By KIRBY ROSS
Phillips County Review
In recognition of the Sesquicentennial celebration — the big 150th Birthday Party — which will be held in Kirwin on Saturday, Oct. 5, the Phillips County Review has been running original historical articles on the community.
It wasn’t unusual for some of us who grew up in Kirwin in the latter part of the 20th century to hear the tale of how the Kirwin Bank was robbed back in the “cowboy days.” As is common with the retelling of legends over decades of time, that story even had it that the bank was robbed by Jesse James.
And, as with many legends, there is usually a kernel of truth in there somewhere. In regard to this particular story, the kernel is that yes, somebody tried to rob the Kirwin bank, and yes, that attempt was made in the 1800s.
But it wasn’t made by Jesse James, and the attempt wasn’t a broad daylight strong-arm holdup with six-shooters and a posse–it was done in the dead of night with explosives, and was unsuccessful.
The Phillips County Review first started on the trail of this story after reading one of Fort Bissell Curator Ruby Wiehman’s great articles of her own she has been putting out in support of promoting the Kirwin Sesquicentennial celebration on Oct. 5.
In one article she ran on the pages of the Review several weeks ago, Ruby noted back in the 1890s attempts were made to rob the Kirwin Post Office and the Kirwin Bank a few months apart, and she wondered whether the two crimes might have been connected.
Maybe. After researching both, we’d have to say maybe.
With Ruby throwing clues our way, the Phillips County Review set out to track down “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey might have said, and here’s what we found out.
This particular tale starts out in the early morning hours of Fri., May 3, 1889, when a band of outlaws burglarized a Kirwin blacksmith shop and then proceeded to head over to the post office. Once there they forced their way through the street door and went to work on the safe.
Drilling through its double doors with the smithy’s tools they had just stolen, they then inserted an explosive and lit the fuse.
And, as if right out of a Hollywood movie produced a hundred years later, the resulting explosion blew the Kirwin Post Office’s doors off their hinges, propelling them across the room and wrecking the office interior in the process. The time of the robbery was afterwards estimated to be 3 a.m. based upon reports of “a low rumbling sound” that had been heard around town then.
The take that night was at least $100 the postmaster said was contained in the safe, plus an undetermined amount in a number of registered letters which had arrived on the 12:15 a.m. Missouri Pacific train.
The U.S. Land Office reported it was expecting a package containing $200, which was not found in the post office wreckage, making the total take at least $300 (equivalent to $8,000 in 2019 dollars).
This robbery was reported the very next day on the front page of the Topeka Daily Capital under a large-print headline, “MIDNIGHT MARAUDERS.” A subheadline noted “Robbers Force an Entrance Into the Kirwin Post Office and Secure Considerable Booty.”
Fast forward seven years to December 1896 when an attempt was made on the Kirwin State Bank by utilizing virtually the same modus operandi used on the post office.
That month had started out with a wave of burglaries in Kirwin. The clothing store of Charles W. Hull was hit, with “a quantity of cash stolen. A little later the dry goods store of A. Weaver was twice tapped,” said the Phillipsburg Herald.
Hull may have been specifically targeted. If he wasn’t, then he was just plain unlucky because two more efforts would be made against him over the next couple of weeks. Not only did he own Hull Clothing, he was also vice president of the Kirwin State Bank and owned a ranch just outside of town that straddled two miles of the Solomon River, on which he raised racing horses.
On December 11 Landes Meat Market was burglarized, and nine days later, on Sunday, December 20, the restaurant of George Doebler was ransacked, with a quantity of food and cigars being taken.
The night following the Doebler robbery was the big one though. The night after Doebler’s was the night they tried to rob the Kirwin bank.
It all came to a head that Monday, December 21, 1896. This time the bandits started out at the railyards, breaking into the section foreman’s tool chest where a large crowbar was taken. From there the plan was remarkably similar to the heist pulled at the post office several years earlier.
Using that crowbar to break into a blacksmith shop, the thieves stole smithy tools — a sledge, cold chisel, brace and drill bits.
Shortly afterwards entering the Kirwin State Bank on the east side of the square through a back window, they went to work on the its substantial walk-in vault. While the thieves may not have known it, in 1884 that safe had been described as follows, “a fire proof vault, a heavy burglar proof steel chest with time locks.”
It would prove to be formidable.
Drilling a hole through the door just above the lock, the raiders then poured a quantity of gunpowder into that hole.
As reported by the Kirwin Globe, if the criminals thought they inserted enough powder to blow the door, “in this they were disappointed, as the door is so constructed that a bushel of powd’r would fall to the floor of the vault and even if exploded, would not effect the door.”
Having failed to breach the burglar-proof door, the gang then went to work on it with the cold chisel (a tool made of tempered steel used by blacksmiths to cut unheated metal). Being unsuccessful in trying to break the lock with the chisel, they finally abandoned the bank heist altogether and went on a burglary spree around the entire Kirwin business district.
Charles Hull’s store was broken into again that night, but by this time the clothier/banker had learned his lesson and didn’t leave any money on the premises.
Deterred again and moving on, the gang also broke into the lumber yard of C.E. Bradley and found his safe. This one was much easier to crack than the one in the bank — this one wasn’t even locked. Bradley reported he never used the safe to hold money — only books and papers.
The outlaws also hit Quintard’s grocery and men’s clothing store, where they forced two money drawers open and made a score of exactly $3.00. Quintard noted, “they overlooked fifty-one cents in pennies that was in one of the drawers.”
Which would have upped their total night’s take by 20 percent if they had grabbed those pennies.
The grand sum of loot hauled in after spending hours breaking into the bank and multiple businesses? — $3 cash money, a crowbar, a sledge hammer, a chisel, and a drill.
According to the Phillipsburg Herald, the Kirwin townsmen knew who the culprits were and put out the word they would be dealt with severely if the crime wave didn’t stop.
Said the Herald — “All this burglary and robbery has been very closely traced out until it stops at the doors of three men and two boys. A vigilance committee may be organized, and a great crash in the underbrush is not among the impossibilities.”
The Herald also accused the primary newspaper in Kirwin at the time, the Independent, which was housed in the basement of the bank building, of not reporting on the “Deviltry that is going on in Kirwin.” Accusing the Independent of being too focused on writing about happy things and not wanting to report about anything negative occurring in town, the Phillipsburg newspaper suggested the people of Kirwin were being put at risk due to the suppression of information they needed to know.
According to the Herald, “the Independent has been loth to mention” what had been going on “because it was thought to be the best policy to say nothing if it could not say something good.”
Six months after the attempted bank robbery, on Thursday, June 3, 1897, the safecracking efforts came back around full circle as the Kirwin Post Office was hit once again. And, once again, the safe was blown.
This time the thieves tore off a window screen and then broke a window to gain entry to the building.
As with the original post office robbery and the later failed effort at the bank, the safe was drilled, and explosives were poured in. And with that– “The safe was blown to pieces,” reported the Kirwin Globe. This time $95 in cash belonging to the U.S. government was taken, along with $100 in stamps.
The postmistress was also storing personal items in the safe that were taken, including jewelry, a gold watch and chain, $9 in cash and private papers. She retired shortly afterwards.
“The rascals left no clew by which they can be followed,” reported the Globe.
The Phillips County Review has not been able to find reports regarding anybody being brought to justice in any of these matters, either through the courts or by vigilante committees operating in the dead of night.
We were also unable to find any reports on safecracking continuing in Kirwin, so the Golden Age of blowing up the interior of Kirwin businesses to steal a hundred dollars or so appears to have passed.
The Kirwin State Bank continued operations for another quarter century. In 1922 it took over the bank in Cedar which was going under due to nonperforming loans. A year later the Kirwin State Bank itself ran into the same problem and failed on October 25. With an infusion of cash from local investors it soon after reopened as the Exchange State Bank under new management. No depositor lost money during this shutdown and reopening.
However this iteration of the most prominent bank Kirwin ever had lasted just three years before the failure of the 1926 Phillips County wheat crop resulted in a voluntary liquidation of Exchange Bank assets and the closing of its doors for good on June 10, 1926. This time no other financial institutions or townsmen would play white knight and come to the rescue as they had for the Cedar State Bank and Kirwin State Bank just a few years earlier.
Without anybody to bail it out, and seven years away before the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and government bailouts of banks, Kirwin depositors were paid off just 25 cents on the dollar.
No less worse, without a tenant the building itself would sit vacant for another eight decades. Over the years the structure, an architectural marvel in its heyday, slowly deteriorated and by the early 21st century had fallen into such disrepair that it had to be razed.
No trace of the bank remains, and now its tale, and that of the unknown would-be bank robbers who tried to blow the vault and clean it out 123 years ago, have now faded into the mists of time until all has become just another chapter in the Forgotten History of Phillips County.
“Unfortunately, those are not available at the local clinic,” Krug said. “So a couple of years ago, the vision services coordinator in Wichita, a man by the name of Bob Hamilton, approached me with the idea of having a workshop in Hays.
