This interview with Doctor C.B. Myers who practiced medicine in Madison, was conducted in 1986 by Anne Wilson. Myers began practicing medicine in 1923 and retired in 1987.
“I was born in Alden, Kansas on November 23, 1900. My first name is Courtney and I have no middle name. Alden is about seven miles northwest of Sterling, Kansas. My dad was an agent for the Santa Fe Railroad there. My dad was with the railroad for 49 years and the last twenty he was working in Madison. He started working for the railroad in New Mexico. When he was there, he and my mother and the section foreman and his wife were the only whites there. All the others were Mexican or Indian. My parents were 40 when I was born. My siblings and I are all seven years apart. My dad originally came from Ohio and met mother in Illinois. He went to Chicago to learn how to run the telegraph before he went to New Mexico. There was an agent at St. John, Kansas whose wife had tuberculosis and he wanted dryer climate and dad wanted closer to Illinois, so that is how he got back to Kansas. He was at St. John for 14 years, then Alden, then Walton, which is by Newton, and then Reading and he did not like it there because he could not go to dinner at noon because two trains met there at that time. They said they would transfer him to Madison in 1907 and he came down and looked around and liked it and spent the rest of his railroad career at Madison. I started school at Madison.
“My wife’s name was Leona Banes. I started going with her when I was a junior and she was a sophomore. She graduated from Emporia State with a major in music and a minor in art. She taught music for a year or two at Burlington before we got married. She graduated in 1924. I got out of Kirksville College in 1923 and we were married in 1927, as she wanted to teach for a few years first. We had one son in 1929 and he only lived three days. Later we adopted a girl who is married and lives in San Jose, Calif.
“I went to school my first three years down in town and then went to fourth grade up on the hill in the old West school. I only spent two months up there and then moved to the new elementary school. The old West school was still a high school. We had about 40 students in every grade back then in elementary school. A lot of those students did not go on to high school. They started working. I only had 16 in my graduating class. I graduated from high school in 1919. Fred Banes was in my class and he still lives in Madison.
“When we moved to Madison in 1907 there were two railroads. The Santa Fe and the Missouri Pacific. The Santa Fe branch line ran from Emporia through Madison, Hamilton, Eureka, Climax, Severy and down to Moline and the other line ran from Emporia through Madison, then southeast to Hilltop, Virgil, Quincy, Toronto and on to Chanute. There were four passenger trains, two running each way and two freight trains each way on both lines. Lamont was on the Missouri Pacific line. That line ran from Butler, Missouri to Madison. They ran a train over and back each day on that line. The passenger trains were discontinued on both lines first. People getting cars started the end of passenger trains.
“The first car in Madison was a Maxwell owned by Dr. Moore. The drive shaft looked like a chain drive on a bicycle. That would have been about 1909 or 1910. I was just a kid and Dr. Moore had an office that had been a house, and he had an x-ray machine, which was the first one in Madison, maybe the first one in Greenwood County. Later Judge Whittier had a feed store where Sauder has a building and he had the first Studebaker in town. The first car I rode in was a Stanley Steamer, which my dad had and that was in 1912. My dad had an uncle up in Ohio who was quite wealthy and when he died, he gave each of his 17 nephews $10,000. He came home with that car. It had a steam engine and was pretty loud when it was running.
“When I came to Madison we had dirt streets, hitching posts and wooden sidewalks. The sidewalks in front of the stores were built up about six inches. The streets would get pretty bad when it rained. They had a town pump with a trough around it to get water for the horses. Most people had a cistern for their house. When I was a kid, we lived where Ross Clopton lives now. We put in a bathroom and put a tank up on the roof and we would fill that tank up by hand every so often. When we took a bath, we got water out of a water reservoir that we had in our cook stove. Most of the stoves burned wood or coal. It was next to the firebox. Up until the time we put in that bathroom that had a bathtub we took a bath in a galvanized tub in the kitchen. We still had an outhouse out back. We did get an electric plant. Where the greenhouse is, there use to be a pump station and that was where the electric plant was. It would start up at 6 p.m. and shut down at midnight. If you did not get home by midnight, you were in the dark.
“In the winter they would go down to the river and cut ice and put it in the insulated icehouse. They used sawdust for insulation. I think I was about thirteen before we got electricity. I remember cleaning the chimneys of the coal oil lamps. My wife’s folks lived where Gilbert Rhoades lives now. They had on the hill by their house water that ran down into the house so they had a septic tank for their bathroom, which was indoors. When I came back to Madison to practice medicine the city was putting in sewer lines. Oil was discovered here in 1922. I graduated in 1923 from med school and had no intention of practicing here. The town was booming. They were building the movie theater. Oil camps like Burkett, Seeley and Thrall were all going. Lamont was an oil camp. At one time there were more people living in the township than living in Madison. Kenbro must have had over 300 people living there. They had a refinery, school and little store. They had a two-room schoolhouse and a post office.
“When I came to Madison, they had livery barns and one blacksmith shop. One of the barns was down by where they keep the school buses now. The other one was up by the city building. You could rent a horse at the livery barn and the barns would feed horses for people who had a horse and lived in town. You could rent a surrey, which had two seats or a buggy, which had one seat.
“Some of the farm families would come into town for church and then take me out to their house for dinner and then we would come back in for Sunday evening church. There were two hardware stores. One was Crawford’s and the other one was Sowder’s. Two dry good stores, two hotels, one was the Madison Hotel. Jerome and Suzie Lindsay ran one of the hotels and when her husband died, she kept it for a long time. That was across from the depot. The other hotel was the Maple Grove Hotel. It was where the Central Christian Church is now. There were two restaurants. One was down by the depot. The freight train came in about noon and all the freight had to be checked out for the stores, it would not come in by the carload. They had three dray wagons that would haul the freight from the train to all the merchants in town. Tommy Hinds had one of the wagons, he was an Englishman and he had a team of mules. Ike and Mose Burris were the other dray wagon owners. They did not have trucks yet.
“Walter Banks had a drug store down where the insurance office is now. They had two feed stores. There were two banks, The First National Bank, Wehrman ran that and then the Martindale people who you have heard of ran the Madison Bank. We had a third bank for a while, The Farmers State Bank that was where the board of education office is now. It started about 1918 and went broke in the Depression in the 1930s. There were three churches. The Methodist Church, a frame church, was where the present church is and it was built in 1919. There was a Presbyterian Church in the same location as the one is now. The other church was the Christian Church and that was a frame church. It was located where the Frazee House is now and later, they built the one across the street on Main.
“There was a dentist here by the name of L.A. Cummings. There were doctors Kunkle and Frocht, who were here in the 1880s and 90s. Doctors Black and Moore were here around the turn of the century. There were four doctors when I first moved here to set up practice. Doctors Hartzel, Haynes, Lose and myself. Dr. Lose came in 1907 and Doctor Black eventually made the move to Virgil. A Doctor Cranston came in here somewhere. Hartzel came in 1922. Dr. Fairbrothers was here for a number of years. He married Susie Clopton’s sister. In those days you could start a hospital in a house, but not today. Another doctor who was here quite a while was Doctor Burke. I started June 15, 1923 and finished my 60th year on June 15, 1983. When I first came here there was not a hospital in Emporia. St. Mary’s Hospital was built about 1913 and it was down by the Catholic Church that is south of the tracks. By the time I got started in practice in 1923 Newman Hospital had been built and St. Mary’s Hospital had built a new hospital in the north part of town.”
