On a Sunday in March of 1915, Mrs. Neill was visiting Arkansas City, Kansas.
Arkansas City, in south central Kansas, is built on the site of a great city of the ancestors of an indigenous
people, the Wichita.
Mrs. Neill mailed a postcard to her friend, Mrs. J. Arnold, of Pekin, Illinois.
Pekin is the county seat of Tazewell County, in central Illinois, not far from Peoria.
The postcard bears a hand-colored photograph of the “First M.E. Church of Arkansas City”.
(Until the formation of the United Methodist denomination in the 1960’s, the “Methodist Episcopal
Church” was the formal name of Methodist churches.)
The church building appears new; there is little landscaping around the site- beside the unpaved street
with a trolley track.
Mrs. Neill may be a neighbor of Mrs. Arnold as she reports, “…think I’ll soon be home”.
The weather, we learn, “very cold out here”.
The handsome, large church was a fitting adornment of Arkansas City which has grown rapidly with the
coming of the railroad.
We hope Mrs. Neill returned safely to her home and enjoyed warmer weather in the Spring of 1915.