Connecting in ‘the middle’ is the American way

Mary Chapin Carpenter sang about “Middle Ground” in 1990, so credit her with an “assist” in the scorebook, helping put Lebanon, Kansas, on the world map. 

Carpenter’s song may have helped just a tad in paving the way for entertainer Bruce Springsteen to recently spotlight Lebanon as the “middle of America.” He portrayed the little Kansas community as a symbol of unity.

Springsteen starred in a Jeep television commercial that aired during the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, 2021. He spoke about the importance of freedom, urging Americans to come together as a people…and to connect in the middle. 

Lebanon, with a population of 252, is the closest town to the geographic center of the 48 contiguous United States, a distinction awarded in 1918, as a result of an official U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey project. 

Today, an 80-year-old limestone monument marks the spot. 

For an article in The Wichita Eagle, Beccy Tanner interviewed Thomas Fox Averill, an authority on Kansas history, to get his thoughts on the subject of “life in the middle.”

 

Averill said: “Being in Kansas puts you in the middle of time and space. Everywhere you look, there is distance. That sense of being is at the center of the ‘plains experience,’ of surviving that aloneness. It forces you to make your own significance. You have to earn your significance.” 

The late Milton Eisenhower, former university president and younger brother of U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, said Kansans are “a unique blend of Puritan morality from the East Coast, southern chivalry from the Old South and rugged, western individualism. It all comes together to form the Kansas character.” 

The official state song of Kansas, “Home on the Range,” grew out of a poem, “The Western Home,” written in 1871 by Dr. Brewster Higley VI, a physician. He was a homesteader from Indiana who built a cabin on West Beaver Creek, not too far from Lebanon. 

Dan Kelley, a local fiddler, set the poem to music in 1873. The tune became the anthem of the frontier, “a feel-good, western love story,” some said. “The song spoke to hope, opportunity and dreams.” 

The late Kirke Mechem, another of Kansas’ great historians, said Higley’s words represented “a perfect blending of man’s nostalgia for home with his dreams of some far-away and fairer land.” Mechem termed the song as “the ideal expression of the love that Kansans feel for their unpredictable state.” 

Lebanon was chosen as the name of a small settlement on Kansas’ Middle Oak Creek that formed in the early 1870s. The people turned to Jackson “Jack” Allen, a Bible student and leading literary man of the day, to select the name for the town. He chose Lebanon. 

This section of Kansas was blessed with an abundance of cedar trees, and Allen knew the Old Testament references to the cedars of Lebanon, which were described as “trees of grandeur.” 

The nation of Lebanon (officially the Lebanese Republic), is the smallest recognized sovereign state on mainland Asia. Its flag features a green cedar in the center, a symbol of holiness, eternity and peace. 

When the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad threaded its way west through Kansas in 1879, it “missed” Lebanon. 

So, in 1887, the residents of “Old Lebanon” picked up their town, down to the foundations, and moved it four miles northeast in order to be on the railway…and give themselves an opportunity to survive, grow…and become “middle America.”