618. Garnett, Anderson County (KS071)

I am very, very seriously contemplating starting a new feature called Dear Future Arborists.  How many courthouses have I come across that are beautiful, but cannot be photographed?  This courthouse is lovely in red brick and white hewn detail, but it’s hard for you to see that because of all the big green leafy trees on the grounds obscuring the view.  Perhaps, if there was some kind of warning available on the internet to future generations so that this tragedy could be avoided?  The term doesn’t even return results in search engines, opening up the possibility of building it from the ground floor!  Of course, I should probably have an arborist or landscaping expert on call for such an endeavor.  I guess I’ll get a staff arborist right after I get that intern and researcher I’ve been talking about for so long.  And perhaps a photographer, too?  Other than considering staffing needs, it was a quiet morning on the courthouse square.  Nobody, except a couple of walkers and the occasionally passing car.  I kept on the lookout for horse drawn carts because I had seen a couple of signs warning me that they might be encountered.  I would later learn that Garnett has a century old Amish community.  I saw no Kansas Amish.  I don’t know if that is the great regret of my life (it isn’t). 

Once again, there is always a cemetery.  I grabbed it on the way to the courthouse.  Bisons in fenceposts seem to be a theme for the morning.  As always, mapping decided to give me an easy route to the cemetery, but a crazy, backroad studded path into town.  What would have been wrong to taking me back to the main road and into town?  Instead of driving those red earth, occasionally wagon rutted roads in?  And, now that I know about the Amish community, the ruts make much more sense!  I was afraid I had passed through one of those invisible time portals I’m always seeing on television and in movies!  Oh well, that was all I needed.  I soon found myself back on a modern-ish, paved road, intent on reaching…