The city of Eudora gets water donated from nine wells under land owned by Lois Hamilton, who has not lived in the city for more than 40 years. Now a company wants to build a sand plant across the road, which could affect water quality.

It has been 44 years since Lois Hamilton really called these parts home.

But as she drives along the rutted roads that criss-cross the flat farm fields that are nestled between the Wakarusa and the Kaw north of Eudora, she still has a story for every piece of land.

Hamilton, 72, will point at a pickup truck in a driveway and tell a story about its owner. She’ll point at a plowed field and tell you who owns it. She’ll point at another and tell you about the banker who financed it.

But the story she lingers on the longest is about her father’s hand. She points at the 90-acre field that is now hers but once was her father’s. Fred Neis farmed about 3,000 acres in and around the Kansas River valley. He did it with a fourth-grade education, and with the help of Hamilton’s mother, who taught him how to read.

And he did it with a happy hand, so to speak.

“I remember how he would bring his deep plow over to help out a neighbor,” Hamilton said. “The neighbors would always come out and ask him how much they owed him. And he would just wave his hand and say, ‘Not a thing, not a thing.’ He always would just wave his hand.”

The 90-acre field is now dotted with nine blue well-pipes that stick a couple of feet above the fertile soil. Hamilton in 2003 began letting the city of Eudora drill water wells on the property. The city owns the few square feet that each well sits upon, and the water rights that go with each well.

Those nine wells pump 195 million gallons of water a year, and provide the residents of Eudora with all their drinking water. For this, Hamilton receives exactly nothing.

“She doesn’t charge us one cent,” City Administrator John Harrenstein said.

Hamilton said that won’t change in the future.

“I just feel like I’m helping Eudora every day, and I want to continue helping Eudora every day,” she said.

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Harrenstein, who has been on the job in Eudora for less than two years, became acquainted with Hamilton when she called him and said she thought it was time for her to donate another well to the city.

“I guess I would describe it as surprising,” Harrenstein said. “At first you don’t really know what to think. In this job, it is kind of like getting a Monopoly card that says ‘Advance to Go.'”

City managers can spend a lot of time worrying about matters such as where a city will get its water in the future. Some cities out in Western Kansas have such concerns that they give their residents free rain barrels. In the eastern part of the state, scarcity isn’t yet such an issue, but the water is usually far from free. Cities and rural water districts often pay the state thousands upon thousands of dollars each year to access water rights in rivers like the Kaw or lakes like Clinton. If you try to get your water from private wells, that usually comes at a hefty price to purchase the resource-rich land.

“There is obviously a financial benefit,” Harrenstein said, although Eudora residents do pay a fee for water service since the city still has treatment and distribution costs to cover. “But the real benefit is we have somebody who really wants to work with us.

“Lois is just an example of a genuinely civic-minded individual who cares about the community. She grew up here, owned businesses here, got her start here, and went on to have a wildly successful career. But she never forgot where she is from, and she always has taken steps to ensure the city has what it needs.”

Hamilton, though, urges people not to make too much of it. Life is about lending and taking a helping hand from time to time. Hamilton has battled cancer three times, battled diabetes to the point that she once weighed 379 pounds (more than twice what she weighs today), and spent 21 days in a coma in 2005 after flipping a golf cart.

“God gave us the water,” Hamilton said. “I’m just giving them the rights to use it.”

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Hamilton bought her first piece of farm ground when she was 19 years old. It was a little piece between Tonganoxie and Kansas City. She paid $125 an acre for it. Today, it has a NASCAR racetrack next to it.

“I won’t tell you what I sold it for,” she says with a laugh.

Hamilton left Eudora three weeks after her father died at the age of 59. She had just married a husband who was sick and would get sicker. She needed to make a living. She had taken classes at various business schools, and one of her former classmates was looking for a business partner.

Come to find out, Hamilton had a knack for understanding property. She would be part of many business ventures over the years — she was an owner of the Eudora lumberyard, took over struggling hardware stores, and for years bought and sold distressed hotel properties.

Even though she left Eudora at age 27, it is still the longest place she has ever lived.

“Most of my life I lived in a hotel room for a few weeks or a few months,” Hamilton said. “Eudora is still the main place in my heart.”

Now semi-retired, she lives in Hot Springs, Ark. Lately, though, she’s been spending more time in Eudora. Hamilton emerged as one of the chief opponents of a plan to build a sand plant operation on 196 acres across the road from her property and the city’s well field. She recently sent out more than 3,000 postcards to every Eudora household with a water account, urging them to oppose the plant over concerns that it could damage the city’s water supply.

The proposed operators of the plant have produced studies that disagree with such assertions, but Hamilton won a victory this week when the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission recommended denial of the plant’s application. It now goes to the Douglas County Commission.

“Oh, I’ll fight it until the end,” Hamilton said. “I’m stubborn.”

But even more than that, she said, she’s determined to keep giving Eudora water. When she returns to the town she grew up in, it becomes harder to recognize. But that doesn’t sadden her. She wants Eudora to grow. Eventually, she would like to see it twice as large as it is today, so that it can have more of its own amenities.

“But if they’re going to grow, they’re going to need more water,” Hamilton said. “I’ve already told them, I’ll take care of that.”

With the wave of a hand.