After viewing the slide presentation that accompanies Agnes Harder's History of Brainerd with her and Edgar at the Remington H.S., I bid them farewell, carefully clutching the slides they had graciously agreed to loan me so I could make copies of them and return them the next day. I headed west on K-196 towards Wichita, stopping in Whitewater for a few minutes to drive up and down its wide, clean, but quiet Main Street, taking in the town's towering grain elevator and contemplating the difference a few miles of railroad track can make in a community's history.

With the wind whipping my Honda from side to side along the narrow two-lane highway, I made it over to I-35 and headed south to Wichita, where I spent the night after dropping off the borrowed slides for overnight duplication at a local graphic service bureau. Before walking across the Arkansas River from my hotel to watch the first few innings of a wind-throttled Wichita Wranglers baseball game, I dialed the home of Jake Cornelius, a Brainerd resident whom Agnes suggested I contact to get another perspective on the whole affair. She had warned me that he was very busy and that I might have a hard time getting him on the phone.

To my surprise, he answered on the first ring, and seemed to be expecting my call. We made plans to rendezvous at his house the next morning and "have a look around" what's left of Brainerd.

The next day, I drove out early, dropped off the slides with Edgar, and pulled off Broadway into the shady, narrow confines of Brainerd proper, slowly putting down Horner Street til it dead-ended opposite the old grade school (now a colonial-style private home). Jake's house -- an adapted mobile home -- was hidden from my view, behind a long, battle-scarred old 1970s sedan, from under which he emerged, wiping his brow, as his dog, Tiny, yipped around his feet. We shook hands, and he motioned for me to get in the car. "Well, let's get started then," he said. "So, what do you want to know about Brainerd?"

The Brainerd Connection

Jake knows plenty about Brainerd, and seems to know every inch of countryside in the surrounding county, as well.

His family has been here since 1870, when his grandfather, George Washington Cornelius, came West from Illinois and homesteaded in a log cabin not far from the present townsite. Jake's father, George, farmed in Milton Township and moved the family to town in 1927, when Jake was a youngster. Jake and his brother, Robert, and sisters, Wilma Cornelius Carter and Mildred Cornelius Brown, have all lived in Brainerd proper for much of their adult lives.

Jake grew up in Brainerd and attended the old Brainerd School in the 1930s. After finishing high school, he left the area and enlisted in the service, fighting in World War II. When he returned to the states, he moved around the East Coast, working at a gas station in West Virginia and several car dealerships in the Washington, D.C., area. He returned to Brainerd for good in 1950, and has made a living at farming, repair jobs and general maintence throughout the county.

He's done everything from raising coyotes to building homes. He has lived alone for 30 years in a modified mobile home, several feet away from the old Johnson house, a two-room original town structure he now uses for storage, along with an old outbuilding behind his trailer.

Brainerd People and Places

As we drove around the streets of Brainerd, stopping at every lot to examine each house and foundation, Jake interspersed his description of the individual homes with his personal memories of the town. As he spoke, he pointed at a blank copy of the 1905 plat map, and I did my best to scribble down notes accordingly.

His fondest memories revolve around the old stone schoolhouse, and the tether ball games he described from his grade school days. But being a man of few words, he didn't elaborate too much, directing me instead to take a look across Horner Street at the site where the old church once stood, and describing the home that was built upon the original foundation. By the site of the old Mellor house, Jake shook his head as he recalled the way the house had been allowed to run down until it burned down one night from a fire started in the adjacent garage.

We pulled up in front of his sister's house, across Neiman Street from the old general store (now a Grace Church missionary home), and pointed out some slabs of stone jutting out under her back screen door. "These old flat rocks were part of a rock sidewalk on both sides of the main street," he said. "They were there when I moved here in '27."

The blacksmith shop at the north end of Broadway was vacant then, he recalled. "Nothing to it when I came here. Just a building -- vacant. Had a motorcycle in it. Must have sat there 15 or 20 years. Guy ran it into a hay wagon."

Jake also remembered houses on the west side of Broadway, and says he, too, had seen the foundation rock work its way up out of the soil from time to time on that side of the road. He pointed out some natural swales in the empty field that, he said, indicated were the foundations once stood.

As we drove along Jacob Street, the town's northernmost and most ruin-studded street, Jake pointed out the site of the home of the odd German bachelor farmer whom my grandmother had been told to avoid at all costs. "His name was Kierkhofer," said Jake. "He would kill possums and skunk and make soup out of them and sleep on their pelts for his bed. When he died, they say he had a trunk full of silverware and all sorts of good stuff. Funny -- he used to live in not much more than a little old barn and he had all that stuff stashed away."

Beyond Brainerd

We topped off our Brainerd cruise with a 30-mile tour of western Butler County, passing by the same relocated Brainerd home that I had seen the day before with Agnes and Edgar Harder. En route, we stopped at the peaceful Brainerd cemetery and Jake related the local legend of a group of immigrants who were found frozen to death in a boxcar and later were buried in an unmarked mass grave here in this peaceful grove.

We trucked on down towards Towanda, stopping for burgers and Cokes at a local roadhouse, and then nosed about the backroads in search of a farm estate sale that was slated to take place the next day. After locating it, Jake sized up the large store of implements and household goods, and pointed out the complexities of several rusted-out old tools and ball bearing aseemblies with the practiced eye of an experienced mechanic. Promising to return the next day, Jake nosed the old sedan over the bumpy farm road and motored us back to Brainerd, where his dog, Tiny, somehow sensed our arrival,and greeted us a mile from where we last left him, chasing the car's tires all the way back to the old Johnson house and Jake's yard full of equipment, tools and memories of Brainerds past.