more than its share of historic trees, so my wife and I took a day trip up there to see the town’s three most famous ones.
First, there’s the Post Office Oak, a huge bur oak that died in 1990 at the age of 270. It’s just a stump now. But between 1825 and 1847, that tree was the primary source of news about the Santa Fe Trail. Travelers left messages in a cache at the base of the old oak, including updates about trail conditions and warnings about hostile Cheyenne tribes that travelers might encounter as they headed west. Some people also left personal mail, asking strangers who were heading east if they would please deliver a sealed envelope to the family back home.
The impressive stump of the Post Office Oak stands under a protective canopy in front of a stone building that was built as a family home in 1864. It now houses a museum of early medical equipment and railroad memorabilia, and is just one of many museums in town.
Council Grove’s second famous tree was an elm that was massive enough in 1867 for General George Custer and part of the 7th Cavalry to camp beneath it. Custer and his men were assigned to patrol the Santa Fe Trail. But Custer liked the Council Grove area so well that he came back two years later and purchased 120 acres of land just south of the tree.
By 1869, the Post Office Oak was no longer the most reliable method of mail delivery.
The third historic tree in Council Grove is sadly in the worst shape. Like the other two, the Council Oak is now just a gnarly stump under a wooden canopy. The old tree was knocked down by a wind storm in 1958. But back in 1825, it was standing tall, marking the spot where the Santa Fe Trail was born. Beneath the shade of the big oak on a hot summer day, U.S. Commissioners and chiefs of the Osage tribes signed a treaty to allow white settlers and merchants to follow the trail from the big oak to Santa Fe, and to pass peacefully through Indian territory. There was no town here at the time, just a mile-wide grove of trees along the banks of the Neosho River. But Commissioner George Sibley thought the agreement wouldn’t be official if the document didn’t identify the location of the signing. Since the council of leaders was being held in a grove of hardwoods, Sibley wrote “Council Grove” as the official treaty signing location. The name stuck.
One of the witnesses who signed the document in 1825 was Seth Hays, great grandson of Daniel Boone. Twenty-two years later, the mighty Council Oak had become part of a Kaw Reservation where Boone & Hamilton, two Santa Fe traders, had received approval to establish a trading post. Seth Hays was placed in charge of building the store and trading with the Kanza tribe. Hays constructed a log cabin that served both as his residence and the trading post, becoming the first white settler to live in what became the town of Council Grove.
Wagons began gathering at Council Grove so they could travel in groups for greater safety. More and more of them bought their supplies at the trading post. Business boomed. So after five years as an employee of Boone & Hamilton, Hays bought them out and began expanding. In addition to supplies, he also offered hot meals and rooms to travelers who were beginning the eight-week journey to Santa Fe. Notorious outlaw Jesse James was among the overnight guests. The place still stands facing the old Santa Fe Trail. The Trail is now Main Street and the business is now called Hays House. It no longer sells supplies or rents rooms, but it lays claim to being the oldest restaurant west of the Mississippi. It wasn’t mealtime when we stopped there, but we fortified ourselves for our journey westward with a shared blueberry cobbler.
A few blocks west of the Hays House is the Last Chance Store. Built in 1857, it’s the oldest remaining commercial building in Council Grove. As the name suggests, it was the last opportunity for Santa Fe Trail travelers to stock up on essentials. They wouldn’t see another store that sold salt or kerosene until they reached Santa Fe.
“We have no proof of what items were actually sold there,” Mark Brooks tells us. “But we know Indians traded there because we found some of their trading beads on the site.”
Brooks is the historic site administrator at the Last Chance Store and the Kaw Mission Historic Site. The Last Chance Store was gifted to the Kansas Historical Society in 2015 and restoration of the historic store began the following year. Construction crews carefully pulled up the old floorboards and numbered them. But before the historic boards were placed back in their original positions, an archaeological team conducted a dig on the site.
“We found more than 26,000 artifacts,” Brooks says. “But before you get too excited, each nail and each piece of glass is considered an artifact.”
But there were some fascinating pieces of history beneath the old floor joists. Musket balls and percussion caps. Civil War-era horseshoes. An old pair of eyeglasses, a Masonic pin, a metal cup and a whiskey bottle. And in addition to those Indian trading beads were other forms of currency, including an 1844 quarter and an 1851 three-cent piece. Many of the items are now on display in the Kaw Mission Museum. Others are still being analyzed and cataloged.
The Last Chance Store was the last commercial building that the wagon trains rumbled past. But the last house they saw was the Rawlinson-Terwilliger Home, a couple blocks west. The two-story stone home was built in 1861 by Abraham and Mary Rawlinson.
The couple had barely finished sweeping up the last pile of construction dust when their son James enlisted in the 8th Kansas Volunteer Infantry in 1861. A year later, James and ten of his Council Grove friends were on the front lines of bloody Civil War battles all across the South.
“James Rawlinson was at the battle of Chickamauga, where the North lost 60 percent of their men,” Ken McClintock tells us. “The Union got routed there. They made up for it later at the Battle of Missionary Ridge. But in between those major battles was a lesser-known one where the Southern army was defeated by 200 of its own mules.”
McClintock is the chief cook, historian and story teller at Trail Days Cafe & Museum, which now occupies the Rawlinson-Terwilliger Home. He and his wife spent years restoring the old building and populating it with antiques from the 1800s. The cafe is operated by the Historic Preservation Corporation, and profits go toward further restorations. Their menu is authentic to the 1800s, too. They offer Indian entrees like bison pot roast, Early American favorites and Old World selections like schnitzel, using recipes brought to Council Grove by immigrants. Desserts include the Joe Frogger, a molasses and rum-flavored cookie invented over 200 years ago.
Other Council Grove citizens described McClintock as “an encyclopedia of knowledge” and as “our unofficial town historian.” They were not wrong. The Council Grove daily newspaper publishes History Shorts on the front page most days, offering snippets of local history. Ken has written 438 of them so far. “And I’m not even close to running out of good stories,” he says.
One of them is about the day in 1926 when the notorious Fleagle Brothers held up the Farmers & Drovers Bank on Main Street. “They locked everybody in the vault,” Ken tells us. “But they didn’t realize there was a telephone in the vault. So the call for help went out immediately.”
Two Council Grove men were waiting outside with shotguns as Ralph and Jake Fleagle jumped into their stolen getaway car. Shotgun blasts rattled the windows of downtown businesses. The bank robbers managed to escape, but the car they’d driven was discovered later, riddled with buckshot holes and with bloodstains inside. Both outlaw brothers were killed in 1930.
There’s more history in Council Grove than can be discovered in a single day. But this year is a perfect time to visit the town because August 10, 2025, will mark 200 years since the treaty was signed under the Council Oak. A 200th birthday celebration will be held at Council Grove Park that day. And on September 19 and 20, The Voices of the Wind People pageant will tell the historically accurate story of the culture clash between Native Americans and Euro-Americans in Council Grove at the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail. Tickets will be available for both nights.
“Council Grove was the pre-eminent place for wagons to gather before hitting the Trail,” McClintock tells us. “It had plenty of water and campgrounds, but it also had something else – a whole bunch of hardwood trees. Wagon breakdowns were common along the Trail, but hardwood trees were not. You couldn’t find any good hardwood between here and Santa Fe, and you couldn’t build a wagon wheel spoke out of cottonwood. So before they left Council Grove, travelers cut down some of our oak and walnut and loaded the timbers into their wagons to make any repairs they might need as they headed west.”
Not all trees in Kansas have great stories to tell. But the historic trees in Council Grove do. And some of the area’s hardwoods ended up carrying their stories all the way to New Mexico.
