photo by: Contributed

Two concrete wrens, pictured in 1966, sat outside the WREN building on the northeastern corner of 8th and Vermont Street.

Fifty-eight years ago, in the early hours of a freezing December night, a boiler explosion in a laundry building resulted in a fire of “record proportions” that “destroyed or badly damaged” three buildings in downtown Lawrence from Massachusetts to Vermont streets.

One of those buildings was the “WREN Building” on the northeast corner of Eighth and Vermont streets, which at the time housed apartments on its upper floors and served as an office for the Independent Laundry, whose other nearby building started the fire.

A Lawrence postman living in the WREN Building sprang into action that night, knocking on several doors, helping his neighbors escape and calling the Lawrence Fire Department. That night was said to have reached 12 degrees Fahrenheit, making it so cold that it froze the helmets of the firefighters who extinguished the flames.

photo by: Contributed

George Bruce, a fireman that was at the fire spanning from three buildings on Massachusetts to Vermont Streets in December 1966, with ice covering his helmet.

Water from the fire department’s four pumpers and its ladder truck that stopped the blaze coated the two concrete wrens that sat on either side of the entrance to the WREN Building, leaving them both covered in a thick layer of ice.

Those two 500-pound birds would eventually be all that remained of the WREN Building since it was demolished by the city a few years later.

The wrens have had quite a journey over the years – starting with a few years in South Park, then being vandalized, taken in by the Lawrence Fire Department, and found by local residents in roadside ditches. Since the fire in 1966, the Journal-World has tracked their whereabouts. However, by the early 1970s, the wrens seemingly vanished without a trace, remaining missing for more than a decade.

Their disappearance has been a mystery that many locals and history buffs have been desperate to solve, but a team got word about one of the wrens, and from there, it was a matter of restoring the bird from years of chipping, a broken tail and a broken beak.

That project succeeded, and now, the intention is to have the wren permanently nested at the Watkins Museum of History in an exhibition created by a team of students from the University of Kansas.

photo by: Contributed

The front page of the Lawrence Journal-World on December 28, 1966 after a fire caused damage to several buildings in downtown Lawrence.

The wrens’ flight path around Lawrence

The wrens arrived in Lawrence after Richard C. Jackman acquired full ownership of the Bowersock Mills & Power Company in 1922, after his co-owner Justin D. Bowersock died that same year.

Jackman expanded the milling business by producing and selling the first ready-mixed flour for household use, specifically for bread, biscuits and cakes. The ready-mixed flour was branded under the trade name “Jenny Wren Flour,” with its logo featuring an image of a house wren.

In 1922, Jackman acquired the former YMCA building located at the corner of Eighth and Vermont to serve as the main office for the business. Eventually, it housed the first AM radio station in Kansas, with the call letters WREN. The building was renamed the WREN Building, and at the main entrance, the two concrete wrens – reportedly crafted in the Kansas City area – were perched on either side of the doorway.

photo by: Contributed

Several advertisements and packaging for “Jenny Wren Flour” products.

The building would house many other businesses, as well as tenants in the apartments that developed later on the top floor. At the time of the fire in December 1966, the wrens were still by the front doors. Following the fire, the city of Lawrence arranged for the building to be demolished by the Bill Eichinger Salvage Company of Topeka, which then donated the wrens to the Lawrence Fire Department in 1969.

The wrens were eventually moved to South Park sometime in 1970, but they ended up being damaged by vandals in late 1971. They were taken to the Lawrence Fire Department’s Station #2 for repairs, but that’s when their whereabouts became unclear for quite some time.

Around 1983, Tom Swearingen and Marvin Conner retrieved one of the wrens from north of Lawrence at the railroad tracks at Midland Junction, and it remained in those two families’ hands until Don Martin traded a deer rack for the wren in the early 2000s.

photo by: Contributed

One of the wrens that used to sit outside the entrance of the WREN building is pictured prior to its restoration in Don and Maria Martin’s garage.

From then, the wren remained in Martin’s garage — until Stephen Hill, the grandson of Bowersock, was brought into the loop in 2010, and about a decade later began searching for people who knew about concrete restoration in 2023 with the hope of restoring the wren for public display.

An exhibition at the Watkins Museum of History

Hill contacted Karl Ramberg, who was a local artist in rock and concrete, and Ramberg agreed to help with the restoration of the wren. Meanwhile, conversations about where the wren should be displayed eventually landed on the Watkins Museum of History – which would make the wren viewable by the general public and display an account of its more than 55-year journey.

“The hurdle was to get the human talent to do it and have the will to carry through and to find a place for the wren to rest, because it’s an important icon for Douglas County and for the city of Lawrence,” Hill said.

Executive Director of the Watkins Museum Steve Nowak said that the museum was excited to take the bird in and hand off the project of creating an exhibition to students at KU – which included Amanda Pope, Madison Preuett, Evelyn Theall, Luke Wilkinson and Omotayo Agunbiade.

“At the beginning of the semester we were told, ‘you have this wren, now create a story,'” Wilkinson said. “We were allowed free rein to come up with our own story and exhibit design, and of course, Steve was there to check along the way and make sure we were on the right path.”

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

The Watkins Museum of History

Agunbiade added that this story was all about connecting Lawrence’s past to the present, and that Bowersock Mills & Power Company, which used to own the flour milling operation, is currently celebrating 150 years of generating power at the plant located along the Kansas River. Ultimately, all of it is important because it’s bringing pride to Lawrence.

For the wren itself, Pope said it’s been through so much, from surviving the fire in 1966 to getting vandalized in South Park and disappearing for a decade.

“The fact that this bird is 100 years old and is still standing, and it looks better than it ever has, is inspiring in a way,” Pope said. Theall also added that they felt it was important to narrow the focus of the exhibition on the people that had an effect on the wren and take the visitors along the journey it went on.

Where’s the other wren?

While Lawrence will be able to see one of the wrens in the upcoming exhibition, Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical’s Dillon Brown said that when it comes to the second wren, that’s where the mystery continues.

He said he saw a Facebook post about a decade ago reporting a sighting of the wren in the front yard of someone’s home in Vinland, about 10 minutes north of Baldwin City. Brown said he visited the area himself, but didn’t find any such concrete bird.

“I went down there where everybody said they thought it was, (and) I looked around as much as I could,” Brown said. “It looks like some of the properties down there have been renovated recently and cleaned up, and so I’m wondering if it just got moved somewhere when someone renovated a property.”

Brown added that with the new exhibition at the Watkins Museum, it may spark new conversations and lead them down a new trail of where the second wren might be.

“Hopefully, it’ll show up someday,” Brown said.

• • •

The unveiling of the restored wren will be on Monday, Dec. 9, at the Watkins Museum of History, 1047 Massachusetts St., from 4 to 6 p.m. There will be a presentation on the history of Bowersock Mills and its signature Jenny Wren flour brand. The event is free to attend and visitors can also enjoy refreshments and meet the KU students behind this unique exhibition.

“I want to add a word of praise about the students who were a part of this project because they conceptualized a really good exhibit story,” Nowak said.

Hill said that these wrens have a personality of their own, and the people of Lawrence loved them and they meant something to people.

“I’m so glad that we were able to have this treasure that was so endearing to so many people over the years,” Hill said. ” … I’m just very pleased to have been able to play a role here.”

photo by: Contributed

The city of Lawrence tore down the WREN building in 1969, three years after a fire broke out in downtown Lawrence, damaging and destroying three buildings.