Kansas land that is site of Knute Rockne memorial sold for $4 million
Nearly 87 years ago, a plane carrying legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne lost a wing and crashed on a farm in rural Chase County, Kan., killing everyone aboard.
A marble and limestone monument was built at the crash site honoring Rockne and the seven others who died.
On Friday, the 1,539-acre property that includes the memorial was sold at auction for a little more than $4 million, according to Griffin Real Estate & Auction Service, a Kansas company that is overseeing the sale.
The land, advertised as "top of the line native grass pasture in the heart of the Flint Hills," sold for $2,600 per acre. The auction company said the Rockne memorial adds "a little more character" to the land, but probably didn't affect the sales price.
The previous owner of the property was E. Cross Cattle Co., a Texas-based cattle company. The company's owners recently passed away.
The winning bidder Friday was the Peterson family, who are from the area, the auction company said. The sale is expected to be finalized on or before March 29.
The sale of the land includes the plane crash memorial, which lists the names of the victims of the fatal 1931 plane crash: Rockne, Waldo Miller, H.J. Christen, John Happer, Spencer Goldthwaite, C.A. Robrecht, Robert Fry and Herman Mathias.
Rockne coached at the University of Notre Dame from 1918 to 1931, leading the Fighting Irish to a .881 overall winning percentage — the highest of any college or professional football coach.
The 1940 film about him, "Knute Rockne, All American," co-starred Ronald Reagan as player George Gipp, aka The Gipper.
In recent years, a local resident, Sue Ann Brown, has helped maintain the monument and organize private tours of the crash site. Brown's father, Easter Heathman, witnessed the crash as a teen on the foggy morning of March 31, 1931. The Transcontinental & Western Air mail transport plane, en route from Kansas City to Los Angeles, crashed 140 miles after take-off.
According to that afternoon's Kansas City Star, Rockne had two sons attending school in Kansas City and was going to Los Angeles on business.
Heathman, a witness to the crash, was the memorial's caretaker for decades before he died in 2008 at the age of 90.
When the crash happened, Heathman had never heard of Rockne, nor did he know much about Notre Dame, the paper reported. Years later, Heathman took it upon himself to take care of the memorial after he once found it in disrepair.
"It was a job that needed done," Heathman told The Star in 2006 at a tribute event. "Nobody was around to do it."
The monument, as it looks today, has a short barbed-wire fence surrounding it, keeping cattle at bay. It stands by itself among the wide open grasslands. A sign with the Notre Dame logo can also be seen in front of the memorial.
Every five years, local residents, Notre Dame fans and descendants of the people who died in the crash gather at the crash site near Bazaar to memorialize the plane crash and to honor the victims.
Aside from the monument, visitors can also see pieces of the wreckage and the plane’s propeller on display at the Chase County Historical Museum & Library.
This story was originally published February 24, 2018 at 1:07 PM with the headline "Kansas land that is site of Knute Rockne memorial sold for $4 million."