Welcome to Virtual Old West Lawrence!

"Where the streets are paved with bricks."

Here's what we hope you'll be able to find here soon:

• something about the history of Old West Lawrence, which includes the story of Quantrell's Raid, and a little bit about a few of our past and current residents--some of them famous, all of them interesting
• images of some of our houses and gardens
• newsworthy neighborhood events and happenings
• and anything else we decide to put here!

We're not the only ones who think our neighborhood is special! Here's what the March 1995 issue of House Beautiful has to say about OWL:

"About five minutes from the Eldridge Hotel, in the area around Louisiana Street between 6th and 9th streets, remains one of the finest residential neighborhoods in America. Old West Lawrence is distinguished...by a graceful mixture of styles, a wealth of detail, and the careful siting of each house. As I walked its streets--going from Gingerbread Victorian to Italianate to bungalow to those wonderful simple clapboards that stand up square and solid off the ground--I was looking not only at a good-natured competition to have the finest house, but also at a whole anthology of solutions to a comfortable and fulfilling family life."--William Bryant Logan, "Crossing the Sea of Grass" House Beautiful, March 1995

Famous OWL'ers

• Clyde Tombaugh,February 4, 1906 - January 17, 1997, who discovered the ninth former planet, Pluto, in 1930. Here's how Sky Publishing Co. reported the story of the discovery:

  February 18th marks an important date in the history of solar-system observations. On that day in 1930, a young observing assistant walked into the director's office at Lowell Observatory and announced, "Dr. Slipher, I have found your Planet X." With that, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh made known his discovery of distant Pluto. The planet's existence had been predicted by turn-of-the-century astronomers based on what they thought were perturbations in the motions of Uranus and Neptune. But now we know Pluto is too small to have any measurable effect. What it *does* have is a satellite, named Charon, which was discovered in 1978. That proved very fortunate, for just a few years later the orbit of Charon and Earth lined up in a way that caused the two objects to pass repeatedly in front of one another. Coincidentally, the first of these "mutual events" was detected exactly 10 years ago, on February 17, 1985. But they will not occur again until early in the 22nd century.

  Tombaugh lived with his wife, Patsy, near Las Cruces, New Mexico. He still had -- and occasionally used -- his homemade 9-inch reflector with which he honed his keen powers of observation. In the 65 years since he discovered Pluto, the planet has completed only about 1/4 of an orbit around the Sun.

  
  

  Copyright 1995 by Sky Publishing Co. Used by permission.

  
  

  Clyde Tombaugh passed away in 1997. Updated information on him is at: www.oarval.org

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  Other local links of interest:

  • Old West Lawrence Association - "The best neighborhood in America"
  • Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods (LAN)
  • City of Lawrence, KCN
  • The Lawrence CyberVillage , orginally at the Lawrence Public Library
  • Elizabeth M. Watkins Community Museum, Dedicated to preserving Lawrence's fascinating history
  • Artists In Kansas Kansas Art Centers, Kansas Art Galleries, Kansas Art Museums
  • Beats In Kansas The Beat Generation in the Heartland

(©2005-2017 George Laughead) See: museum myspace.