Wulfkuhle Farm |
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By
Aleese Kopf
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| The Wulfkuhle Farm is a unique place. August Wulfkuhle, the man who built the house,and his wife, Caroline Dreves, were German. Almost all of the people that lived around them were German. August went back to Germany three times in his life to get more people to come build homes near his. They built the house in 1869 about seven miles West of Lawrence, Kansas and one mile east of the town of Stull. Besides the house, there is a barn, milk house, smokehouse/bakery and wagon sheds, a chicken coop/forge, and a pig pin. August's grandson built a forge in the chicken coop after WWI. The house is built into the side of a hill. All the buildings except the milk house are made out of limestone, quarried on the land. The house has the date of consruction carved above one of the windows on the south side. A family story is that August needed very little sleep. Some nights, after a hard day's work on the farm, he would make a pair of shoes. |  |
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| The barn was used for multiple chores. One of the areas was a milking parlor, with places where cows would stand and put their heads when they were getting milked. Then, as you went farther in it had the stalls where the horses were kept. The upstairs was used as a storage for hay and housed a grain mill.There are openings where they would drp hay and grain to the animals below. The doorways to the barn were built in an interesting way also. In the smokehouse there was a very old oven opening that caught my eye. The chicken coop/forge was what I saw next. The year 1887 is carved above a window on the side. | |||
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| The gravestone in the family cemetery, where eight of August and Caroline Wulfkuhle's children are buried, is over one hundred years old too. The inscriptions are in German. The cemetery has the graves of their five stillborn children, a child that died at five days old, another that died two months after birth, and Mina, their daughter who died at eighteen years old. |  |
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| Nancy Hughes and her husband Ogden Lindsley are the owners now, and have been since the spring of 1981. They bought the house from August and Caroline Wulfkuhle's grandson and his wife, Theodore and Katherine Roller Walter. The first seven years she lived there with very little running water, except a tiny bit in the bathtub and in the kitchen sink, because the plumbing didn't work. The only thing they have added to the house is the porch they restored on the south side. The original porch was torn down in the 1930's. They have also made a few repairs and put a new roof on the house. | |||
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Resource: Hughes, Nancy. A personal interview. Lawrence, KS: Feb. 9, 2003 |
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This is a Photo
2 project at West Junior High School, Lawrence, Kansas. © Aleese Kopf, 2003 Historic Places / Student Projects / Community Connections / West Junior High / USD 497 |
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