Lawrence resident Conrad Altenbernd is pictured with an old corral post he found on an 80-acre piece of farmland owned by his family since the 1870s. The property sits between Lawrence and Eudora.

Admitting to an attraction to old things during a tour of his Vermont Street garage, Conrad Altenbernd suddenly pointed to a porch swing hanging from the rafters.

His uncle crafted the swing in a long-ago Eudora High School woodworking class, using walnut harvested from trees that grew on a family farm in the Kansas River Valley between Lawrence and Eudora.

“People asked me what I was going to do with it,” he said. “I said I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to let it be sold to some stranger at auction.”

Nearby was a jar filled with spikes that were once driven into ties on the railroad that connected Eudora and Lawrence south of the river. The spikes’ purpose is revealed by the numbers on their heads, which correspond to the year they were driven into freshly placed railroad ties so that workers at a future date would know when the ties should be replaced.

“They gave the old ties to the farmers living along the tracks,” he said. “My family pulled the spikes out.”

Conrad Altenbernd unfolds the original title abstract from his property, an 80-acre piece of farmland owned by his family since the 1870s purchased from Susan Bush, a member of the Shawnee Indian tribe.

The swing and spikes aren’t mere historical curiosities to the 67-year-old Altenbernd, but links to his family history. It’s a four-generation history handed down through family stories and supported by a patchwork of documentation.

Foremost among the documents is the original abstract for 80 acres of Kaw Valley bottomland that predates his family’s ownership of the tract by 35 years. The 1858 document gives possession of the 80 acres in the name of President James Buchanan to Susan Buck of the United Tribe of the Shawnee.

“She must have been a powerful person in her tribe,” Altenbernd said. “She was allotted thousands of acres of ground.”

The same year Buck was allotted the 80 acres, brothers Konrad and William Altenbernd arrived in Douglas County from Horn, Germany. His great-grandfather Konrad and his brother soon began acquiring land in the Kansas River Valley east of Lawrence.

“They lived side by side on identical farms,” Altenbernd said. “My great-grandfather’s original farm was right down the road from this 80 acres. It was a pretty good chunk of land. He bought it from the same Shawnee woman.”

In April 1883, after the Shawnee had been mostly removed to Oklahoma, Buck sold the 80 acres listed on the abstract to his great-grandfather for the considerable Gilded Age sum of $3,300.

His great-grandfather had been a miller in a gristmill within a Horn castle, Altenbernd said. He and the brother who journeyed with him to Kansas had four older brothers they would probably have been expected to work for, had they stayed in Germany. Instead, they started new lives in Douglas County.

His great-grandfather wasn’t among the Abolitionists from New England or Ohio who made Lawrence an antislavery stronghold during Territorial Days or the Civil War, but a family story dating to before the purchase of the 80 acres from Buck reveals where Konrad Altenbernd’s loyalties were.

“They got up one morning and saw Lawrence burning from Quantrill’s raid,” he said. “They went into a 200-acre cornfield. They hid out the whole day, and the next morning my great-grandfather brought a wagonload of potatoes into town.”

His great-grandfather prospered, eventually owning more than 1,200 acres, Altenbernd said. He took advantage of the coming of the railroad south of the river to market his farm’s produce.

“My great-grandfather built a weigh station right there on the farm,” Altenbernd said. “I think they weighed potatoes. I have one year of their weigh tickets. He must have been quite a guy. He was a private banker in about 1870. I have about two years of his loan books. He loaned money to all kinds of people down in the bottoms at 3 percent interest. And he loaned up to about $6,000. Back then, that was quite a sum of money.”

After the 1901 flood, his great-grandfather moved to a home that still stands on the southeast corner of 15th Street and Haskell Avenue, Altenbernd said. Konrad Altenbernd had an orchard and made wines for his church. It wasn’t the only property he owned in Lawrence.

“He owned land all over town,” Altenbernd said. “He even owned property in the Fairfax area up in Kansas City.”

His great-grandfather set all his sons up on farms, including his son Conrad, who inherited the 80 acres purchased from Buck.

“I have signatures of my great-grandfather and grandfather,” he said. “They’re identical to mine. We’re all left-handed. The signatures have the same slant and everything.”

There is one difference. Altenbernd and his grandfather spell Conrad with a C. Neither that Americanization, nor the families’ six-plus decades of residence in Kansas, were enough to clear his grandfather of all suspicion during a period of German paranoia.

“My grandfather had to sign an alien card, saying he’d be loyal to the United States,” Altenbernd said. “They have it at the Eudora Community Historical Museum.”

Part of his great-grandfather’s holdings passed down to his father, Elmer, Altenbernd said, and he spent his first years in the valley on his father’s home on acreage just east of the 80 acres his great-grandfather bought from Buck in 1883.

The family was forced off the farmstead in 1951 when a swollen Kansas River, then untamed by Milford, Tuttle Creek and Perry dams upstream, inundated the valley. ?

“The whole farm was under 9 feet of water,” Altenbernd said.

His family lived for five years in a trailer on his great grandfather’s property at 15th Street and Haskell Avenue, Altenbernd said. After the flood, his father became a carpenter and then a seed salesman, Altenbernd said.

“I think he always wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “My uncle farmed the land. My father didn’t have any equipment.”

His father remained attached enough to the land to pass down the 80 acres in the Buck abstract to his children. Altenbernd said he bought out family members a few years back and has been learning more about the property and farming. He’s cleared brush from the property and plans to install a circle-pivot irrigation system in a well drilled on the property in the 1970s.

“I sharecrop it with a neighbor,” he said. “It’s planted to corn and soybeans. It’s good land. It does really well. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a century farm. There’s a lot of them in Douglas County. You think, ‘1883. That was a long time ago.'”

There’s other family stories about the land Altenbernd wants to explore.

“A French fur trapper was supposed to have had a cabin on the property,” he said. “That’s the story. I want to get a friend with a metal detector out there to look around.”