(soft music) - Wyoming history remembers John Kendrick as a wealthy cattle baron, state legislator, governor, and three term US Senator.

But he also was a builder.

And in 1913, he completed the Trail End Mansion.

Today, the big Kendrick House and surrounding property comprised the Trail End state historic site, beautiful, grand, unique.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

Welcome to Wyoming Chronicle.

I'm here in Sheridan today with Sharie Shada.

It's a lot of SHs.

- It is.

- At the Trail End state historic site.

And there's a big house on the property as well, commonly known around Wyoming, around Sheridan as the Kendrick Mansion.

And that's named for - John B Kendrick.

He was a penniless orphan cowboy who first came to Wyoming on a cattle drive.

- How did he build this big house if he was a penniless orphan.

- Yeah, classic rags to riches.

He was a very good businessman.

Worked his way up through the cattle company until he eventually bought controlling interest in it.

Built this home, went on to become state senator for Wyoming, and then governor of Wyoming and finally a three term United States Senator.

- And this was in what period of time?

- We talk about 1913 to 1933.

1913 is when the home was finished.

1933 is when he passed away.

- During that time, he didn't really get to live here all that much, did he?

- No, he sure didn't.

18 months after they finished the home, he was elected as governor.

Halfway through his governor's term, he became the first popularly elected United States Senator from Wyoming and was in Congress the rest of his life.

So this really just became the family's vacation home.

- For a long time, the US Senators were not elected by popular vote.

They were appointed by state legislatures in most cases, but he won the popular vote.

And in those days, if you moved to Washington, you stayed there.

- Pretty much.

- You didn't come home every weekend.

You just couldn't do that, especially if you lived in Wyoming.

- Yeah.

- The way that the senators and representatives do now.

So most of the time they lived there.

It was his children who, this was more of their family home in a way, wasn't it?

- Yes, he had two children, Rosa-Maye, his daughter, who married a military man.

So they lived wherever he was stationed.

And then their son Manville, ran the ranches.

And so Manville raised his family here.

And when the senator passed away, his wife, Eula Kendrick, moved back in, moved back there, lived here with her son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons.

- It's an example, sort of, of what you could do in those days if you lived in Wyoming and wanted to build a nice house and money was really no object.

The amount of money that it cost to build seems almost comically small now.

Still not nothing, but the construction cost at the time was?

- $164,000, which is like us spending 4.8 million on a home.

This is in comparison to a home in Sheridan that's three bedrooms, a bathroom and a garage that you could get for $3,000.

- And how many bedrooms here?

- There are 10 bedrooms.

- How many baths?

- 12.

- 12?

- Yeah.

- And many other rooms besides that?

- [Sharie] Yes.

- And we've got functional living and working space on 1, 2, 3 floors.

- Four.

- Four.

State historic site now, when did that happen and how?

- So the family lived here till 1961.

They tried to sell it for about seven years or so.

Nobody could afford to buy it or if they could buy it, they couldn't afford to maintain it.

So in 1968, the Sheridan County Historical Society bought the grounds and the family gave them the house and it became our local history museum.

They ran it for 12 years.

And then in 1982, it was given to the state of Wyoming as a state historic site.

- How did you get to be in charge of the Kendrick Mansion in Trail End?

- Well, I applied to be the curator, and that was almost 20 years ago now.

And then just through restructuring and retirement, I became the superintendent here.

The state was given the LX Bar Ranch, which was one of John Kendrick's 10 ranches.

And so it's not publicly accessible yet, but we still maintain it.

I also have Fort Phil Kearney state historic site as well as its associated battlegrounds and battlefields and a campground in Ranchester, Wyoming.

- You talked about the ranch property that was associated with the Kendrick family.

That's not really a developed historic site yet, but you're hopeful.

- I am.

I am.

We just need some public access and then people can see a 1910 ranch that was really advanced.

- Good luck with getting that off the ground in the next 20 years.

- Yeah, - Could be what it takes.

Well, let's go look around.

Sharie, this is a room that carries a designation I think a lot of older houses used to have, the library.

Now John Kendrick himself was more self educated than school educated.

- Correct.

- But he made an effort as well, right?

- He did.

He only went to school formally with the teacher until about the fourth or fifth grade.

Mrs. Kendrick on the other hand, went to finishing school.

So learned not only reading, writing, math, but also music, painting, things like that.

- There are a lot of books here that we see around us.

But there are a lot of books elsewhere in the house too.

- Yes.

- They like books.

- Yes.

- Had a lot of them.

And Mrs. Kendrick made an effort to keep track of them, catalog them, display them, and if you wanted to find a book in this house, she knew how to do that.

What was her method?

- She kept this book of titles.

It's a card catalog essentially, just in a journal.

And so each book is numbered with the book in the collection, the number, the title and the author.

And so she has everything organized.

And then this corresponds to the books in this library.

For example, in the back of the books, they have this nice plate with, it says the book number John B Kendrick, Sheridan, Wyoming.

And sure enough, number 204, you go to here and it's sketches of Paris and it correlates, and it's a really organized system.

- And they enjoyed reading and made time for it.

It wasn't just for show.

Look at our nice library.

- Yeah.

- Look at the books that we live with and that we read.

- Exactly.

- Tell me what you said earlier about when the other members of the ranch crew would go to town when Kendrick was a younger man, what he would do.

- Sure.

On on the cattle drives, the story is when they rolled up near town, the cowboys would go in, party, waste their money.

Kendrick would stay back with the herd reading his books that he kept in his saddle bag.

- It reinforces this notion that I think people have of him once you read more about him.

He was thinking ahead, I'm not gonna be a dusty cowhand all my life.

- Yeah.

- And getting some education, even you had to get it himself, was part of it.

- Yeah.

- Sharie, as we moved through the house, the obvious impression is the Kendricks didn't scrimp on anything.

They wanted a nice place to live.

They had nice things in it.

This is the room that was referred to by you as the drawing room.

We might call it the living room or the equivalent of that in a modern day house.

I think one of the things that people like about touring an old house is imagining what it would be like to live here.

You've spent years in and around this house, what would it have been like?

- Some older homes have a more formal and a less formal room.

A room to entertain your company, a room just for the family.

- Right.

- This is it.

So this is for everybody.

It's where they would read, have conversations, play games, entertain their friends.

And they've said, or we've heard stories that you could see guests anywhere from, you know, politicians to the cowboys that worked on the ranches.

They had everybody here.

- Come in here.

- Lots of places to sit.

There's a piano, there's art around the room, which clearly was important to them.

Clearly the house had electric lighting in it, which was not unheard of then, but not all that common, and the lights in this house are just beautiful.

- We have been rewired.

But you can see the old fuse boxes.

- Yeah, still there.

- Yes.

- One of the features that is talked about as well, that I'm sure interests people and we'll see the guts of it later, central vacuum.

- Yes.

- And I'm in a room like this, there's lots of vacuum.

How did that work?

so they had hoses that would plug into wall outlets.

The dirt goes up through the hose, travels through the house, through pipes and ends up down in the basement in a big unit.

So there's a great big vacuum generating, - [Sharie] It weighed 400 pounds.

So it's also called a stationary vacuum.

It's not going anywhere.

But you could choose lots of different attachments because if you have the ability to vacuum so quickly, why not vacuum your radiators and your drapes and your furniture in addition to your floors.

- It was the height of luxury at the time.

And they wanted it.

They could afford it.

They installed it.

How long was that in use?

- We know it was in use until probably the 1940s.

- Really?

- One of the former maids told us that by the time she worked here in the forties, they had switched over to a more modern Electrolux vacuum.

- Which she got to use.

- Yes, she did, yeah.

- The house also has an intercom system.

And we've got four stories we're talking about and made communications easier.

From the looks of it, it was just a mini telephone system.

- Sure, it's a labor saving device.

They could call five different places within the home as well as the carriage house across the driveway.

- And do we know specifically how it worked?

Was there a particular ring for particular room?

- Well, there were dry cell batteries that operated it, first of all.

And then to call someone, you would choose the room, push that button, select ring, and then if you're on the other end and they're calling you, say in the basement, you would hit answer and that would connect you.

- I see.

I think I read an old newspaper clipping that said, referring to the outside telephone, as you might call it, there was a telephone exchange in Sheridan.

- Yep.

- And I think the clipping said this was believed to be the first house in Sheridan that had more than one telephone in it.

- Yes.

- We see a fireplace in virtually every room that we go into.

Of course, they cast off heat, but they didn't count on that.

I'm sure both of them had lived in bigger houses or in Mr. Kendrick's case, colder quarters.

And they wanted heat, and they had a central heating system to supplement and maybe the fireplaces were supplementing it.

How did that work?

- So they had two boilers in the basement and during cold months they could burn up to a ton of coal a day to heat the home.

The home has always been too big for the system to efficiently heat.

- I see.

- [Sharie] But they use steam heat and radiators.

We have a modern boiler, but we still heat the home with the same radiators.

- It's commonplace, especially I think in our part of the country to have radiant heat.

- Yeah.

- And now we tend to have these registers along the floor, which are all they are is radiators.

- Yeah.

- What do you like about this room?

- I love that so many things came from all over the country here.

You have Honduran mahogany, it was all machine tooled in Michigan, sent out by railroad.

The wall is covered in silk from France.

The rug in here cost as much as a three bedroom house did in 1913.

And so, but it's huge.

And it was all made by hand and it was already an antique when Mrs. Kendrick bought it.

So we really have no idea how old it is, but it's an excellent shape.

- I'm just now noticing how huge it is.

- It's intricate, yeah.

- It goes well behind us.

- Yeah.

- And this is what a Persian rug, Middle Eastern.

- Yeah, made in Kurdistan.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

We have Italian marble around the fireplace, but it's livable.

People can imagine themselves living here.

We get that comment a lot from people.

It's not so big that it's cold.

It's very welcoming.

- Sharie, we're in the kitchen now.

I bet you this is one of the super high curiosity portions of the tour for everyone who visits, because you just imagine, again, what if we had to cook in here and how would we do it?

And what did they have?

For one thing, it's very spacious.

And you said it's strategically placed in the house to stay cooler.

- Yes.

It's on the north side so we don't get direct sunlight in here.

The walls are what they call hospital white.

Not only do the tiles stay very cool, but they're smooth and easy to clean.

Sanitation was something that people were considering more.

There's doors that can be closed so you don't make the rest of the house really hot, especially in the summertime.

And then a pass through, so you can still get the food out of the kitchen, but keep the heat and the food smells in the kitchen.

- There was no cooling system then like we talked about the elaborate heating system and there still isn't.

- Right.

- So how warm does it get here?

And you spend a lot of time here in the summer.

- Yeah.

It can get pretty hot, especially on the top floor.

We open windows where we can.

- [Steve] There's a great old range.

It's a stove that had a fuel source in it, which was either coal or wood.

And it was probably being heated most of the time.

- Correct, yes.

- You could operate an oven from it and it has openings and bellows and ways to control heat as best they could.

- Yes.

- There's no temperature dial.

- No - The way we have now.

There's a stove top.

We see a skillet.

We see like a dutch oven sort of pot with some kind of a griddle.

We see, is that a waffle iron?

- It is a waffle iron.

It's one of my favorite things.

- We started to look at that.

There's a cooling rack for pie.

You could keep a pot of coffee there.

- Yeah, the cook really had to know her stuff.

What's in season?

What are they growing in the vegetable garden?

What can she cook ahead of time?

What can she buy ahead of time downtown?

Like ice cream for example.

They wouldn't have to make it.

They could go get it downtown.

And so she'd really have to know her way around the kitchen.

- What do we know about how they ate?

Or has that survived history?

- Well, we know that Mrs. Kendrick didn't like to cook.

She didn't think she was very good at it, but she loved food presentation.

So we have her notes from when she went to the White House, for example.

What did they serve?

How did they, you know, mold the food into some creative design and I think she tried to recreate it here.

Good cooks were really hard to find.

You wanna make sure your cook likes it here.

And they had cooks that stayed for decades at a time.

- It has a beautiful dining room, which we'll see later.

I'm assuming Mr. Kendrick was a cattleman.

They ate beef, I suppose.

- Yep, I would think so.

- That they grew themselves.

You talked about ice cream.

Dessert making was just a source of great pride, I know, for a lot of cooks.

And there was no refrigeration, especially at the beginning.

How was it kept cold?

- Right, so they had an icebox here.

Eventually, they bought a refrigerator, but they had an icebox here.

And for their icebox, they had an outside access point.

So the iceman could just walk up the stairs, deliver the block of ice, and be on his way.

He wouldn't have to wait for someone to be home or track through the cook's kitchen.

- [Steve] This is the dining room.

It is fantastic.

Tell us about it.

- Sure.

So this table's really versatile.

They could have it at its smallest, perfectly round, seats for people.

At its largest, it could seat 20 people because there are eight table leaves that go with it.

- Hmm, 20 people.

That's a big tablecloth.

- Three tablecloths, probably.

- [Steve] Three tablecloths, just to cover it.

They had tableware settings with lots of pieces.

Beautiful stuff, what do we know about that?

- [Sharie] So the set that's on the table right now is called Minton Rose.

It was the China that Mrs. Kendrick picked out for this house specifically.

- So when they got up for breakfast in the morning, kids came thundering down the stairs.

This is where they sat and ate.

- It is, and they would've been dressed for the day and they could have, you know, cereal, toast in the morning to fancy dinners with their friends and family at night.

- They did it all.

It's a fireplace here.

- Correct.

- There's a mantle piece here.

There's a beautiful big sideboard here.

What about the finishing in the room?

This is more of the mahogany.

- It is, yep, Honduran mahogany.

And then there's also painted walls above it.

And then painted ceilings, hand painted.

- Wow.

Below us, right by your foot at the moment, an odd looking thing on the floor as well, what's that?

- That was the servant's call button.

So Mrs. Kendrick would press it with her foot.

She'd always sit here, no matter how the table was configured.

And a bell would ring in the butler's pantry to let the servants know she needed something.

- She needed something.

- Yep.

- And it sort of gives the impression, well here's the lady of the house.

- Yeah.

- What do we know about her?

Was she, did she have a sort of a haughty way about her, do we know?

- No, no.

She was famous for being a great hostess.

She would study up on people beforehand, find common neutral topics to talk about.

So as a politician's wife, she could converse with people on either side of the aisle.

- Okay.

- And she was just known for being a really gracious hostess.

- And there's nothing wrong with having a button to alert someone two, three rooms away that you needed something.

- Sure, right.

It's less rude.

You would never yell.

She didn't have to interrupt conversation and ring a bell.

And I've heard the system was, she tapped it if she needed something, she put her chair over it when they were done.

- Sharie, another high curiosity item at the Kendrick mansion must be the master bedroom suite.

That's where we are now.

Very spacious, very comfortable, very much of its time.

- Yeah.

- Tell us more about it.

- Sure, so this room is big enough to accommodate two of everything.

Two beds, two beds, two dressers.

Having one bed for every single person in your home was a sign of wealth.

There's also a day bed in here.

People wonder about that.

That would be for napping on because you're not going to nap in your formal living room.

- Hmm.

Or in your, - Or in your clean nighttime sheets with your dirty daytime clothes.

- Two radiators as well.

- Yes.

- They wanna make sure that stayed warm in here, even if it was a problem elsewhere.

But signs of comfort, more intimate personal kind of items.

Books that they, I think would've read at bedtime, perhaps.

Art that meant a lot to them.

Family portraits, both photographs and paintings.

We're noticing that it is warmer up here.

You talked about the temperature control on the house, people doing what they could.

We're here in the middle of June, just coming up on the summer solstice.

It's not a super hot day here, but I think for modern people, this is about as warm as you'd ever want it to be in your bedroom.

- Sure.

- But of course at night, - Yeah.

- They learned ways to cool it off.

And a lot of it had to do with opening the right windows at the right time.

- Exactly.

- Sharie, bathrooms are again a hot item for home improvements.

And some things that are old are kind of new again now.

Here you see what the height of luxury would've been in the mid nineteens.

Tell us some things about, this is what we call the master bath right off this beautiful bedroom.

What does it have?

- [Sharie] Correct, so it has the bathtub and shower, the sink, a dressing room and the toilet room.

- And the tub is just fantastic.

Cast iron, I'm sure, under that enamel, probably.

It's big.

- It's six feet long.

You could really sit in there.

But you told me an interesting detail of it, about, and if you look at the fixtures we see now, where does the water come out?

- At the bottom, the faucet is almost next to the drain.

So you could really only fill the bathtub up with about four inches of water.

- So the idea, you'd fill this huge tub up to the brim soak in it, that's not what they did, at least not in this tub.

- Not in this one, which is too bad.

- So the technique of bathing then was what?

- So you fill up your tub with a little bit of water, you soap up and then you stand up and shower off - And the dirty water goes away.

Hot and cold running water, right?

- [Sharie] Yes.

- [Steve] So there's a boiler specifically for the, - [Sharie] The hot water heater.

- [Steve] There's a toilet here.

Recognizable to what we'd see today, but probably not exactly the same.

- A little different shape.

- I just don't know.

- Yeah.

- A tank with gravity, a radiator in there as well and a door that closes, what we used to call the water closet.

Beautiful old tiling, fixtures, good lighting in here.

A nice window here.

A pleasant place to be.

- Yeah, it's a really lovely room.

- I have no trouble imagining living very comfortably if this was my bathroom.

Sharie, we're still in the Kendrick mansion, but this almost seems like a room from a different house.

It's got these dramatic vaulted pitch ceilings and these beams, huge expansive floor.

I can only guess this must have been a what?

- A ballroom.

- A ballroom.

So this was, again, a conspicuous family.

Even before Mr. Kendrick became legislator, governor, senator, they entertained crowds of people here.

There was a musicians loft above us.

Live musicians were here and they danced.

- [Sharie] Yeah, dancing was the thing to do.

You could find a dance happening anywhere in town, every single weekend.

- [Steve] A piano, and it's one of several in the mansion.

You said that it was a musical family.

- Yes.

Mrs. Kendrick, her daughter Rosa-Maye and their son Manville all played the piano.

They all sang.

And we've heard that Mr. Kendrick, being the cowboy he was, played the guitar.

They wanted this room to be fairly simple.

Early architectural renderings show much more detail and they didn't want that.

So we've got rough-hewn Georgia pine beams, 21 foot tall ceilings.

And then the floor is maple, like basketball courts.

And it's also raised up a couple inches.

So it gives it a little flex as you're dancing on it.

- Imported maple, 21 foot ceilings, these huge expanses of beams, the hardwood floor, that constituted simplicity in the Kendrick mansion.

- Compared to the fancy designs that were shown, yes, this is the simple version.

- Do we know if this was a room that was used in any other ways?

Did kids come up here and run around and play or that kind of thing?

- So when the house was first starting to be built, this was supposed to be the playroom for the kids.

But the house took five years to build.

So by the time they moved in, their kids were teenagers.

They didn't need a playroom.

They needed a room to hang out with their friends.

And so we know the first dance here was for Rosa-Maye's 16th birthday.

- Really?

- The electricity hadn't been turned on yet.

They hadn't actually even moved in yet.

So they hung Japanese lanterns from the ceiling for light.

- Sharie, we've come upstairs to one of the less conspicuous, less showy parts of the Trail End Mansion.

We're in the room where the cook lived.

It was her bedroom.

What would her situation have been, typically?

- So cooks tended to be older, unmarried women who still needed to work for a living.

A good cook was hard to find.

You wanna make sure she likes your house.

You're a good employer, but does she have nice lodging?

So she's got the bigger bed, a comfy chair, a sink in her room.

- [Steve] You mentioned earlier, when we were in the kitchen, she would stay here, if everyone was agreeable with one another, sometimes for years.

- Yes, decades.

- Cooking for the family.

- Correct.

- [Steve] And for the other staff as well.

We're also, there's a maid's room and there's a housekeeper's room near us.

Their situations were a little different.

- Sure, yes.

Maids tended to be teenage girls.

The job didn't pay very much and maids tended to come and go.

Maybe they got a better paying job or they got married.

Housekeepers would work to coordinate everybody within the house.

And so they had rooms for three female servants.

They each got a sink in their room for washing up and then they all shared one bathroom.

- Which we've looked into and maybe we'll get it as well.

Not as luxurious as that master bath we saw, but comfortable enough.

Again, by today's standards, so much of what we're seeing, even though it's more than a hundred years old, it's very nice still.

What's the value of continuing to show a house like this to the 21st century public, do you think?

- Yeah.

Well for Wyoming it's very unexpected.

People think cattle baron and they don't necessarily think a modern home for the time period.

Almost everything people see here is original, which is incredible because when the state acquired the home, it was empty.

So when visitors come through, they're getting a very authentic look at what the home looked like, how the family lived in the early 1900s.

- [Steve] The house was empty then.

- [Sharie] When the family moved out, they took their things with them.

- Sure.

- And then when we became a historic site, they started giving things back.

Or today as they downsize or move or whatever, they think of us, and it's really nice to have that generosity.

And so they've just been so great in saying, "This came from Trail End, here's the story behind it."

And now we get to share that with the public.

- It's such an important part of it.

- The story.

- Not just a crate shows up with a chair in it.

Here's what it was.

- Yeah.

- You talked about as well, discovering some diaries where you've been able to match up things you saw in a diary with a particular room, sometimes even a particular artifact.

- Yes.

- Tell the story, would you please, about the, was it the cook who was showing off for her friends or the housekeeper?

- They just hired a new cook in the 1920s and she thought nobody was home.

She's showing off to her friends.

Look at this lovely house I work in and didn't realize that Rosa-Maye was in the next room.

So the cook is in the drawing room.

Rosa-Maye is behind curtains in the library.

And Rosa-Maye hears this woman giving a tour and she's thinking, "How do I politely let her know I'm here?"

The cook opens the drapes between the rooms, sees Rosa-Maye, shuts them.

And then I think her friends probably left.

She was probably very embarrassed, but Rosa-Maye wrote about that in her diary so we have that story.

- That's how we know.

- Yeah.

- And she wrote about it in this little bit of extra personal detail.

- Yeah.

- Not just discovered cook in drawing room.

- Right.

- How am I gonna, a human being.

These are real people who lived here.

- Yeah.

- When are we open?

- We are open April through December, seven days a week.

- [Steve] It's a little bit of an admission fee to get in.

- [Sharie] Sure, it's $8 for adults.

Wyoming residents do get a $4 discount, and children 17 and under are free.

- I can tell you that it would be worth the $4 or the $8.

Really enjoyed our time here.

- Thanks a lot.

- Thank you.

- Good luck to you.

- Thank you.

- And thanks for being with us on Wyoming Chronicle.

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