Kenneth & Helen Spencer of Kansas: Champions of Culture & Commerce in the Sunflower State

By Kenneth F. Crockett

Born on opposite sides of the Kansas/Missouri border in 1902, Kenneth Aldred Spencer and his wife, Helen Foresman Spencer, were transformative figures in the Midwest during the twentieth century. Kenneth grew up in the small town of Pittsburg, Kansas, but by the 1950s, his innovation in the chemical and coal industries had earned him mention in "Forbes" magazine for his role as one of the nation's great industrialists. But it is the couple's remarkable philanthropic work that stands as their true legacy, preserved in places like the Kenneth Spencer Research Library and the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art..

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jan 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625849199

Kenneth F. Crockett

Kenneth F. Crockett holds a BA from Central Missouri State University and a JD from Washburn University. He served as Assistant United States Attorney for the state of Kansas, then First Assistant City Attorney in Topeka and Special Assistant Attorney General for the state of Kansas. He went on to practice private law and taught at both the college and graduate levels.

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Chapter 1

The Spencer Legacy Begins

The Spencer family originated in England and immigrated to the United States during the colonial period, when Kenneth’s grandfather Daniel Reed Spencer arrived in Vermont. Kenneth identified his great-great-grandfather as Calvin Spencer; however, nothing is known about his background. As a young man, Daniel pioneered in Illinois and began a career in farming and cattle. He died at Centralia, Illinois, in 1883.

Daniel’s son John W. Spencer was born in Washington County, Illinois (near Mount Vernon), on November 5, 1840, one of thirteen children. His elementary/secondary education was in the public schools of Washington County, Illinois, and he later attended and graduated from Lebanon College at Marshall, Illinois.¹

At twenty-two, John entered the Union army (on December 21, 1863); served with the Thirteenth Regiment, Company D, Illinois Volunteer Cavalry; and spent the majority of the Civil War in Arkansas, with a participatory role in the Battle of Pea Ridge.

After being discharged at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on August 31, 1865, John returned to Illinois. In his discharge order, John was described as five feet, seven inches tall and dark complexioned, with black hair and black eyes, as well as a farmer by occupation. His stay in Illinois was of short duration—having seen the virgin territories of Arkansas, he had decided to travel west and visit a sister who had moved to southeast Kansas. Although some dispute the year of his travel to Kansas, the family reports it as being 1865.²

John W. Spencer in retirement, as seen in 1929.

Upon his arrival in southeast Kansas, John saw wide-open prairies and rolling grasslands and decided to stay. Thus began the opening chapter of the Spencer family in Kansas. John worked as a cowboy, participated in cattle drives from Texas to Kansas and eventually started his own career as a farmer and cattleman.

Within a short time, through the combination of government grants and purchases, John accumulated more than one thousand acres of land two miles north of what was then the village of Hallowell, Kansas, in Cherokee County, Kansas, inside what had been Indian lands of the Cherokee nation. In 1869, he met, courted and married an Illinois native, Ambrosia LaFavor, whom he described as a beautiful, dark-haired French treasure.

Ambrosia Spencer, circa 1900.

Ambrosia was born on March 9, 1841, in McHenry County, Illinois, one of eleven children (five sons and six daughters). In 1904, she was described as the daughter of Jonathan and Mary M. (Pingry) Favor…a thoroughly educated lady, and prior to her marriage taught 23 terms of school in Wisconsin, two terms in Iowa, and one in Kansas. Ambrosia had moved to Kansas in 1868 with two brothers, who settled in the Wichita area.³

Charles Franklin Spencer (one of Kenneth’s nephews), in researching the Spencer family history, wrote that Ambrosia came to Kansas for the purpose of being a housekeeper for another brother, a homesteader in Cherokee County and widower with an infant child. Soon, Cherokee County developed a need for a schoolteacher, and Ambrosia, with an above-average education, was asked to serve as the teacher. She initially rejected the offer because of her obligation to her brother; however, the women of the area insisted and developed a plan whereby Ambrosia would take her room and board from the various families in the county for one month each, while the women would provide the household work for her brother. Due to this arrangement, Ambrosia became the schoolmarm, riding a horse from prairie homesteads to the county’s one-room schoolhouse.

In his later years, John, who lived some twenty years past Ambrosia’s death (on December 3, 1910), enjoyed telling how lucky he had been to acquire the hand of the dashing, gay schoolteacher, as he had been one of the many suitors for the vivacious Ambrosia.

John and Ambrosia had three children—Charles Favor Spencer, born on December 10, 1872, in Cherokee County, Kansas; Maggie Myrtle Spencer, born in 1880 (she died at the age of two); and Lyda Ambrosia Spencer, born on July 8, 1884, in Columbus, Kansas. In his early career, John was a partner with Ambrosia’s brother, P.M. LaFavor, in a mercantile store in Sherman City, Kansas (a small Cherokee County community). Later, they were partners in a hardware store at Columbus, with John being the money investor.⁴

When John suffered crippling injuries in an 1880 horse accident, he ceased his farming and cattle operation, sold a large amount of his farmland and entered the mining industry. It is interesting to note that on many of the prairies where John Spencer pioneered his farming and cattle operations, nearly half a century later, his son and grandsons would operate one of the country’s largest coal mining operations.

John’s entry into coal mining came during the industry’s infancy. Production of coal in southeast Kansas started in the 1860s, prior to the first coal shaft being sunk in Crawford County, because it was visible and could be removed by pick and shovel—men dug coal from outcroppings and transported it by wagon to the only settlements in existence, at Fort Scott, Kansas, and Carthage, Missouri.⁵

Historians have disputed who founded Pittsburg, Kansas, and when, but they seem to agree that with the coal boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the population of Pittsburg mushroomed to more than fifty thousand residents.⁶ That was the Pittsburg that John Spencer found when he entered the coal fields of Crawford and Cherokee Counties some twenty years into the area’s industry.

The mining editor of the Pittsburg Headlight, Fred Henney, wrote in Mining History of Crawford County in 1904:

When the Missouri River, Fort Scott & Gulf Railroad was built through the county, in the memorable race from Fort Scott south to the Indian lands, the railroad company really disregarded the coal. Although the railroad company owned nearly all of the land which later became the coal belt of the county, they did not appreciate what riches underlaid the land. It was true that they knew coal cropped out of the surface and had been removed from the surface for years, but an agent who was sent here to look into the mineral prospects, reported that the coal existed merely on the surface, and that there was no probability of mining ever being profitable…

By 1877 perhaps one hundred miners were working along Carbon Creek, getting out coal.⁷

After reviewing the digging in 1877 of the first coal shaft at a location that ultimately became the town of Pittsburg, Mr. Henney wrote that by 1879 a coal camp had developed on Carbon Creek named Edwin, after Colonel Edwin Brown (the colonel would be one of the incorporators of Pittsburg & Midway and its president in 1887); a second shaft was sunk at this camp. He reported that Edwin was considered more important than Pittsburg since it had numerous mining operations versus Pittsburg having just the one shaft. Mr. Henney proceeded to write:

But Pittsburg just about this time was visited by a Wisconsin man, who changed the course of affairs, and definitely assured the permanency of Pittsburg. This man was Robert Lanyon, or Bobbie Lanyon, as he was best known. Mr. Lanyon had come west from Mineral Point, Wisconsin, to see what he could make in the Joplin (Missouri) district. Lanyon…quietly acquired extensive zinc land holdings, and within a few weeks he had commenced building a block of zinc smelters here…This smelter was the beginning of the great zinc industry which firmly established Pittsburg, and which resulted in the growth of the mining camp to a city with today a population of 16,000.⁸

The first coal camp with the requisite company store, houses and school was built for the Oswego Coal Company at Carbon in 1880. Twenty-eight company houses were built, along with the company store, and that store was also used as a school that graduated many of the prominent business men of Pittsburg. Among the men who were connected with this old store were W.C. Seymour of Seymour Dry Goods Company, Ed Nevius, superintendent of the Nevius Coal Company, John Tracy, city clerk of Pittsburg, and other prominent Pittsburg men were identified with the store as managers. Mr. Henney also noted that [t]he years 1885 and 1886 marked the beginning of the boom in the coal district. In those two years no less than ten or twelve new coal concerns commenced operations in the district…the Chick brothers, W.H. and James, of Kansas City…with the late J.T. Morrison, formed the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Company, and commenced stripping operations north of Litchfield.

Robert Lanyon and his brother, S.H. Lanyon, became stockholders of the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Company in 1895 when the corporation was formed in Missouri and its Kansas predecessor dissolved.⁹

Pittsburg & Midway Coal Company would become the future of the Kansas coal industry; in the state, it would be synonymous with coal. In sixteen years, it would become the impetus for the development of the Spencer legacy. But first John W. Spencer would begin the tradition of a Spencer being involved in the coal industry within southeast Kansas for three generations.

Chapter 2

The First Spencer in Coal

In 1881, John incorporated the Columbus Coal Company. By 1904, he owned two coal mines in Cherokee County, was an investor in two additional area coal mines and three additional coal companies, owned lead and zinc mines in Kansas and held investment interests in silver and lead mines in Colorado. Although starting his adult life as a United States military officer and later becoming a cowboy, John ultimately set the family standard for his son and grandson to follow (and significantly expand). And the impetus for it all had simply been that fall from a horse.

John’s many business interests (landownership, farming interests, cattle operations, mineral mining interests and coal mining firms) continued to grow and expand over the next ten or more years. By the time of his retirement in 1918, the mining industry in Cherokee and Crawford Counties had reached gigantic proportions.¹⁰

Reports in 1917 reflect that the local United Mineworkers Union chapter, District 14 in southeast Kansas, had a membership of sixteen thousand. Coal mines, mostly underground operations, were everywhere in those counties.¹¹

During this period, where one saw a burden (a pile of earth and stone extractions from the mine site), John saw a tipple, where the coal would be processed (separated from other minerals and categorized by size), as well as a camp that included the miners’ tents and houses built by the mine owner, a company store and other retail establishments (usually saloons, restaurants and, in some instances, a hotel). The industry was thriving, and John W. Spencer was a southeast Kansas pioneer and its most successful operator.

In Pittsburg & Midway’s private publication of 1985, A History of the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Company, there is a detailed description of the difficulties of underground mining in the early days in southeast Kansas:

A successful underground coal mine was a very special enterprise. Operators were a blend of gambler, promoter, engineer, market analyst, and negotiator. Miners were skilled laborers…exposed to ever-present danger and constant job insecurity. It is little wonder that both groups were highly organized and fiercely independent. To fully appreciate the environment in which operators and miners worked, consider a deep-shaft mine in 1885. The top house or coal tipple was the only part of the mining operation visible at the surface. Beneath the tipple the main shaft was sunk vertically to the coal seam. The main shaft was approximately 8 by 13 feet, and its depth ranged from 35 to 300 feet. All underground mines in Kansas operated in a single seam. Once the main shaft was sunk and carefully boarded, the top house was built, the necessary machinery installed, and mining operations commenced…

At the bottom of the shaft, main entries were constructed, usually twelve feet wide and eight feet high. Side entries were constructed off these main entries at right angles. Small cars were placed on the rails that were constructed in all the entries and mules were used in 1885 to pull the cars to the main shaft…

Every 30 feet or so, a pair of side entries were connected. Two miners would start digging toward each other, and after digging about 200 feet, they would meet. Thirty feet away, two other miners would dig toward each other. A six foot wall of coal was left as a support pillar. When a tunnel (room) was completed, a canvas cloth (or a door) was hung to direct the air flow. The seams at the Midway mines were 3’2 to 3’8, so miners had to work in a stooping or reclining position. The roof above them was slate and very treacherous, so they carried chocks or pieces of wood cut in about four foot lengths to be used as props.¹²

In retirement, John’s investments included real estate, farms, mines (lead, zinc and coal), cattle, oil and retail establishments. Just south of his coal, farming and cattle operations was the area of Galena, Kansas. In 1868, minerals had been discovered in that locale by a farmer digging a water well—the shiny surfaces of rock turned out to be lead and zinc. As a result, the Galena area became the producer of 30 percent of the country’s zinc and 2 percent of its lead. In 1896, the two boom areas within the United States were described as Cripple Creek, Colorado, and Galena, Kansas.¹³

Pittsburg became the beneficiary of zinc mining at Galena; the former’s development as an industrial city was directly related to the development of zinc smelting. Pittsburg in the 1890s became the zinc smelting capital of the world because of its railroad network built to support the coal industry, a labor market made up of the many immigrants who came to work the coal mines and an overabundance of coal to operate the smelters. By 1900, Pittsburg had six smelters with forty-two furnaces, a capacity to produce fifty tons of smelter daily and one thousand men working the plants.¹⁴

The following inscription appears on the Weir-Pittsburg Coalfield Miners’ Memorial at Immigrant Park, Second and Walnut Streets, Pittsburg, Kansas:

With the discovery of coal in Cherokee and Crawford Counties in the late 1860’s, thousands came to work the mines. Some from American towns and cities but most were immigrants from Europe. Over fifty nationalities settled in this area. Many landed at Ellis Island and continued here by railroad before heading out to the coal camps. Some came to find work. Some to escape repression. Some to find new life in America. All were seekers.

The Weir-Pittsburg Coalfield would eventually be home to more than one hundred coal camps. At one time, this region produced a third of the nation’s bituminous coal and smelted lead and zinc ore in such quantities that southeast Kansas became an industrial giant. The mix of nationalities in these camps created an ethnic geography unique to Kansas that came to be known as The Little Balkans. The miners not only dug coal but gave voice and leadership to the United Mine Workers in its efforts to establish the eight-hour work day, guarantee safe working conditions, secure equal pay for equal work, create child labor laws, and implement minority and women’s rights.

This memorial is dedicated to the men and women who not only toiled to extract coal from the Earth and create a homeland but also engaged in a courageous struggle for social reforms that advanced the cause of human and civil rights in America. A diverse populace of uncommon strength, ingenuity and heart, their presence lives on in their descendants and in the businesses, farms and towns they established throughout southeast Kansas.¹⁵

The Kansas mine inspector reports reflected how within southeast Kansas, young men customarily withdrew from public school and entered the mining industry as early as nine years old. In the early days of mining, particularly in shaft and slope mining, the miner’s pay was based on the tons of coal he removed, and if a son worked with his father, the son’s production was added to the father’s.¹⁶

In 1889, eight years after John entered the mining industry, Thomas McNally Sr. brought his wife and five children to southeast Kansas. A boilermaker by trade, Thomas opened a shop soon after his arrival in Pittsburg, and years later, the McNally family and the Spencer family would become neighbors.¹⁷ A McNally/Spencer relationship would appear later during Kenneth’s teenage years.

Chapter 3

The Second Generation

Charles Favor Spencer attended Columbus, Kansas schools and went on to attend the University of Kansas. His one sibling, Lyda Ambrosia Spencer, graduated from Cherokee County High School in the spring of 1903, attended the University of Kansas and married Charles Akres of Akron, Ohio. (Akres became a leading manufacturer of clay building products, roofing materials and roofing systems.)¹⁸

Following college, Charles returned to Columbus. Although John preferred that he become a farmer and stockman, Charles saw King Coal as his calling. In 1892, he became a clerk at Columbus Coal. Soon he had worked his way through the various steps in the business’s management structure to the point that he was the company’s superintendent. By John’s retirement in 1918, Charles had become a southeast Kansas leader; by reputation, he was a pioneer in surface mining versus the antiquated method of deep-shaft mines.

On October 23, 1895, three years into his Columbus Coal Company career, Charles married Clara Hughes. Clara was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, on February 10, 1876. Her parents, Joseph and Margaret Hughes, migrated to Colorado in 1885. Clara was a devout Methodist and a true believer in the Sabbath being the day of rest; she was seen by some as quite pious.¹⁹

Charles and Clara had three sons: Harold Hughes Spencer, born on March 5, 1897; Kenneth Aldred Spencer, born on January 25, 1902; and John Galen Spencer, born on August 3, 1905.

A college picture of Charles Favor Spencer from his University of Kansas days.

Kenneth, Harold, Charles Favor and Galen at a rare family gathering in1940.

Clara devoted Sunday to the Lord, so much so that the playing of her favorite game, contract bridge, was prohibited on Sundays (and she was a dedicated bridge player, even demanding that her maid know the game). Consistent with her belief that one only performed the Lord’s work on Sunday, Clara would not allow her sons to attend Sunday movies. Later, when she was a grandmother, Harold and Hazel would always tell their boys to not let Grandmother Clara know they had gone to a Sunday movie.²⁰

Clara banned alcohol from her house, and being an ardent Republican, Democrats were also banned from the Spencer household, as were Jews, Roman Catholics and African Americans.²¹ There are no documents recording what her reaction was to Kenneth marrying an Episcopalian.

After beginning as an assistant bookkeeper and then progressing through promotions to treasurer, general manager and finally president, Charles ultimately assumed management of the company’s two mines. Clara’s contribution was to help maintain the company’s books. Charles spent most of his time each week riding freight trains while selling coal.

In the early 1900s, Charles and C. Newlands formed the Spencer-Newlands Coal Company, with Charles continuing to work for his father’s business, Columbus Coal Company.²² Spencer-Newlands established two shaft mines, Nos. 9 and 11, near Mulberry, Kansas, for the purpose of supplying coal to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad company.

Kenneth and Harold (on the horse) as children in Columbus, Kansas, in 1907.

Ten years later, when Charles became an owner of a coal enterprise in Crawford County, it was reported that within the county, there were forty-four coal mining companies operating more than sixty coal mines, employing more than seven thousand miners and producing more than 4 million tons of coal. Crawford County was producing more than 60 percent of all coal produced in the