Spotlight
Way back when
A scholar in the making
Grady Atwater was a kid from Osawatomie, Kan., with a passion for history who would skip recess to quiz the curator after annual field trips to the nearby John Brown State Historic Site.
Grady was a school janitor who had to quit when ailments put him in a wheelchair and weakened his eyesight.
Grady was by hobby a historian who never gave up
on a dream. The disability opened a door to education,
and today because of scholarship support he holds two
history degrees from Emporia State University.
Grady, 44, is today the curator of the John Brown
State Historic Site.
* * *
Atwater’s smile fills the cabin that hid John Brown,
the legendary free-stater immortalized in Bleeding
Kansas lore. The cabin belonged to Samuel Adair,
Brown’s brother-in-law; the Adairs were ardent
abolitionists and protected Brown and his men in the
tumultuous 1850s. Atwater (BA 2003, MA 2005) will
gladly tell you the cabin’s secrets – he learned them as a
youngster, picking the brain of former curator Chester
Ward, a descendant of Brown and the Adairs. For more on the cabin's history, click here.
The janitor-to-curator transformation began when
Atwater accepted disability assistance, including
funding for his master’s degree. Atwater was overjoyed,
starting on his associate’s degree while volunteering
at the Brown site. Wheelchair-bound, Atwater chose
ESU after a tour – the campus was the most accessible
university he visited.
Scholarships filled an otherwise insurmountable
financial void, and the TRIO program helped him
elsewhere. Atwater received three primary awards at
ESU: the Lewis and Elva Humphreys Scholarship, the
Gladys Faye Beuchat Scholarhip and the Elsie A. Borck
Memorial Scholarship (see below).
“I never would have been able to do it without those
scholarships,” Atwater said. “Where students otherwise
might not receive an education, scholarships better
their lives. It’s a vital link in education. I’m extremely
grateful. I would not be sitting where I am today if not
for their generosity.
“It’s not only helped me, it’s helped me to share the
vital history of this area. My gratitude is immense. It’s
hard to overstate that. I serve the public now becauseof their generosity.”
Lewis and Elva Humphreys
were delighted to hear Atwater’s
quotes. “It’s very gratifying to
know something like that. It’s a
pure joy,” Elva said. Lewis chimed
in, saying, “The reason we do it, we
want to help young people get an
education.”
Atwater finished his master’s
degree in 2005, and the stars were
aligned for a boyhood dream to come true when the
curator’s position opened. “Absolutely heaven on
earth,” Atwater said. “I imagined it in my dreams. This
has been a passion all my life, to be a historian. ‘Work’
is a misnomer.”
* * *
Atwater, who plans to begin a Ph.D. program soon,
keeps his academic muscles strong by reading two
books a week and researching Brown. He’ll also speak
ad infinitum on Brown.
The abolitionist was a polarizing figure in his day,
to say the least. The idea that blacks and whites were
equal was enough to cast him as
radical – which could explain the
depiction of Brown, shotgun and
Bible in hand and twice as tall
as the others, in the well-known“Tragic Prelude” mural in Topeka’s
capitol building.
Atwater explains that Brown
is still a polarizing figure today.“This is a fresh topic to a lot of
people. As some say, history isn’t
about the past. It’s about the present,” Atwater said.
Racism may have softened its sharp edges, but the
blade is still there. Sometimes Atwater gives tours to
southerners appalled that a museum honors someone
they consider a murderer. Other visitors, particularly
African-Americans, show church-like reverence and
whisper, “He was a great man.”
Standing in the room where John Brown took shelter
during a defining moment in history will send a chill
racing along your spine – like realizing the passion in a
person’s eyes was made possible by education.
* * *
The Lewis and Elva Humphreys Scholarship was established in 1994 for physically disabled students, by a couple who for years has had a direct impact on the lives of young people and the success of the university.
“My thinking on that is those people
who have disabilities, they sure
need an education,” Lewis said. Elva
finished his thought: “If they were
educated they could get jobs where
they could use their minds when
they couldn’t use their bodies.”
Elva, a former teacher, understood
Grady’s motivations, saying that the
best way to motivate boys was to
pique their interests. “If you did that,
the motivation held no bounds and
there’d be no limit to their abilities,”
Elva said. “You just know what it’ll
mean for people to have him in that
museum. It’s very gratifying to hear
that we’ve helped in a small way.”
The Gladys Faye Beuchat
Scholarship honors Beuchat,
who died in 1993. She earned from
ESU a life certificate in 1918 and a
foreign language degree in 1921.
Beuchat taught
at El Dorado
Junior College
from 1944 to
1962, and also
at El Dorado
High School,
according to a
1993 El Dorado
Times article.
Beuchat’s first teaching assignment
was in 1913 in Greenwood County,
where she earned an extra $5 per
month doing her own janitorial
work (just like Grady Atwater!).
The Elsie A. Borck Memorial
Fund, established in 1998,
honors Borck’s dedication to
teaching. She graduated from KSTC
in 1939 with a bachelor’s degree in
business, and taught at Marysville
High School
from 1947 to
1977, according
to a Marysville
Advocate article at the
time of the gift.
Borck’s $1.15
million gift was
the largest ESU had ever received.
* * *
History is awash at the Adair Cabin at the John Brown State Historic Site in Osawatomie. History falls, in fact, in the form of flecks of whitewash that still coat the walls that once protected John Brown and his abolitionist movement. Grady Atwater (BA 2003, MA 2005), the site’s curator and an Osawatomie native, reached his dream job on the back of an ESU education and invaluable scholarship support. Moving around the cabin, Atwater said there’s plenty to look at “if you’re an obsessive historian like me.”
The cabin, owned by Brown’s half-sister Florella and her husband Samuel Adair, was moved about a mile from its original site. It now sits where free-state guerillas fought the Battle of Osawatomie, holding off 250 to 400 pro-slavery militiamen during the Bleeding Kansas era. A pergola was built around the cabin in 1928 to guard against the elements. The windows’ architecture mirrors that of Harpers Ferry, the raid that led to John Brown’s capture and execution. The 19th-century window glass was hand-blown. Walk through the door where Florella, eight months pregnant, faced down a cannon to allow free-staters to slip out the back door, and you’ll find furniture originally owned by the Adairs.
The idea of equality espoused in the abolitionist rhetoric of Brown and the Adairs and Brown became a precursor to the women’s rights movement. The Adairs were originally from Oberlin, Ohio, a hotbed of abolitionist thinking, where Florella became one of the first women in the country to earn a college degree in 1839, Atwater said.
Incidentally, Lyman B. Kellogg, the first president in 1865 of Kansas State Normal School – now ESU – was raised in this tradition. His father Hiram was a student at Oberlin College around 1840. Kellogg recalls the Oberlin influence in his memoirs, recently published by Emporia State Printing Services: “Oberlin College at that time was a small school, struggling for existence, but co-educational, intensely anti-slavery, and strong for temperance. From this association my father became an outspoken abolitionist and temperance advocate.”
Learn more about the historic cabin at www.kshs.org/places/johnbrown
See the story in the electronic magazine, page 22.
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Last Updated April 17, 2008