Atchison, Kansas
My wife carries a now dog-eared copy of this photo of Amelia Earhart in her pocketbook. She was given it at the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum in Atchison, Kansas, which is in the Gothic Revival house that belonged to Earhart’s maternal grandparents. Perched high on a bluff on the west bank of the Missouri River, it’s where the pioneering aviator was born at the end of the 19th-century.
Earhart lived here off and on between the ages of three and twelve. Her father, who was a lawyer for the railroad, moved the family around a lot. The poor man also suffered from alcoholism, which would challenge the family’s well-being in all ways, including financially.
In an otherwise troubled childhood, Earhart clung to her fond memories of her time here. Though she lived in many places, she always considered Atchison her hometown. It’s here, writes biographer Susan Butler, that Earhart felt “secure of her family’s position, nurtured by tradition and surrounded by friends.” The friends she met here as a child would remain her best friends for the rest of her life.
We stopped here on a drive from Kansas City to Omaha. And as tempting as it is to say that Earhart came from the middle of nowhere, Atchison–like so many Midwestern towns–once boomed because it was in the middle of everything or at the very least conveniently located along a popular path between East and West.
Either way, places are created by the meaning people attach to them. And Earhart viewed her grandparents’ home in the northeast corner of Kansas as the perfect place to take off from.
