Emporia, Kan. is the official founding city of Veterans Day, a holiday first suggested by an Emporia resident in 1953. Over 70 years after the proposal, Emporia residents honor those who have served with banners hung around town.
Veteran banners hung from lampposts feature a photo of soldiers with their duty information and inscriptions decided on by the soldiers’ families. They can be found down Commercial Street, 6th Avenue and Kellogg Circle.
According to the commemorative publication Beyond the Banners: Home of Heroes, a pair of volumes containing the history of the banners and the stories of individual soldiers, the veteran banners program began in 2014 when a number of community members noticed various ways that military bases honor those who have served. A committee then formed under Emporia Main Street to create banners for veterans, which was deemed the safest format to endure the unpredictable Kansas weather.
When the Main Street office first opened to banner applications, the staff hoped for 44 banners to decorate Commercial Street. That first year, 107 banners hung from designated posts, and the high demand has remained consistent through the years.
“Each year we tried to add a little bit more to the program, and we used to have it where we would open up banner, like, application day, and people would camp out outside of our office overnight to make sure that they got one,” said Jess Buchholz, Community Development Coordinator at Emporia Main Street,
Continuous requests for new banners and banner renewals have resulted in the program’s expansion. The use of ESU campus space provided about 60 more locations for banners, and even with the added locations, Main Street is usually forced to keep about 300 applications on hold. Coordinators soon realized that the “first come, first served” strategy they had to process applicants was largely inequitable considering the quantity of potential applicants.
“We decided that the, you know, line-up-and-see-if-you-got-lucky scenario didn’t really allow for everyone to have a fair chance to participate,” said Buchholz. “We had some people who were like, ‘I can’t do that, I can’t sit in a chair for 10 hours and hopefully get a spot,’ or there were other limitations. Or maybe we had some people who were from Emporia and lived out of state, and that wasn’t conducive to them, so we switched to an online application.”
Buccholz believes that community interest in the veteran banner program reflects Emporia residents’ investment in the communication of veterans’ stories, and Emporia Main Street has made an effort to do just that. Becky Smith, former member of the Main Street team and current city commissioner, suggested that the program capture their stories in short biographies that were eventually anthologized in print and digital form.
“When we started this in 2014, you know, we would have people coming in and applying for the banner spots and, inevitably, that always turned into a story about the veteran,” Buccholz said. “And it was really remarkable, some of these stories that were being told in our office…And so we started giving folks the option to provide a biography for their banner, so they could write down that history of their veteran… It was just really cool to read those and very inspiring. And I think it’s just a really important part of our community’s history that shouldn’t be lost.”
There are approximately 260 banner locations throughout Emporia. Over 400 veterans have currently been through the program, with each term lasting four years during the month surrounding Veterans Day. Short biographies for each veteran are compiled on the Emporia Main Street Facebook page and in the two existing editions of Beyond the Banners, the proceeds for which go to veterans projects in Emporia.
