SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

store. Mrs. Selts was born in 1848 in Ridgeway, New York. She moved west and married
Benjamin D. Selts in April of 1866 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The next year the Selts family moved
to Clay County, Kansas, to establish a farm in Goshen Township. After the Selts homestead
failed three years later, the family moved into Clay Center. Mr. and Mrs. Selts had one daughter
who died at about two years of age and one adopted son, Henry. 80 In 1874, the Selts family
began a hotel business, which Mrs. Selts managed. 81 Once the railroad came through Clay
Center, the Selts House flourished. It was only during the disastrous grasshopper infestation of
the 1870s in which the Selts’s did not make a profit. A Clay Center Times article commented,
“They ran the Selts House for five years,—were there during grasshopper times—and for a while
did a losing business, feeding the moneyless hungry once in their flight from the hopper
scourged prairies.” 82 Mr. Ben Selts became city marshal and street commissioner after he sold
the hotel business in 1880. He also worked as an auctioneer traveling to California, Colorado,
and Minnesota. 83 Mrs. Selts’s own business career took off in 1880 when the family purchased
another building in which she established a successful millinery and jewelry store. 84
The Selts Millinery and Jewelry Store rose to prominence in the Clay Center community.
Mrs. Selts’s business was so successful that the newspapers noted its anniversary in 1905, the
twenty-fifth year of the store’s continuous service in business. The article quoted Mrs. Selts’s
pride in her business, “This year, A. D. 1905, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of continuous
service in business, without ever a change in the name of firm in any way; no doing business in
other people’s name; no failures, successful or otherwise, and only one move in twenty-five
80 The Times, 24 August 1911, 1.
81 The Times, “It is Historical,” 6 April 1905, 1.
82 The Times, “Tribute From Her Friends,” 5 December 1907.
83 The Times, “Ben Selts Dead,” 22 October 1903, 1.
84 A millinery store sold women’s hats and other articles such as lace and ribbon.
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