By JOY LEIKER
Hays Daily News

NESS CITY — A county, city, hospital, school — countless things bear Cpl. Noah Van Buren Ness’ name.
And they’re all spelled wrong.
Ness should be Kness, and needless-to-say this recent discovery could make quite a mess on state maps, not to mention the local phonebook.
Unbeknownst to any of the 3,500 residents who live in the county that bears his name, distant relatives of Kness have been researching their genealogy. That’s where they found Kness, a Civil War corporal who died in battle 140 years ago.
That’s also how Dennis Brooke, a civil war buff from Georgia got into the mix. He was the lucky one who broke the news to the volunteer answering the Ness County Historical Society’s telephone that the society, museum and everything else named Ness was short one letter short of perfection.
Through a network of e-mails and Civil War historical Web sites, Brooke met Gay Davis, one of Kness’ indirect descendants. The two of them have worked to detail Kness’ military background.
But Davis is just one of at least three ancestors from various branches of the Kness family tree to discover the spelling error. From her home in Washington she’s talked to other descendants in Illinois and Florida who were just as surprised to find that a Civil War soldier in their family had a Kansas county and countyseat community — Ness County and Ness City — named after him.
Davis lives on Puget Sound in Hansville, Wash., and the retired psychologist has been studying genealogy for most of her adult life. A couple of years ago she turned her attention to her great-great-grandmother and her siblings, including brother Noah.
Davis’ great-great-grandmother and husband moved from Ohio to southeastern Kansas in the mid-1800s, and Davis said Kness and another brother apparently followed them there. Later Kness married, had a son and enlisted in the Union army.
The 26-year-old died in battle in August 1864.
Now, 140 years later, it appears Kansas officials didn’t get it right when they named this northwestern Kansas county after the corporal who never even stepped foot into this part of the state.
But that doesn’t matter to Ila Fritzler, the woman who led the research and campaign to create a bronze statue of the soldier on the courthouse lawn. She spent about 10 years researching Kness — though she was looking for Ness — and back then detected discrepancies in the spelling of his name.
She just didn’t think too much of it. She was more interested in making sure Ness County did something to honor its namesake.
The 1860 Census is the first time the Ohio-born man shows up on paper in Kansas, and that record counts him as Ness. A couple of years later when he got married the marriage certificate notes the name as Kness.
“We don’t know. One hundred some years ago I’ve heard people say that sometimes they spelled the names the way they sounded,” Fritzler said as a reason the ‘K’ might have disappeared from a few records. “When he enlisted, that might have been when it got changed.”
Davis hasn’t figured out exactly when or how the name changed either, but she’s confident the family name is Kness. She has a copy of a will and other legal documents that spell it with a ‘K,’ as well as a document with Noah’s signature that spells it the same way.
No matter what, Fritzler said there are no plans to climb to the top of the courthouse and add a ‘K’, — or to the top of the hospital, city building or high school for that matter.
“We don’t plan to change a name,” she said.
It’s been four years since Kness created a stir like this in his namesake of a county.
That’s when Fritzler and other volunteers finally hit the jackpot and had the $50,000 to erect a bronze statue honoring the man they knew little about, but thought still deserved their respect and a proper tribute on the courthouse lawn. Before that, there was no official tribute to him anywhere in the county.
They built that statue one commemorative brick at a time. Fritzler’s proud of the fact that there were no big donors to the project, but instead only $30 and $35 contributions.
“So many people helped pay for that statue,” she said.
A limited number of smaller-sized casts are still for sale. Every one of course includes the same name plate as the original statue, and the Kansas spelling of Ness.
The unveiling and dedication of the statue was paired with Ness County’s banner event, the Old Settlers Reunion, a once-every-five-years celebration that attracts former residents from both near and far.
The Oklahoma artist commissioned to create the statue had quite a task. With no photographs of his subject, he gleaned as many physical characteristics as he could from Kness’ military records. The rest came from the artist’s own research of Civil War uniforms and weapons, and it was put onto a statue that depicted Kness’ slender build.
“The statue’s beautifully done but it doesn’t look like Noah,” Davis said.
Only after the statue was dedicated did Fritzler finally track down a photograph of Kness. Another descendent, Peter Grace in Illinois, contacted Fritzler and offered her a photo, the only one known to exist. No one is sure of the exact date of the tin-type photo, though they seem to agree that it was taken before Kness jointed the military.
Luckily, Fritzler has taken that little-too-late timing in stride.
“It’s kind of bizarre,” she said. “I researched this for about 10 years, then I’d sort of give up. Then I’d think, ‘well why don’t I try this.’ I just kept contacting people.”
Davis understands that frustration.
“You’ll work on something for years and years and it’s a dead end, and then all of a sudden it just pours out. I have a huge stack of documents up there just received in the last two months,” she said. “Some of us who do genealogy say that ancestor was ready to be found.”
Reporter Joy Leiker can be reached at (785) 628-1081, ext. 136, or by e-mail at leiker@dailynews.net.