In the spring of 2023 I drove out to a farm north of Andale to attend an estate sale, not as a buyer but because the woman whose house was being emptied had been a friend of my mother's and I felt I owed it to her memory to stand in the kitchen one last time. By the time I arrived the auctioneer had already started on the silver. He worked from a folding table set up under a white tent in the side yard, and behind him, on a long row of tables that had been borrowed from the Mennonite church down the road, lay the accumulated objects of three generations: a set of Reed & Barton sterling flatware, a tea service that had been a wedding gift in 1939, a wooden cigar box full of buffalo nickels and Mercury dimes, a Singer treadle sewing machine, two quilts pieced from feed-sack cotton, and a tin breadbox with a hand-painted lid that I recognized at once as the one that had stood on the kitchen counter every time I had ever been in that house.

I bought the breadbox. It cost me four dollars. I have it now on a shelf above my desk in Riverside, and it is, I think, the closest thing I own to a thesis statement for this publication.

Wichita Heritage Quarterly exists to document what gets kept and what gets sold in Kansas families — and, more importantly, to take seriously the difference between the two. We are not an antiques magazine, though we write often about antiques. We are not a history journal, though we publish long pieces of regional history. We are not a profile magazine, a coin newsletter, or a real-estate publication, though we are all of those things in turn. What we are, finally, is a quarterly attempt to write down what happens at the moment a generation hands its objects, its land, and its memory to the next one — or, increasingly, declines to hand them down at all.

Wichita is a particular kind of place for this work. The city was platted in 1870, two years after the county was organized and only a year after the first permanent settlement on the Arkansas River. Within five years it had become the northern terminus of the Chisholm Trail and the loudest cow town between Fort Worth and Abilene. Within twenty it had become a respectable middle-sized city of brick storefronts and Methodist churches. By the First World War it was building airplanes. By the Second it was building bombers at the rate of one every ninety minutes. The result is a city whose attics and basements are unusually full, and whose families — the families that stayed — tend to know with some precision where the things in their houses came from.

The country around Wichita is fuller still. Sedgwick County was settled by Germans from Russia, by Mennonites who arrived in 1874 with seed wheat sewn into the linings of their coats, by Irish railroad workers, by freedmen from Tennessee, by Bohemians and Czechs and Swedes. Each of those communities brought a slightly different idea of what was worth keeping. The Mennonites kept seed and Bibles. The Germans kept silver. The Irish kept rosaries and rifles. The freedmen, who had been forbidden to keep almost anything, kept names — long carefully memorized genealogies passed down orally until they could safely be written into a family Bible. A century and a half later, all of those things turn up at estate sales in the same county, on the same tables, priced by the same auctioneer.

We pay particular attention, in these pages, to coins and to gold and silver — not because we are an investment publication (we are emphatically not) but because the relationship between Kansas agricultural families and physical specie is one of the great underwritten stories of the American interior. The farmers who broke this prairie did not trust banks, and for good reason: the banks that financed the early settlement period failed regularly and spectacularly, and a depositor in 1893 who walked into a country bank to retrieve his savings had a non-trivial chance of finding the door padlocked and a hand-lettered notice tacked to it. The response, for two generations, was to keep money at home, in physical form, in silver dollars and gold coin. My own grandfather, who farmed eighty acres outside Cheney from 1928 until his death in 1971, kept a Mason jar of silver dollars in a hole he had dug under the floorboards of the back porch. He added one each year on his wedding anniversary. When he died there were forty-three of them.

That habit did not end with his generation. It tapered, certainly — the silver dollar stopped circulating in 1965, and the kind of farm-kitchen accumulation that produced my grandfather's Mason jar became, by the 1970s, something more deliberate: a hobby, a hedge, a quiet inheritance strategy. But it did not end. The estate sales we cover in this publication still produce, with remarkable regularity, coffee cans full of Morgan dollars, cigar boxes of Walking Liberty halves, and the occasional pre-1933 gold piece tucked into a desk drawer behind a stack of unpaid utility bills from 1962. Those objects have stories, and the families who inherit them have decisions to make, and we believe both the stories and the decisions deserve to be taken seriously and written about at length.

A word about how we work. Wichita Heritage Quarterly publishes four issues a year — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter — and nothing in between. We do not run breaking news, weekly columns, or anything that could reasonably be called a blog. We do not accept advertising. We do not run sponsored content. We do not publish reader correspondence, though we read every letter we receive, and the address for those letters is printed on our masthead and on no other page. Our editorial commitments are simple and, I think, old-fashioned: long articles, slow reporting, paragraphs that have been written and rewritten until they are worth the reader's time, and photographs that are taken specifically for this publication by photographers who live in or near Wichita and know what the light here does in October.

We believe, finally, that heritage is not a thing you inherit but a thing you decide to carry. The breadbox on my shelf is not heritage. It is a four-dollar tin breadbox with a hand-painted lid. What makes it more than that is the decision I made, standing in a stranger's yard on a Saturday morning in 2023, to pick it up and take it home and put it where I would see it every day. Heritage is what you do at the auction table. It is what you carry up the stairs and into the next house. It is what you teach a granddaughter the name of. Everything else, eventually, gets sold.

— Margaret Holloway, Editor