Chapman St. Patrick's Day Parade

Irish Parade Reflects Chapman’s Heritage

by Cecillia Harris

While we all may don a wee bit of green on St. Patrick’s Day, those in the community of Chapman wear it with special pride.

Irish pioneers settled the Chapman area and the community celebrates this heritage with a parade every year around St. Patrick’s Day, which honors Saint Patrick, the patron saint and national apostle of Ireland who is credited with introducing Christianity to that country. This year’s Chapman parade will kickoff at 1 p.m. on March 13, according to organizer Bob Diehl, who started the parade over 20 years ago as a community event.

 “If you wear green, you can walk in the parade,” Diehl says. “One reason I started it was that not everyone can be in the band or be in athletics, but everyone can be in this parade.”

In recent years, Diehl adds, the parade time was moved to early afternoon to allow children attending all of Unified School District 473 schools to be bused to Chapman to participate in the celebration of heritage.

“I’ve had so many grandparents with tears in their eyes tell me how much it means to see all these kids involved,” he says. “It’s just a fun thing and it brings people back to the community.

After all, the school’s mascot of “Chapman Irish” is a regular reminder of the town’s roots.

Donna Relihan, treasurer of the Chapman Area Preservation Society (CAPS), says historic photographs reveal “Irish” was the mascot back when it was known as Dickinson County High School and remained the mascot despite the name change to Chapman High School when unification occurred in 1966.

“One reason they chose ‘Irish’ was because the Irish settled the town,” Relihan says. “Down at our CAPS building, we have a map showing where the Chapman settlers came from, and many came from all over Ireland.”

According to the book Past and Present Towns of Dickinson County, Kansas by Helen Dingler, Ireland was plagued with a potato famine during the late 1840s and 1850s and thousands of Irishmen came to America looking for a better way of life. John Erwin, one of those early immigrants from Ireland, chose a land claim in 1857 near what would become known as Chapman Creek because of the availability of water and timber.

Other Irish families followed, and a missionary Catholic priest visited the area in 1859. By 1866, the first Catholic Church - called St. Patrick’s - was built near the Erwin home and later housed the first district school, according to the City of Chapman website.

Dingler wrote that when the Kansas Pacific Railroad arrived, the town of Chapman (named after the nearby creek) was laid out in 1867 from land donated by Pat Sheeran, S.M. Strickler and James Streeter. She continues in her book that the area became known as “Little Ireland” and Chapman became “steeped in Irish culture, loyalty, history and wit.”

The first school in Chapman was a stone building with two rooms, according to Dingler. After the Kansas legislature of 1886 provided that any county with  over 6,000 population could have a high school, Chapman had the distinction of constructing the first such school in the nation in 1888. The three-story structure of native limestone opened to students from throughout Dickinson County in the fall of 1889 with the first class graduating in 1893, according to Dingler.

Its purpose was to afford “better education facilities for pupils more advanced than those attending district schools, and for persons who desire to prepare themselves for the vocation of teaching,” according to the general history recorded in the First Annual Catalogue of the Dickinson County High School. Educators in the state at the time believed every county needed a school that could be a link between district schools and the state institutions of higher learning, the Catalogue continues.

The Catalogue further reveals that one of the reasons Chapman was chosen for the county high school was because the community was “energetic and progressive,” traits that would make the school a great success.

In addition, the community had the Luck of the Irish.

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