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Nininger Moment #8
The Brenham Meteorite
Back in the middle to late 1800's as cowboys rode their horses
across the prairie in what is now Kiowa County, they came across
from time to time heavy black rocks scattered across the buffalo
grass. There were no other such stones found else where so the black
stones were a bit out of place. The stones were often used for
weight lifting and shot-put demonstrations. At the end of the
nineteenth century Frank Kimberly brought his wife Eliza Jane to
homestead the area. One of the first things she noticed was the
black rusty rocks that were about in the area. She informed her
husband that the rocks were not ordinary but rather meteorites and
began to keep a pile of them near the house they had made. She was
often laughed at and kidded as the pile grew larger. The rocks were
considered somewhat useful for a number of chores that the locals
had in the area as no other rocks were around.
As a child in Iowa she and her class were taken to a railroad
station to view a great meteorite in transport to an eastern museum.
The experience was one she had not forgotten and how the meteorite
had looked to her when she was quite young. As Frank plowed the
prairie ground he would often plough up new specimens and Eliza
would drag them back to the pile, although this was beginning to
become an irritation to him as the pile grew. Eliza wrote a number
of letters to various places in hopes of finding someone that might
be interested in her meteorites. Finally after five years a Dr. F.W.
Cragen at Washburn College in Kansas agreed to look at the
collection. When he arrived he was amazed and delighted at the pile
of specimens and paid her several hundred dollars for the better
half of the specimens. This sell was enough to buy a neighboring
property where more of the specimens were found. As word got out,
other scientists followed Dr. Cragen's lead and came to buy
specimens and a brisk market was generated for a number of years.
Frank had quickly changed his tune after the first sell his wife had
made, and went out prospecting on a more regular basis. Over a ton
and a half had been sold just past the turn of the century by the
Kimberly's Their place was known as the Kansas Meteorite Farm
Nininger had met the Kimberly's in 1923 and bought many specimens
from them as no interest had been made in regards to the remaining
specimens for some twenty years. This increased Nininger's young
collection at the time and help him finance other searches during
that time. More than three and a half tons total had been recovered
from the Brenham fall and no doubt more picked up and not recorded.
In 1929 while visiting the Kimberly's on their farm Nininger
discovered that some of the masses were in a buffalo wallow which
peaked his interest of a possible meteorite crater. Nininger was
shown a shallow depression that was forty feet wide. The rim around
the edge peak his interest even more. Nininger later went back and
excavation the crater called Haviland using teams of horses and road
scrapers. Each time the crater was cut and scraped detailed
information was noted of features and places meteorites were found
as well as weights and condition of specimens which were mostly
falling apart by their stay on Earth in a wet environment. The
crater formed an elongated bowl of such. Nininger went on to write
several papers on meteorite craters even though at the time they
were not well established. One such paper at the American
Association For The Advancement Of Science in 1933 was titled Meteor
Craters vs Steam blowouts.
Source: Find A Falling Star By H.H. Nininger
The Nininger Moments are articles or books written originally by
Harvey Nininger and put into a consolidated form by Al Mitterling.
Some of the items written in the moments might be old out dated
material and the reader is advised to keep this in mind.
--AL Mitterling
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