This is a very poor quality photograph, but I love it for many reasons and it has great historical value. The photograph is of a Royal Neighbors of America Mother’s Day Program in May 1952. The photograph was taken inside the American Legon Hall on Maple Hill’s Main Street. The hall is no longer there after collapsing in an ice storm. The ladies are posed along the east wall of the hall for this photo.

If you look on the ceiling over the ladies heads, you will not an odd white box with several rectangular holes. This was the little “cage” where Jimmy and Sadie Powell from Topeka, showed films on Friday night. I remember the price being 10 cents per person. There was a serial feature (I still shiver when I think of “The Iron Claw”) a newsreel, a cartoon and a main feature movie. I don’t ever remember going when the hall wasn’t filled to capacity.

The hall was heated in winter with two coal stoves. You see one of them in the photograph. Also shown, are the oscillating fans which provided a little cooling in summer. There were three fans on each side of the room. Not shown, is the stage which was in the front of the room. I have participated in more programs on that stage than I am able to remember. The hall was the center of community life during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and until the new Maple Hill Grade School Gym was built in 1953 and the Maple Hill Community Congregational Church Fellowship Hall in 1960.

I am able to identify a few of these ladies but certainly not all. L-R:
Carry Butefish, Mary (Watt) Turnbull, Mabel Rachel (Jones) Clark, ?, Ellen (Maginley) Turnbull, Rua (Mitchell) Clark, Virginia (Mitchell) Kelling, Flora (Hartman) Barsch, Bess Allen, Estelle Holdenhausen, Belle (Leeper) Miller, ???Charlotte Imturn???, Hazel Pearl (Knapp) Ballinger, Irene Holmes, I do not know who the next three ladies might be), Margaret Ann (Romig) McClelland.