Wichita Heritage Quarterly

The auction tent went up on a Tuesday in late September, three days before the wheat would have come in, had there been anyone left to bring it in. Henry Mueller stood at the edge of the gravel turnaround in front of the white farmhouse his great-grandfather had raised in 1881, hands deep in the pockets of a canvas coat that smelled faintly of diesel, and watched a younger man he did not know unfold a folding chair on the front lawn. Around the chair, in neat rows that followed the slope of the yard toward the windbreak, were arranged the contents of four generations: a sod-busting plow with iron teeth worn smooth; a 1947 John Deere Model A with its original two-tone paint chipped down to the metal; a butter churn; a school desk from a long-closed one-room schoolhouse outside Cheney; a coffee can full of Indian Head pennies; and, set carefully on a card table near the porch, a leather-bound family Bible with births and deaths recorded in three different hands since 1856.

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