Peter Pan Park

This Emporia park carries a name born of grief. The famous newspaper editor William Allen White, who ran the Emporia Gazette and won a Pulitzer Prize, lost his sixteen year old daughter Mary in a horseback riding accident in nineteen twenty-one. In a tender editorial after her death, he wrote that she was a Peter Pan, a child who refused to grow up, whose enthusiastic spirit lived on even after she was gone.

White donated the original fifty acres to the city in nineteen twenty six and nineteen twenty seven, and the park took the name from that editorial. A bust of White by the sculptor Jo Davidson was dedicated here in nineteen fifty by former President Herbert Hoover. For a time the park even kept a small island that sheltered monkeys retired from the circus.