Lowell is a small town with some charming older homes, and others that are more run down. The dam outside town is remarkable! It has a rest home called the Quaker Hill Care Home, which pays homage to the early Quaker settlers in this part of Kansas. The cemetery was established in 1869.
Riverton is another town on Route 66. It was originally set aside for the Cherokee tribe, but mining and farmland led white settlers to steal the land here. These days, it has a hydroelectric plant, a number of blue-collar neighborhoods, lots of brick ranch-style homes, fewer junk-filled yards, and some really nice neighborhoods with well-maintained homes.
Some notable spots are the Empire Dam Falls and the Rainbow Curve Bridge, which is the only remaining Marsh Arch Bridge on Route 66.
Galena is on Historic Route 66, and it was used as a research location for the Pixar movie Cars. If you stop at the Kan-O-Tex service station, you'll see the boom truck that inspired the character of Mater.
The town also has a mining museum which, we regrettably found, closes at 3:30. It does have some outside exhibits that we got to see, including an anti-aircraft gun manned by a 5-year-old girl. We enjoyed the downtown area, and we wish time and weather would have allowed us to visit Schermerhorn Park, where a cave and river show the landscape and wildlife of the Ozarks of Kansas.
The town has a few churches, a cemetery, and a shopping district where a sign in front of a store called Liberty Hall boasted, "We buy gold, silver, and guns."
We were charmed by the Dalmatian-painted fire hydrants throughout the town.
Empire City was a famously iniquitous town, according to these contemporary newspaper comments from Legends of America:
Such a motley collection of houses, men and women…The town looked as though volcanic convulsions had heaved it up. Houses had been erected with no regard to architectural beauty, the regularity of line, or locality. The streets are as crooked as illicit distilleries, and from morning till night, they are filled with people and teams. Saloons and gambling houses are the most frequent objects. Gambling quarters are in such great demand that several members of the profession are compelled to conduct their operations in the open streets. (Topeka Daily Commonwealth)
The principal thoroughfare was known as Red Hot Street. It became so true to the name that all legitimate businesses withdrew and left the street to saloons, gamblers, and dance halls. For several months the orgies that held sway on Red Hot Street were perhaps never exceeded in any other frontier mining camp. (Kansas City Star)
In 1877, the town council built a stockade blocking off commerce with Galena, a town just to the south. You can read the full story here, but the short version is that an armed posse from Galena surprised the stockade guards and burned it to the ground, thus reopening trade between the two rivals. Ultimately, Galena won out, and Empire City was annexed to its rival in 1910.
These days, Empire City is a blue collar town. We saw a quaint old limestone antique store there, as well as lots of railroads. It also featured a number of white-painted water towers, a flood plain, some brick farmhouses, thick woods, road signs peppered with bullets, and a few yards filled with items that could charitably be described as "potentially useful."
A sign in town proclaims that Empire City is "The Oldest Mining Town in Southeast Kansas."
