A 130-year-old general store and memories keep Kansas ghost town of Banner alive

From a spring wagon pulled by mules, A.W. Purinton found his home.

It was fall 1878 and settlement was only beginning. Western Kansas was vast and empty. Trego County hadn’t been organized. The only community center was a small settlement north of the Smoky Hill River that would become WaKeeney.

Yet, for a few days on the sparsely settled prairie, the pioneer and a couple others from his native Vermont searched for the best free land to stake their hopes and dreams and build a future.

Purinton found it along the Hackberry Creek in the southwest part of the county, not far from Castle Rock. The settlers then marked a trail north so they would remember where to go when they returned with family that spring.

It was the beginning of a community they called Banner. Those first residents built sod homes, a sod church and established a post office.

As they tried to make a living on the hardscrabble prairie, the pioneers found encouragement as they came together for Sunday services, literary club meetings, baseball games and annual picnics. Box dinners raised funds for pews and an organ for the church. By the 1880s, Banner had a blacksmith, store and creamery.

Yet, on a recent June afternoon, finding a trace of the community center so deep-rooted in descendant Wayne Purinton’s family heritage isn’t easy.

Just off the Banner Road—that same trail A.W. Purinton marked to find his homestead 140 years ago—Wayne, his great-great grandson, surveys the old townsite. A century-old weather-beaten home that his relatives ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog still stands, along with a few outbuildings.

A quarter-mile away is the skeletal remains of the general store. It was moved to the ranch headquarters around 1940 and turned into a shop.

“This is Banner,” Wayne said, who could be considered the town’s last caretaker. “There is not a lot left.”

Finding a home

A.W. Purinton returned with his family in May 1879, building a small sod shanty on the homestead.

He found making a living on the prairie wasn’t easy.

The 1979 centennial edition of the county paper, the Western Kansas World, chronicles the development of Banner. Purinton broke sod for corn in 1879 during a dry period. He found his horses, used to a ration of corn, didn’t fare well on buffalo grass, so he traded them in for oxen. He and others battled grasshoppers, the heat and blizzards. Some settlers didn’t stay.

Purinton didn’t quit. As wagons continued to come through the area heading west, he saw opportunity. In March 1886, he established a flour and feed store and sold groceries at the Banner townsite.

The family was active in the community. Purinton helped build the church. A.W.’s wife, Melissa, was active in Banner’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, said Bob Kephart, whose mother, Luella, is a sister to Wayne’s father.

Kephart chuckled as he told a story about his great-great-grandmother’s union days.

Melissa was hosting the women one day and had purchased a keg of cider, which she stored in a basement window. The cider turned hard, and she didn’t realize it when she served it, Bob Kephart said.

Rodeos and picnics

The store and post office closed shortly after A.W. Purinton died in 1918, Luella Kephart, 98, said. Only the school and church were still active during her childhood, which along with events at the ranch, helped hold the agriculture community together for a while.

Her grandfather, L.W. Purinton, raised cattle. Her father, Ray, a cowboy, also developed nationally known cutting horses.

Luella recalled rodeos the community had at nearby Castle Rock.

“When I was a little girl, they would park their cars next to each other and make an arena.” said Luella, who lives with son Bob in Missouri. “When it got dark, they would turn on the car headlights.”

Her father hosted other rodeos at an arena on the ranch, she said.

“I kind of remember sitting up on the fence in the early 1950s watching the rodeo,” Wayne Purinton said. “I wasn’t very old.”

The community also had an annual “Banner Picnic” in a grove on the Purinton ranch. One picnic on July 25, 1917, drew 350 automobiles and a crowd of more than 2,000 for food, music, games and baseball, according to an article in the county newspaper.

Later, picnics occurred around Memorial Day weekend honored L.W.’s birthday, Bob Kephart said.

“It was for the whole community, not just family,” Bob said. “It was a pretty big deal.”

Leaving for Vietnam

Wayne said he attended school just down the road from the ranch. He hunted pheasants in the same pastures his father hunted for fossils, some of which are on display at the Trego County Historical Society Museum.

Wayne left for Vietnam in April 1967. He wrote often to his parents, Leonard and Irene, about everything he experienced that year.

He described burning villages, killing livestock and destroying the country’s food supply. Some letters detail tragic ambushes, including one, on Jan. 12, 1968, that took the life of one of his close comrades.

“A battle is something most people read about or watch on TV,” Wayne wrote his parents. “I will never forget Jan. 12 as we really got in a fix. We were caught in the open while enemy machine gun fire raked the ground. It was really a shock to see my buddy lying there with a hole in his head.”

When Wayne came home in 1968, Banner was nearly gone. The school closed in 1966. The church voted to dissolve in 1971, not long before Wayne and his wife, Sandy, returned to the ranch to work with Wayne’s parents. The couple would purchase their own farm. But the crisis of the 1980s forced them into bankruptcy.

In 1997, Wayne was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. A few years later, he began delving into his past—discovering dozens of letters he sent in a closet at the ranch house. He published them in a book, “Journey Back from Vietnam,” in 2011.

Photos of return trips to Vietnam with the Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project, along with hunting photos, hang in the hunting lodge he operates from the Banner ranch.

It’s the last gathering place for a community that thrived on congregating. The old rodeo arena still stands, albeit it’s been decades since the last rodeo.

There wasn’t a better place to grow up, Wayne said, who detailed the virtues his family instilled in him throughout his book.

At the ranch house Easter Sunday 1967, a week before he would leave for Vietnam, his father gave him a small Bible to carry in the field.

“I am very proud of you,” Leonard Purinton told him. “Have faith. Stay alert and be careful.”

Amy Bickel can be reached at 620-860-9433 or [email protected].