‘Good luck to the finder:’ Seeking clues to who we are at the oldest working courthouse in Kansas

The historic Chase County Courthouse stands in Cottonwood Falls. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

COTTONWOOD FALLS — Just about where a visitor first sets foot inside the Chase County Courthouse a letter was found in 1950, when workmen were replacing the hardwood floor in the main hallway.

The message was slipped into a crack between the boards the last time the floor was replaced, in 1924.

“This beautiful bright February day Mr. Levi Chandler, the county treasurer, and the janitor, Harry Hudson, are laying a hardwood floor in the courthouse hall,” the letter began. “Mr. Chandler is doing the work for nothing if the commissioners will let the county pay for the material.”

The letter was written by the treasurer’s wife, Carrie Breese Chandler.

The courthouse had been completed in 1873, and the floor of the hallway had been worn nearly to splinters by tides of Chase Countians coming to pay their property taxes, to register or transfer deeds, to appear in court, to be jailed in the basement, and to marry and sometimes divorce. The building is now a Kansas icon, and the oldest working example in the state, but when Carrie wrote the letter a century ago it was already an old building in need of repair.

I was thinking about Carrie’s letter and the responsibilities of county office when I entered the courthouse on Monday, Sept. 15, and took the stairs to the courtroom on the second floor. The local Republican committee had called a convention there to nominate an interim replacement for Dow Wilson, who resigned early this month after financial “irregularities” in his department were reported.

The last time I had been in the courtroom was 14 years ago, when Kim and I had been married by a local judge. We didn’t live in Chase County, but in the county next door. Being wed in the oldest working courthouse in Kansas in a county made famous for its sense of place seemed a promising start. Five thousand days later, it still does. Just about everything appeared the same in the courtroom. Did I remember the sign taped to one door that said “JAIL,” with a down arrow? Surely it was a new sign, perhaps made for tours.

I’ve written about Chase County back in 2021, when I questioned the morality of the county running a for-profit detention center. In May of this year I revisited the topic, as the 148-bed lockup was the last and largest ICE-contracted jail facility in Kansas. The detention center is separate from the courthouse, five or six blocks to the southeast on Kansas Highway 177. If there are tours of that facility, they aren’t advertised. But that is another matter.

On Monday, I was in Chase County to observe government at its most fundamental level. Oh, I asked the questions most journalists would ask, the how manys and whens — and I was curious about Wilson, the treasurer who had resigned — but mostly I was looking for clues to an unasked question.

Who are we in 2025?

Your neighborhood may not resemble Chase County — I know mine on Constitution Street doesn’t — but that’s OK. There are many corners in Kansas, from the town of Nicodemus founded by formerly enslaved people to the Hispanic majority in Dodge City to the historically liberal college town of Lawrence. They all have some lesson to offer.

There are 2,572 people in Chase County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and 88% of them are white. The median household income is $54,518, significantly lower than the state average. The county also skews slightly older than the rest of Kansas, with a median age of 45.

Republicans hold every elected post in the county, with the exception of a couple of township officials. Of 1,462 votes cast in the 2024 general election, 75% went to Trump. The county had a 2024 budget of $7 million, with an additional $5.4 million for the detention center.

Before the meeting I had haunted Broadway Street, that town’s long main street with the picturesque courthouse at the end, looking for a place where local residents gathered for coffee and talk. But the place I had remembered, the Emma Chase cafe, was gone. Instead, I found a group at the local Senior Center.

It was similar to what William Least Heat-Moon recounted finding in his 1991 book about Chase County, “PrairyErth.” The Emma Chase, he said, was closed and reopened and closed again, and the only place to find a cup of coffee on Broadway was at the Senior Citizen’s Center.

“Cottonwood Falls is probably not dying, but without the courthouse that issue would be moot,” Heat-Moon noted. “Of the thirty enterprises along Broadway, the one commercial street, half are federal, state, or county offices.”

More than three decades later, Cottonwood Falls is still probably not dying.

At the senior’s center I sat with a group of men in coveralls and work clothes ranging in age, I’m guessing from about 40 to more than 70. They allowed it would be all right to ask a few questions, but none of them wanted their names to be used.

I asked about Dow Wilson and the group exchanged tight smiles.

Wilson had been elected treasurer in 2017 (as a Republican, of course) and served a time as jail administrator. All the men knew him or his family and some of them had worked for him at the detention center. He may or may not have had a new job with the state. He had won it big at a casino. And he was still on the board of the Flint Hills Rodeo Association. Held in nearby Strong City, it’s the oldest consecutive running rodeo in Kansas.

All of the men knew about the investigation into the finances of the treasurer’s department. None of them said an unkind word about Wilson.

Wilson lost last year’s primary election to Bernice Albers.

Albers, a native Kansan who moved to Cottonwood Falls in 1989 and taught high school business and English, won the nomination by 34 votes. She told me that she had considered Wilson a friend but had not spoken to him since he mounted a fierce write-in campaign for the 2024 general election.

Albers won easily, 879 to 521.

Unlike other county officers, the term for Kansas county treasurers begins on the second Tuesday in October following the election. While the clerk and sheriff and others began their new terms in January, Wilson had nearly a year ahead of him before handing over the keys. By August 2025, according to the Emporia Gazette, Wilson reportedly stopped keeping business hours, came in on weekends, and had hired a part-time employee to take up the slack.

He was still drawing his full salary of $46,469.

During the first week of August, he won $362,606 playing “Mississippi Stud” poker at the Prairie Band Casino at Mayetta, north of Topeka. Wilson had, according to a social media post by the casino featuring a photo of Wilson, won the progressive jackpot on a side bet with a royal flush, the best hand possible.

Then a bombshell came at the Aug. 29 meeting of the county commission.

“Sheriff Jacob Welsh and (County) Attorney Brian Henderson informed the Board that CPA Cindy Jensen had uncovered irregularities in the financial records with the Treasurer’s office during the annual audit,” according to the minutes of that meeting. “After research Jensen was unable to justify any allowable legal reason for the discrepancies. Jensen reached out to Chase County Treasurer Dow Wilson who said he would look into it but never got back to her.”

The amount in question was between $50,000 and $100,000. The county commission approved a forensic audit by a third party, at an estimated cost of up to $25,000. Welsh was also given access to all county bank accounts from 2022 to present.

Wilson resigned early this month.

Henderson, the county prosecutor, declined to comment on the investigation. The county clerk, Connie Pretzer, told me the commission had not yet received the 2024 audit from Jensen, so she was unable to provide a copy.

I reached Wilson by telephone.

“Hey buddy, I have no comment at this time,” he said.

But wouldn’t he like to tell his side of the story? Explain what happened? At least share some tips on playing Mississippi Stud? Anything?

“No.”

At the courtroom on Monday, the convention lasted 30 minutes. The lone nominee was treasure-elect Albers. After a short speech from her, the committee asked the public to step out while the party voted. Albers was selected to fill Wilson’s unexpired term, pending appointment from the governor.

After the meeting, Albers said she was optimistic because she had confidence in the treasurer’s staff. She also said she had not been privy to any of the details of the investigation.

“I’m kind of in a grey area, because at this point I don’t really have any authority,” she said. “For right now, I’m not a part of it. I know what I read in the newspaper.”

She said the allegations were shocking.

“When I ran, I just wanted to retire (from teaching) and do something different,” Albers said. “I didn’t really have any thoughts about what this might turn into. It’s been almost a year-and-a-half journey, and there have been so many ups and downs.”

I asked her what question she would most like answered.

“Are we all doing what we can to do what’s right for the people of Chase County?” she said.

Treasurer-elect Bernice Albers stands in the Chase County Courthouse at Cottonwood Falls. Albers was nominated to serve the unexpired term of Dow Wilson. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

As citizens we tend not to notice what goes on in government. No matter how old the building is, courthouses — and those people who hold offices inside them — are part of the background noise of our lives. Paying taxes, renewing car tags, dealing with jury duty notices are common experiences, whether we find them merely inconvenient or downright dreadful. You probably haven’t thought about the courthouse much unless you work there or have been summoned to one. But a working government is the infrastructure that makes our lives possible. And a functioning government requires the trust of the people it serves — and the willingness for the people to contribute to the greater good.

As Americans we tend to mythologize the past, to imagine that things were better a generation or even a century ago. As Kansans, we like to imagine that we are part of an unchanging frontier heritage, and the Chase County Courthouse is part of that gospel.

It’s pleasant to visit Cottonwood Falls and walk Broadway and admire the postcard courthouse at the end where you can still enter without having to go through a metal detector. But if you actually lived in Chase County — not just visiting on a Saturday for a sunflower wedding — if you were one of the county’s citizens, more would be expected. It isn’t the local limestone or the native walnut railings that keep the courthouse vibrant, it’s people.

Chase County is part of the answer to who we are in 2025.

We are the overall-clad coffee drinkers at the Senior Center, the county attorney reticent about speaking to the press, the newly minted treasurer facing a problem whose outlines are yet unknown to the public. We’re the visitors seeking a bit of Americana, the predominantly Latino ICE detainees in the detention center, the journalist from just out of town who asks a lot of questions. We’re also the former county official at the center of a gathering storm.

We are in a period of transition, buffeted by forces both economic and partisan, and sometimes of our own making, and whether we find our way through in a form that will be recognizable as American to subsequent generations depends on how we treat each other.

It’s the essence of citizenship.

Heat-Moon became a temporary citizen of the county and contributed to the greater good in his own way, by producing what he called a “deep map.” Some of the residents I met at the Senior Center remembered the writer, and they allowed he got some things right.

“A Kansas City reporter once called Cottonwood Falls a dusty jewel, but it has more fundamental substance, more usefulness than that,” Heat-Moon wrote. “Rather, it’s a chiseled block of native stone, burnt by the sun, otherwise plain, practical, humble, and ordinary except for the tarrying past that each year makes Cottonwood stand out a little more from other Flint Hills towns either dying or embracing some prostitute of progress.”

If Cottonwood Falls ever turns the 1873 courthouse into a museum or something other than a working building, it will embrace probably dying rather than probably not. The courthouse is a living, functioning thing, a constant in the lives of Chase County residents.

In the 1924 letter that Carrie Breese Chandler slipped between the new boards in the courthouse hallway, she recalled how the courthouse had always been a part of her life.

“I can remember as a small child, sitting in the east window on the third floor and seeing antelopes running on the hills east of town,” she recalled.

Elsewhere she recalled reading books at the courthouse, because that’s where the county library was located.

She finished the letter with this:

“There is a crack left where I can put this letter under the floor, so here it goes,” she said. “Good luck to the finder.”