Communities
Lillis
The Lillis High School Gymnasium, now known as the Lillis Community Center, is historically significant for its association with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) from 1936-1938, and for its role in the Lillis community. The gym is also significant as an example of the architecture of the WPA.
The gym was a WPA project that began in June 1936 at the Morrissey quarry where WPA workers cut building blocks from limestone ledges. Construction on the 57 x 90 x 20 foot gym with a domed roof began in September 1936. It was erected adjacent to the south side of the Lillis Rural High School, built in 1921—as many as 45 men were employed at one time to work on this WPA project.
The building was finished in the summer of 1938, and had cost $28,000, of which $22,000 had been paid by the federal government. The gym was dedicated as a memorial for the twenty-one Cleveland Township men who had served in WWI.
Our fathers and grandfathers built the gym as a WPA project during the terrible depression and dust storms of the 1930s. The crops were poor, many livestock starved in the drought-ridden pastures and even for those that survived, and there was little or no market.
In June 1997, a tornado ripped away the gym’s roof and the accompanying hail also damaged many of the windows. Left open to the elements, the wood floors, bleachers, stage, plaster walls, and the two furnaces succumbed to damage inflected by rain and snow. In the aftermath of the storm, a group of area residents formed the Lillis Community Center, Inc.
In August 2004, the Lillis Gymnasium received approval from the Kansas Historic Sites Board of Review to be placed on the Register of Historic Kansas Places.