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Brookville is located on Kansas State Route 140 about 13 miles west of Salina
in Saline county in central Kansas. I visited in November 2002.
Being along a state highway, it is not a true ghost. |
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This is a photo of the Brookville Hotel which appears on
page 179 in Fitzgerald's book (1988). At the time of the photo, it was still in operation,
bringing crowds "daily," as the caption indicates.
Below is the same structure in November 2002. It
is out of business and abandoned. Note that the portion of the porch
that is sagging at the left was sagging in the earlier photo above as
well. |
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Here's another photo of the hotel taken by me in
November 2002. It doesn't look too bad, and it didn't seem like it
would take much to get it back into operation. Since these photos
were taken, however, I found out that the Brookville Hotel is actually
still in business with the same ownership in nearby Abilene, Kansas near an exit off of Interstate
70. It seems that the owners wanted to remain in Brookville, but
they were unable to get the city to modernize the town's sewer system.
With that and several other problems related to the age of the original
building, a decision was made in 2000 to close the original building and
build a new Brookville Hotel.
The appearance of the original was retained in the new building. |
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| Added July 6, 2008: This page was seen by
someone with this photo of Brookville, and they were kind enough to send
it along. The photo is of the main street of Brookville in about
1910. It's always possible to date photos like this because of the
telephone poles. In the early part of the 20th century, when the
telephone was still new and the technology not very far advanced, one
needed essentially a separate pair of wires for each telephone in each
residence or business. Hence the telephone poles tended to have
many crossbars to hold all those wires, just like the ones in the left
center of this photo. Eventually, and fortunately for the sake of
the scenic beauty of our cities and towns, technology advanced to the
point that multiple conversations could be carried over the same wires.
Couple that with the move to putting telephone wires underground in most
cities, and the kinds of telephone poles seen here disappeared.
This photo was taken essentially from the opposite vantage point
from the photo above. The porch of the Brookville Hotel can be
seen at the far left. |
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