Welcome

This is a story about Hutchins, Kansas. Never heard of it? That’s okay, most people haven’t. In fact, it’s not really a town even though you’ll find it on maps. Go ahead. Mapquest it. I’ll wait.

See? Hutchins, Kansas. Not a lot around it, right? It’s just an old grain elevator 2 ½ miles south of Scott City. As best as I can figure, it got listed as a town because it was a grain elevator and a stop on the railroad, and because most grain elevators and railroad stops are in towns so somebody along the way decided it must be a town. At the time it was built – 1947 – it was the only privately owned elevator in Kansas. Clarence Thomas Hutchins built the elevator, hence the name. Fortunately only the Hutchins stuck, because no one called him Clarence. Sometimes he went by C.T., but to most he was known as Pete Hutchins (how he came by the name Pete is a story I’ll tell another time). To me, his oldest great-granddaughter, he was Grandpa Pete, and he was my hero.

I grew up a half mile west of that elevator, on the family farm in Grandma Mary and Grandpa Pete’s old house. By the time I came along, they’d lived in their new house in town about 20 years. My mom was raised in the farmhouse along with her 3 sisters. My room used to belong to my great-aunt Carol (my Grandpa Calvin's sister), then my mom, and then my aunt Mary.

This family stuff is going to get tricky so I'll have to post a family tree later.

For now, I plan to use this blog to tell stories about my Hutchins family history. I have another blog where I'll be posting more about current events - that's at http://view-from-hutchins.blogspot.com/. It's from a liberal perspective, so some of my conservative cousins may want to steer clear of reading that one, and I'll steer clear of politics on this blog.