Hands Across the Sea From Kansas to France

The Three Hundred Citizens of Morganville, in North Central Part of State, Make a Step Toward Peace in Adopting the Village of Feves, Near Metz.


MORGANVILLE, KAS., Sept. 4 - This quiet little town of 300 population in North Central Kansas has a main business section not quite a block long. But the night of August 27 it buzzed with a crowd of 2,000 people from the surrounding countryside, attending an International Peace Festival that launched Morganville�s adoption of a French village.

The main thoroughfare was jammed with people and the cars that lined both sides of every street in town were parked two and three deep around the business section. It was a mob scene out of a Cecil B. DeMille epic.

Doing Something About War.

The people of Morganville decided that they had no desire for further war and should do something about it. They felt that all the diplomats in the world could not make a lasting peace if the people of the world did not help and appreciate one another.

So, as an example to be followed by other towns, they adopted the French village of Feves, a farming community of Morganville's size located near Metz. Morganville will send food, clothing and other supplies to supplement the meager rations of Feves, but will not attempt complete support of the town. A correspondents exchange will be started. The preacher in one town will write to the preacher in the other, the school teacher to the school teacher, the farmer to the farmer, and it is hoped that everyone in each community will be able to write to someone.

This project, Morganville's UNESCO project, was made possible by Operation Democracy, a non-profit organization with headquarters in New York, which specialized in promoting and making arrangements for town adoptions. Operation Democracy will see to it that Morganville contributions arrive at their destination and are fairly distributed. It also helped Morganville select Feves as the town to adopt.

This is the third such project in Kansas. Neosho County has adopted the Dutch town of Zevenbergen and Friends University in Wichita, the Hungarian village of Sarkerestes. But it is believed to be the first time, in the United States, that a town as small as Morganville has started such a program. Prior to Morganville, the smallest town with such a project had a population of 5,000.

Starts With a Pageant.

The program was divided into two parts, a pageant from 8:30-9:30 and a street fair and dance until the wee small hours. The pageant was held in an abandoned basement converted into an amphitheater normally holding 400 people.

One hundred and fifty people participated in the pageant depicting the founding of the town in 1870 by Ebenezer Morgan, a retired sea captain, and went through the history of the town down to the pageant. Costumes of all nations showed the variety of countries that have contributed to the settlement of Morganville. The place was a riot of color. There were costumes of Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Mexicans, Russians, Romanians, Japanese, French, Irish, Scots, American Indians, Asiatic Indians, Germans, Chinese, Egyptians and Hawaiians.

Congratulatory telegrams were received and read at the pageant from Milton S. Eisenhower, president of Kansas State college and national chairman of the commission for UNESCO, the French consul in Chicago and Operation Democracy in New York.

The street fair that followed included a stand selling foreign cookies, a stand selling home made ice cream and cake, and pony rides for the children. The proceeds of all sales - about $600 - went to the fund for Feves.

Lowell Brandner
Kansas City Star
September 5, 1948