The people and stories of Pot’s Corner
In 1976, the Register published a three-paragraph squib about “pot corner”:
“Nobody knows for sure how it was started, but a country road intersection east of Moran has been known for years as ‘pot corner.’ … The landmark gets its name from four chamber pots, one sitting on a post at each of the four corners of the intersection. The pots have been there for as many years as anyone can remember, and whatever significance they once had is lost. Still, when a pot is stolen or broken, as it sometimes is, a new one takes its place, put there by an unknown resident.”
Then, in 2003, a reference to “Pot’s Corner” made its way into the official minutes of the Allen County Commission when “a citizen reported a hole in a culvert by Pot’s Corner.”
Between these two mentions little else has been written about Pot’s Corner, an otherwise anonymous, dust-blown crossroads on the margins of the Osage Valley — and probably no one cares one way or another. But then again I’ve met two or three who care very much about the biography of this nowhere place and the history of its people.
ON A LATE Wednesday morning last week, I called local developer and longtime Moran resident, Bill McAdam. “If anybody would know, McAdam would,” a coworker had told me that morning. And so I asked him what he knew about the origins of Pot’s Corner. “Me, I’m not old enough to know that,” said McAdam. “I’m only 86.”
Still, McAdam stretched his memory toward the project: “I think you have to go back right through the Depression, sometime around ’34 or ’36. That’s when the county had crews working during the WPA days. … I’m from a time when people would have a pot, and you’d have to go dump it out the next morning. Bad weather, you didn’t go outside — you used a pot. Anyway, somebody came up with the idea to start putting them up and made it Pot’s Corner. I don’t know why. But I think Roy Marple was a county road boss in those days, and I think I heard that from him. But don’t say that for sure, because I’m not damned sure about it. There isn’t anybody left to ask. I mean, I’m about the oldest one around who would know anything about it. Hold on — there’s a lady here that has something on it. Her name is Patricia Ensminger. Here you go.”
“THIS LADY would have been a little older than Bill,” remembered Ensminger, “that’s who told me. Her name was Mrs. Thelma Watkins. Now, I don’t know how much credence there is to this, but she said the pot was put on the corner to mark it, so kids there would know where their corner was to turn. See, it was a mark. You know, there was a family that had some mentally handicapped children in the area and they put big targets on their barn, so the kids would always know where home was. Who might know about Pot’s Corner is Glenn Smith. Have you called him? His wife’s name is Retta. They’re of a generation. But also Mrs. Maley — she’s very good on that kind of stuff.”
I thanked Mrs. Ensminger and found Audrey Maley in the phone book and rang her. No one answered, so I called Glenn Smith and explained that I was looking for information on Pot’s Corner.
“I’LL HAND the phone to my wife,” said Mr. Smith. “She’s heard some different versions on that.”
There was a brief, muffled exchange in the background before Retta Smith assumed the line. “I don’t know myself,” said Mrs. Smith, “but I’ll tell you a good one to call — Audrey Maley. I’m sure she can help you out. Here’s Glenn again.”
“Several years ago, I heard that when they were laying out the road, with horses and scrapers, they needed a location point out in this direction. And in some way that got labelled Pot’s Corner then. But then I’ve heard other versions of it that don’t go with that, so I don’t know which is right.”
Other versions?
“Well, one was that some high school kids back in ‘37, ‘38, along in there, had something to do with it. But Audrey would know that too.”
I asked Mr. Smith about the new-looking metal sign that sits high atop a gate on the southeast corner of the intersection: A precisely lettered, bright-orange sign that reads POT’S CORNER (the basis for the apostrophe remains something of a mystery).
“Uh-huh,” says Smith, “Dale Maley owns that place now. That’d be the son of this Audrey. You might call him too.”
I thanked him for his time.
“OK.”
After saying goodbye to Glenn Smith and his wife, I again rang Audrey Maley. No answer. So I called Dale.
DALE MALEY purchased the land that includes the northeast and southeast sections of Pot’s Corner more than 10 years ago. He installed the sign last year. He’s put up new fences and has kept the corner clear of brush and other debris. He’s keen on preserving the history of the intersection. He’s 51 now and has lived in the area all his life and has known Pot’s Corner by that name since he was a boy.
But he doesn’t know any more about its origins than the others do. “But you know what?” asked Dale. “I was trying to remember — another guy called me here, probably about six months ago. I’m trying to think of his name right now. He said that his granddad ran the road grader out in this area for the county. And he said that the man had picked up some old chamber pots that he’d then stuck on that corner, and he’s the one that kind of started the whole deal. I guess his last name was Gillham is what his last name was. I can’t tell you his first name. It was Larry? Or Gary?”
I’ll eventually track down the Gillham in question: it’s Terry.
“Well, anyway, this guy called me about wanting to put up some pots,” continued Dale, “because they get stolen pretty regular out there, kids take them off and they get vandalized over the years. See, the local people try to keep a pot on each corner is what they try to do. And this Gillham fellow wanted to put up a pot. He had been living in Texas, but had retired and come back to the area. And he was telling me that history then. … You know, I don’t know a whole lot more about it, though. All the old-timers definitely knew Pot’s Corner, but it’s getting so a lot of them are passing away and it’s not as known anymore as what it used to be. Have you talked to my mother? She’s likely to know.”
I NEXT REACHED Larry Manes, who handed the phone to his wife, Nelda Cuppy. The pair, by reputation, know a good deal about the history of Moran. “I don’t really know anything about Pot’s Corner at all,” said Cuppy. “As far as I know, it’s a mystery.” I tell her I’ve been told to get in touch with Audrey Maley. “That’s who I was going to suggest!” chirped Cuppy. “Anyway, I look forward to hearing more about it.”
It’s a wonder, that night, that the name of Audrey Maley didn’t fill my dreams.
I FINALLY REACHED Mrs. Maley by phone the next morning. Hooray!
Turned out she hasn’t a clue how Pot’s Corner got started. Ack!
“In fact,” she said, “I believe everybody that does know is dead.”
She is on the case, however, and explained her efforts. At 84 years old, the sharp-witted Mrs. Maley makes frequent trips to the Moran Public Library. Following on a tip from her daughter — who recalls doing a project on Pot’s Corner during her time at Marmaton Valley High in the 1970s — Mrs. Maley is in search of an article on the legendary intersection that appeared in either the Marmaton Valley Sun or else the Moran Sentinel in the early part of that decade. “We know it hasn’t always been Pot’s Corner,” said Mrs. Maley, “but nobody that I have ever found knows when or how it was started.”
Mrs. Maley even searched the county directory for that “fellow who moved back here from Texas.”
“Gillham?” I asked.
“That’s the one.”
Mrs. Maley, who has lived in the area since she was 6 years old, and who now resides a mile north and a mile east of Pot’s Corner, is fluent in the other arcana of that particular intersection, too. For example: there is a Cottonwood tree just north of the corner that has an eye-catching “misshapen fungus growth” high up on its trunk; there is a ghost who visits the area some nights, the “disturbed” son of a couple who lived for years near Pot’s Corner; there was a worker in the 1930s who scratched “Damn Roosevelt” into the wet cement of a small bridge just east of the intersection, a piece of graffiti that has outlasted both the author and his subject.
“It is,” concluded Mrs. Maley, “kind of a distinguished corner.”
LATER that afternoon, I called Dale back to ask whether he had any idea where in Allen County the Texas fellow might be living. He had a ballpark notion of the spot: Two miles south of Highway 54, he recalled, down a dirt road near the Bourbon County line.
I drove out to the area and found the farm nearest the two-mile mark, but when I pulled into the long driveway of a ramshackle farmhouse set back in a small dark woods, I stumbled not on Gillham but on someone called “Big John” David. “Big John” is a large man in overalls, a farmer in his middle 50s with a cutoff T-shirt, a long goatee, a mouthful of tobacco, arm tattoos and a mohawk haircut, who, when he found me tramping through the knee-high grass in his front yard, assumed I was the meter reader. I corrected him, gingerly, and told him I was looking for a man called Gillham.
“Gillham?” asked Big John, who helpfully searched every corner of his brain for anybody he might ever have known with the last name of Gillham. “Gillham, huh?” We chatted for 30 minutes in the summer swelter, wiping sweat from our eyes. Big John turned out to be a man of enormous friendliness and charm, who relayed many interesting facts about his section of Allen County, but was as in the dark as anybody else regarding the origins of Pot’s Corner or the whereabouts of Larry or Gary Gillham. Before I left, Big John urged me to first drive to the end of his road where the alley of trees gives way to a wide meadow. “It’s very pretty down there,” he said.
BACK AT POT’S CORNER, I stopped at the farmhouse of Bob Tholen, who owns the southwest section of the crossroads — currently the only section of Pot’s Corner without a chamber pot. “I guess I’m falling behind,” laughed Tholen. “In fact, there’s an old man that gave me a piss pot awhile ago. He said if one comes up missing, put it on there. I still got it down there in the shed.”
Tholen, too, remembers hearing that Pot’s Corner was first established as a marker, a way to orient rural travelers in the early part of the last century. In those days, explained Tholen, there wasn’t the tree cover that you have now, and a person could see a marker of that sort from miles away. “I remember someone saying that they would go from Uniontown to Iola and see one tree. Back then, you had tall prairie and it would burn off whenever they had fires and it would take care of any little trees that started. Now, everything is so broken up and farmed and all the fires are controlled — that’s why you have to fight the damn trees all the time.”
Tholen’s face suddenly flashed excitement. “You know who would know? Edith Gustafson. She’s an older lady that used to live over here. She lived to be 105 years old. A neat lady. But she died a few years ago.”
Among many other things, Edith Bradford Gustafson was for a time a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She was a freelance writer and columnist and author of many short stories, who occasionally wrote for the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Manhattan Mercury. She was a painter, whose large-canvas artworks still hang in homes and corporate offices here and in Texas, where she spent many winters. At aged 93, Gustafson wrote and published an award-winning book on the Osage Cuesta. She had beautiful handwriting all her life, remembered Tholen, even as a very old woman — a smooth stroke, unmarred by any tremor. She took garlic pills and now and then enjoyed a nip or two from a gallon jug of red wine. She rarely had a health issue. “I think one time she had surgery for an artery in her neck that was plugged up.” She outlived all her children. And she insisted on mowing her own yard well into her 100th year. “When she’d go out there and mow, all you could see were her eyes,” remembered Tholen. “She’d have everything wrapped up and her hat and her scarf and her gloves, long sleeves, her pant legs tied. I mean, nothing was getting to her. She was quite a lady.”
Tholen scratched his head and tried this time to think of somebody who wasn’t deceased who might know a thing or two about Pot’s Corner.
“Somebody who would know would be Dale’s mom. Audrey Maley.”
I explained my prior association with Mrs. Maley.
“Oh, here!” said Tholen. “Try Lucile Bacon. Go down to Pot’s Corner, go south a mile, then you go back west…and she’s on the south side of the road. She’s fairly old and she might know something about it. I know there was another old man — he was in his 90s — but him and his wife have been gone for awhile. He possibly would have known. But there are a lot of people in this area that have died in the last 10 years. Lucile Bacon — yeah, I’d go ask her. Everyone else has died.”
“I’LL BE 90 this fall,” explained Bacon, holding open her backdoor, “but, you know, I married into this area, so I don’t know the story behind it. But come on in, if you want to, I might be able to help you a little bit. You know somebody who might know?”
“Audrey Maley?” I ask.
“That’s right,” said Bacon. “But my husband could have told you something about it, too, because he knew a lot of that stuff, the old stories. It’s been Pot’s Corner ever since he was a boy. He died almost three years ago.”
Lucile Bacon grew up a million miles away, in Bronson. One summer, when she was 15 years old, she was sitting on her front porch watching a young man fix a flat tire he’d incurred on the road just in front of her house. Eventually, he came up and introduced himself. His name was Kenneth but everyone called him “Joe.” They were married in 1945.
“He was quite a ballplayer,” remembered Lucile. He pitched. And then, as his age caught up with him — Bacon played ball until he was 39 — he manned first base. And, occasionally, he played left field. “They couldn’t get a ball past him,” said Lucile.
Bacon played for Howard Dawson, the owner/manager of the regionally famous town team in Bronson. Bronson had a good team then. They once, during Bacon’s time, defeated Satchel Paige and his Kansas City Monarchs. “Joe was supposed to go to a tryout in Iola one time. Some big-league outfit was coming in. But they had a tornado that tore the stadium down that afternoon, and they called everything off. That was the only chance he ever had.”
The old farmers around Pot’s Corner have all gone. “I think I’m the only one left. We used to have a little neighborhood club, all the women around here. One afternoon a week, we’d go meet — first at one person’s home, then another’s. That’s how we communicated with our neighbors then. But now you never communicate with the neighbors. They don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know what they’re doing it. And you get to missing that when you’re my age.”
But it was a good place to raise her five children, and has been a good place to grow old. “I’ve had company from Illinois, whose home is near a river in the woods. They come up here and say, ‘Boy, you can see for miles.’ That’s one thing you don’t realize. We’re kind of on a knoll. Water runs in both directions from our place. It goes to the Osage River and it goes to the Marmaton River. We don’t seem to be very high up, but we’re high enough if you’re really paying attention.”
Lucile apologized for not knowing more about the origins of Pot’s Corner — “It’s always just been Pot’s Corner,” she said — and we bid our goodbyes.
LAST WEDNESDAY I decide to call every Gillham listed in the local phone book. “Ben,” “Johnny,” “Johnny and Sue.”
The last is a listing for Wilfred Gillham, in Humboldt. “Is Mr. Gillham in, please?”
“No-o,” says the woman who answers.
I tell her I’m doing a story on Pot’s Corner.
“Ye-es,” says the woman, who has a lovely, resonant way of giving one-syllable words an extra beat.
I ask her if she knows anything about the origins of Pot’s Corner.
“We-ell, ye-es,” she says. “I do.”
Ruth Gillham, who will turn 90 on the first of September, tells me about the first pot to go up at Pot’s Corner. “You see, it was my husband’s family. His father was named Walker Gillham. He started it. He worked for the county and, at that time, they didn’t have mechanized equipment to work on the road. He was clearing out a ditch and came upon this chamber pot, and so when he got to the corner, he just put it up on the corner post. And others, I suppose, followed his lead thereafter. That’s all I know.”
Ruth, a widow now herself, remembers her father-in-law, Walker Albert Gillham, as a kind, hard-working man, who enjoyed fishing in his free time. Walker Gillham developed arthritis at a young age and got about with the aid of a cane or a single crutch during the last half of his life. He died of a heart ailment in 1951 at the age of 61. “I guess you would call him a good man, you know? But much more than that, I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”
LATER THAT EVENING, I receive an email from Mrs. Gillham’s son, Terry, who identified his grandfather as “the originator of Pot’s Corner” and included a picture of Walker Gillham — overalls, a cane — taken a couple of years before his death.
I receive a second email from Terry Gillham the following day: “I have informed my daughter and three grandsons that it will be their responsibility to keep pots up at the corner for many years to come.”
