(gentle music) Hello, I'm Ed Laurier, Director and Producer of "Cottwood Connections."

My work with the friends of the Cottonwood Ranch started a few years ago with the production of a documentary film about the Cottonwood Ranch, about the Pratt family that built it and lived here, and about the work of our show host, Don Rowlison, who served as the curator of Cottonwood Ranch, a position he started in the mid 1980s.

I'm happy to report that Don intends to continue hosting episodes of Cottonwood Connections.

However, effective this month, October, 2025, he is retiring from his role as Curator of Cottonwood Ranch.

In honor of that, this episode of Cottonwood Connections is a special half hour recut of that original documentary film, which tells of the legacy of the Cottonwood Ranch, a story Don has been researching and sharing with visitors for 40 years.

I hope you enjoy.

(gentle music) (gentle music) Welcome to the Cottonwood Ranch.

If you concentrate on something like the Cottonwood Ranch and really get into the history, it's a window to such things as entrepreneurship, banking, the economy, the evolution of crops, the evolution of livestock and stuff.

I'm a Kansas history teacher.

Having Cottonwood Ranch so close is very beneficial for our students to be able to see living history and see what it was like back then and have part of their culture.

Now, one of the reasons the state acquired this was, but it was a representation of agriculture being the biggest industry in Kansas.

So this did this, this was historic as far as the architecture was concerned, it is one of the oldest houses in this part of the state that's standing and unmodified because this house was finished in 1896 and no other family ever lived in this house except the Pratt family.

And they did not remodel or make any modifications except for maybe electricity, which came in in 1948.

Now, there are more ranches in Northwestern Kansas or throughout the state that have more exciting history than this and have lasted a lot longer.

This wasn't a working ranch basically after 1904, but the information is incredible.

John Fenton Pratt was an amateur photographer.

So while I was cleaning the outbuildings out here, I was able to salvage about 400 glass negatives.

The State Historical Society redeveloped those.

So we have these black and white prints and this guy was a very careful record-skeeper.

And they have everything from my demise grocery lists and what they paid for each item or they bought it.

So that's the details we have on this.

So this is really a historic package.

And to have Don as a curator, he is a wealth of knowledge and just can explain it so well to the children and he attracts their attention.

There's a thing with history, a lot of us think that the oldest thing in the state is your grandparents.

And so they aren't interested in the history until they start to understand the stories that happened, of what went on, of the activity, anything from the native Americans to the early settlement, to the turning into an agricultural area, the peak of the population that is now diminishing, the dustbowl years, how the world wars affected the area.

It can tie in one small area in Northwestern Kansas to the world history.

In 1878, Abraham Pratt came to this part of the state.

Abraham Pratt had an interesting history.

He was born in 1823.

He became a sailor.

He later became a businessman and rip in England after he got out of the British Navy.

He owned at least two pubs, but possibly three.

He had a wholesale, liquor mercantile and a bottling works.

Well, Abraham, at the age of 53, decided to seek a new land.

So he came to, first of all, they say Nebraska, the homestead there.

They didn't find a suitable place, according to the family in Nebraska, so they came down into Kansas.

And when he came over in 1878, he bought this property from the railroad.

The USA was really in debt because of the war.

They gave the railroad company land.

It conisted of every other odd numbered section on 20 miles on each side of the railroad line.

And so this is 20 miles north of the Kansas Pacific with the idea that when the railroad went through, they could sell that land and fund the construction of the railroad.

So Abraham Pratt started buying this from the railroad for a high price, but there were springs running through this and also the South Fork of the Solomon River, which ran good, rich water in the bottom lands.

And he had money from England.

The first house lived in by Abraham Pratt was a dugout south of the river.

He was a widower when he came here.

He had four children in England, two boys and two girls.

He bought this with his two sons name on it.

John Fenton Pratt, who had the Cottonwood Ranch, and his younger son, Thomas.

Now one son, John Fenton Pratt being the eldest, had been his bookkeeper, Abraham's bookkeeper, over in England and was selling things out for his father.

And once he got him sold out, came over here in March of 1880.

His brother came over in 1882 and the Foster brothers, Charles and James Foster, were friends of the Pratt's in England.

They came here too.

Well, at first the single Englishman lived in a dugout in Abraham Pratt's dugout, which was approximately 14 by 16 feet, pretty crowded.

So they built the Cottonwood Ranch, a stone building in the fall of 1885.

The original one room house, it was a rock building with a dirt floor and a sod roof.

In late 1888, there was a shingle roof on it.

As the house evolution went on, in 1890 they added the West Wing onto the house, which consisted of a bedroom and a parlor.

And then in 1896, on the east side of the house, which consisted of a kitchen as a separate room, a bathroom, and also a guest bedroom, which finished it in 1896.

This was lived in until 1978 by Hilda Pratt, born here in 1889 and lived here until 1978.

So a lot of the stuff is original.

The rug on the floor of the living room is from 1903.

And a lot of people say, well, why are we walking on these and wearing them out?

And yes, these rugs could be preserved, but they would be rolled up and put in an environmentally controlled dark room.

They might last for 300 years, but nobody would ever see them.

The ceilings, I see some of you looking at these.

Tell me what these are made out of.

Clay, we have clay.

Plaster of Paris in art class.

These ceilings are called pressed tin.

The stained glass windows, there are four of them in the house.

This particular one is called a cottage window.

They added a lot of elegance to the rooms.

This window is the most expensive window, this oval window.

That costs $15.38.

And this is where they did their laundry.

But also in this wash house, I found a small wooden box of his glass negatives that we talked about, and also a bunch of photography chemicals.

So with that evidence, I'm thinking that he was probably using this as a dark room.

The stove and the sink date from the 1920s, but you burn wood, coal, corn cobs, all sorts of things in the stove, anything to get heat.

That bathtub is original.

That was off the site for about 70 years.

And the last 25 years before I got it back, it had been used as a horse tank.

The bathroom allegedly was the first bathroom in a house in all of Sheridan County.

Running water in a house, I mean, this was a mansion compared to the solid houses.

And people will come here today and they say, "Well, look at all the trees up and down the river.

Why didn't they use lumber and maybe build a log cabin?"

Well, the reason was there were no trees along the south fork of the Solomon River.

From Hoxie to here, in 1885, when the first part of this house was built, there were four trees.

And so the only building materials it has was rock and sod.

The gray stone in the wall was quarried about 150 yards north of the house.

The yellow stone was quarried about a mile southwest here.

This is where the Smoky Hill Chalk was obtained, which was used on the north side of the original house.

And also the coins, an English term for the cornerstones, the colorful cornerstones that add a lot of architectural beauty to a building.

We can see where the door, the screen door hits it right here.

Now I'm gonna rub this.

It's nothing but a yellow chalk.

That's all it is.

And it's so soft that you can cut a section like this when it's freshly quarried with a saw with tree trimming teeth on it in actually about 45 seconds.

The problem with these rock walls being the oldest structure that we know of intact in this part of the country, we don't know how long they last.

Dan Rockhill, who is a architectural design professor at the University of Kansas came out with a crew.

The goal of preservation is to leave whatever shred you can of the original building.

So it's not as if we just tear things out and replace it and carefree.

There was a lot of stone work that needed to be taken care of.

There was some rock that we could not replace.

So we went nearby to get the same sort of rock and quarried it and cut it the same way that they did.

Dan was very skilled at doing this stuff.

He knew how to do it and he ran the crew.

So we got a lot done and they came out here for two summers.

(soft music) This was a sheep ranch.

At the peak of this man's sheep operation, he had about 3,500 sheep.

They were merino sheep.

They're a heavily-willed sheep and a merino was the best quality.

It's a fine wool and people were wearing a lot of wool clothes, so there was a good market for it.

The buildings were built to support the sheep operation, which was very successful.

Where the Pratts came from, North Central England, and near Ripon in North Yorkshire County, this was the style of outbuildings that they were used to.

And I should say too that the Foster brothers nor the Pratts had any farming experience.

They came from Ripon in North Central England, which is a sheep area, but they were all city dwellers.

And how they learned about the sheep, the oldest book I found concerning sheep when I was cleaning one of the outbuildings was an 1878 version of a shepherd's manual for the Americas.

The other thing, making money on sheep out here, this is all open range.

So although John Fenton Pratt, only at his peak, only owned about 1,480 acres, they could graze a sheep over about 33,000 acres.

And so that's where the sheep made money.

No fences, illegal to put them up, herd them with dogs, didn't have to invest in horses, you're herding them on foot.

And the wool price was high, and then you got the lamb crop from them too.

So you could make a lot of money on sheep, on a merino sheep.

John Fenton Pratt and his ledgers had spent a couple of months one winter building what he called the house on wheels, which this description is a sheep wagon.

So these were self-contained.

These are like the first Winnebago recreation home.

And so the shepherds, when they were out on the range, would live in these.

They would be in an area and maybe graze the area for three or four days, and then maybe once a week, somebody would come out and check out the shepherd, bring in new supplies and maybe a team of horses, and they would move the wagon to another grazing area.

By 1904, as the open range was diminishing in this area, he got out of business.

He retired.

He sold all of his land but 80 acres in 1904 and retired at the age of 48 from the sheep industry.

John Fenton Pratt was a amateur, well, maybe not an amateur photographer, but he didn't get paid for his stuff.

If he did get paid, he only charged, if he took a portrait or something, the cost of the materials.

The photographs give us a picture of the whole area which most people don't have.

He was a bookkeeper in England.

He was used to keeping records and very precise records and continued that luckily for us to have the houses as an artifact and a lot of the specimens in it as original stuff, the records that are incredible and especially the photographs.

And so this is kind of a package.

It was a matter of just sorting it out.

John Fenton Pratt lived until 1937.

He had other business interests.

He had invested in stocks and bonds.

He was also a money lender to people coming in.

When I first came out here and being a native, I could go down the list and the ledgers and see names that I knew that he had loaned money.

And so I would call these up and it might be a son of a man had borrowed money from him.

It might've been a grandson.

So I asked, I said, you know, what did your family think of Ol' Fent Pratt?

He was known.

And some of them, about 50% said, oh, he is a real tight-wad scoundrel.

And others, he was some kind of hero to him.

So he would loan them money where they didn't have enough collateral to borrow from a bank.

And they could get money from him and pull them through because a lot of them said that we couldn't have made it if it hadn't been for him loaning us money.

He was one of the founders of the Studley Bank in the 1920s.

He invested in stocks and bonds.

And he was kind of innovative too.

He was a middleman for the timber claims.

He was buying thousands of trees out of nurseries out of Salina, Kansas and Concordia, Kansas.

And what he was doing was getting these and then selling them to the guys for their timber claims.

He was the entrepreneur.

The story with Mrs.

Pratt is her name was, before marriage, was Jenny Elizabeth Place.

She and Fent Pratt had been childhood sweethearts over in Ripon, England.

He left England and then he kept corresponding with Jenny.

In 1885, according to the family, he went to England to talk to Jenny.

Well, he was over there for at least two months, but probably three, and he was getting ready to leave on the ship to come back to America.

And he kind of mentioned, you know, why don't we get married and go back to Kansas?

And she said, now the excuse was that she was too ill to travel.

She wasn't feeling well.

He received a letter from her that she was actually engaged when he was over there.

She was engaged to another man, but she didn't have the heart to tell him.

But he kept corresponding with her.

So he must have been pretty well hooked on her.

Took three years and they were corresponding back and forth and finally he convinced her to break the engagement of the other guy.

So she must've been a little bit undecided too.

And marry him.

She actually landed, went across the Atlantic on the SS Wyoming for Steamship Wyoming.

This is the trunk that Mrs.

Pratt brought with her from England.

It was shipped to Lenora, which is the end of the railroad track, 22 miles northeast of here, where Fent Pratt met his Jenny.

Now they hadn't seen each other for three years, but they got married the next day, New Year's Eve, December 31st in Lenora.

And on New Year's Day, according to the family, he brought the brand new bride to the Cottonwood Ranch.

And according to the family, when she set foot on the ranch, she broke into tears.

She was a city girl from Ripon, England, and supposedly used to some house servants.

And so coming out here in the middle of the winter to a one-room dirt floored house with a man she barely knew, allegedly he would be working the sheep out or maybe herding them and come home and find his wife missing.

She would take off walking to get to Lenora.

They would alert Fenton that she was gone again, so he would go get her and bring her back.

I mean, I could just see her with that little satchel, just, "I'm going," you know, one way or the other.

(laughs) And then here she was back again.

But she eventually took to it.

I imagine she never quit yearning for England.

But she was very active, was a hostess in a lot of clubs, active in the church in Studley, and was highly thought of.

She, at one time, kept a whole lot of little silver baby spoons, because the English tradition was that the first place you took a newborn child was whateverr house, and you were supposed to give them silver for good luck.

Well, she got so she couldn't get the silver spoons.

She was still doing the silver, and it was silver dollars.

She wanted the children to come here first, any newborn baby, she just loved babies.

From Studley to about eight miles west along the river valley, the south fork of the Solomon, was mostly British in the early days.

I talked about the Pratts and the Foster brothers, but there was another family of Pratts that came in.

Interestingly enough, this other family of Pratts came from north central England also.

I have a picture here of the museum ranch where the other family of Pratts lived and it's quite a sprawling ranchstead.

Now these two families of Pratts had the same name, were unrelated and unacquainted until they just by chance settled in Sheridan County and lived five miles apart.

I am the great great granddaughter of Abraham Pratt and the great granddaughter of little Tom Pratt on my maternal side.

There were two different Pratt families that settled in Sheridan County and they were known as the Little Tom Pratt family and the Big Tom Pratt family.

So here you have two Tom Pratts arriving in the same area in 1882, the same name.

They both had British accents and so people had, when they talked about them, had to distinguish them.

This is big Tom Pratt, Tom L Pratt that came over in 1882.

Thomas Pratt, Abraham's son, was about five feet six, five feet seven.

So they were Big Tom and Little Tom and they lived with that for the rest of their lives and on Little Tom's grave is little Tom Pratt.

The Pratt families had known each other for over a hundred years, but never were related that they know of until my husband and I got married.

Sometimes people say, well how did all these English get here?

Well Abraham Pratt came over first and then the George Pratt family came over and so they were corresponding with other Englishmen back in England.

So it was kind of a, I guess kind of an ethnic draw because even a lot of the settlement of the Great Plains was done by people of various ethnicities.

These people, the English in the area that John Fenton Pratt was subscribing to the London Daily Mirror.

And I asked his eldest nephew Abram because Abram told me that and I said, did he get the papers in bulk shipped over from England?

He said, oh no.

He said Uncle Fent had to have a paper every day.

And I said, well how long did it take to get here?

And Abram paused and he said, I don't remember.

And he paused a little bit more but he said, I do remember that Uncle Fent was so excited because the news from England was only three weeks old.

Until just recently, the close-up picture we had of Jenny Place Pratt is right here on the side.

And this is her daughter Hilda, born here in October 1889, sitting in the high chair beside her.

Here's Elsie.

This is the back porch of the Cottonwood Ranch.

And Elsie was born here in 1894.

But on a farm in a rural condition, most of the kids were working kids.

They could do what they could.

You might start gathering eggs when you're three and four year old.

Hilda once told one of her relatives that the happiest day of her life is when her father sold all the sheep in 1904.

She helped her father with the sheep and she hated the sheep.

Her younger sister, Elsie, mostly helped her mother in the house.

Elsie married a man by the name of Clarence Johnson.

He actually was a Canadian immigrant.

But he married Elsie.

Fent Pratt bought him a small farm and a mom and pops grocery store in Manhattan, Kansas.

Hilda was a very statuesque woman.

She always had a British clip in her language.

She went to American schools.

She went to school at Studley until the eighth grade.

I did find the copy of one letter where she was applying to go to college to major in music.

And she was accepted, but she didn't go.

I was acquainted with Hilda.

I worked in a grocery store in Hoxie during my high school years and Hilda would come in, usually once a week, to buy groceries.

And she was known around the area as Miss Hilda.

And she was a volunteer as a gray lady at the Hoxie Hospitals.

So she did lead a very good life.

And the last person to live in this house was Hilda and lived here until the spring of 1978 and passed away in a long-term care unit in Hill City in 1980.

This was put on the list of National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The history of the ranch after I came here, there was a hundred years of stuff in some of these buildings.

Some of it was absolutely junk.

Some of it wasn't.

Don was here to start with.

I mean, he cleaned up everything.

You know, in the process found all the glass prints from all the pictures, the part rolls of the original wallpaper, the records Mr.

Pratt had, you know, of how many, of what he did, how many mice he caught, how much money this ceiling cost, how much the rug cost.

Don researched all of that.

He made the place, in my opinion, what it is today.

My first love is really archaeology.

And I thought I'd really miss the prehistoric archaeology because it's, you know, Native Americans and stuff here in the state.

Well, this is above ground archaeology.

From archaeology, I tried to deal with the best I could.

I know I've made a lot of mistakes probably on this, but I can't talk to the people on how it was done.

So it's kind of a, yeah, my own desire to get it right.

He's so much a part of this.

I mean, it's in his heart.

And at the same time, he's such a stickler for doing it right, timely, you know, historically.

When you get a tour from Don, you get the history of the place.

And I don't think it would have ever developed to the extent that it has had not the person operating it had the interest in the place that he has.

He's documented it.

He's studied it.

He's rebuilt it.

The stone wall, I remember when it was, you know, I think I climbed on it when I was a little kid.

And then he rebuilt it, you know, and he used photos to kind of piece all that together.

He knows the ranch inside and out.

He knows the history.

It's in his head.

He doesn't have to read it.

I mean, he knows it.

It changed me.

I mean, my background in anthropology and archaeology, I was only primarily interested in prehistoric history and the Native Americans out here.

But this has got me into agricultural history.

It has got me into English history.

It has got me into the settlement and homesteading of Northwestern Kansas, which I wouldn't have had any interest in if I stayed in archaeology as a state's public archaeologist.

I don't think I would.

I don't know what would have happened.

He claimed value to helping tell the story of this part of the country.

And he had the opportunity of a lifetime to be here and help this story stay current.

The ranch is going to be here long after we're gone, I hope.

And I hope that we can continue the ranch moving forward.

So we are looking for people that are interested in history so I can retire and you guys can have a job here.

So think about it.

When we took a history class in school, grade school or high school, they talked about mostly wars and politics.

History comes from the people living on the land, the grass roots, it starts here and then it gets to the politics and the wars.

Well, I find it important for kids to know their history and their family history so going out and having the experience of visiting the place they can understand how the people lived and understand how their ancestors lived as well.

One of my personal goals was, yes, I know about the Pratts, but I really didn't necessarily want to make it a memorial to the Pratts.

I wanted it to be broader to interpret early farming and ranching and homesteading in Northwestern Kansas.

There's a lot of history, a lot of exciting history.

Yeah, it just goes on and on and it will keep going on.

What's happening today will be history in another hundred years.

We hope we record it.

Hidden things in history are often found.

A lot of times you think you have the definitive study of something.

You've written it up and two years later there's one paragraph or one sentence in a newspaper or another book that answers the question that you had, which only means there's more questions to ask so you're never done.