Keystone Gallery

The Pilgrim Holiness congregation of Pleasant Ridge built this church between about 1914 and 1916, quarrying the stone from the surrounding chalk, probably two miles northeast, and hauling sand for the mortar from the Smoky Hill River by ox team. It was dedicated debt free on a cold January 17, 1917, and took its common name from Keystone, a town north of today's Lake Scott on the short-lived Scott City to Winona railroad, whose rails were pulled up for scrap in December 1917. Services ended around 1952, and by 1980, when Barbara Shelton bought the place, it was a roofless shell full of shotgun shells.

Her husband Chuck Bonner comes from a fossil family. His father, Marion Bonner, found a fish skull on his first chalk hunt as a Leoti freshman in 1925, kept collecting through years of farming and running a movie theater, and in 1955 found a nearly complete short-necked plesiosaur, Dolichorhynchops, which he gave to the museum at Fort Hays. Chuck's brother Orville spent more than thirty years as head preparator at the natural history museum in Lawrence.

Chuck, a painter trained at Fort Hays, and Barbara, a photographer, rebuilt the church and parsonage by hand, never connected them to the grid, and run them on wind and solar power. The gallery opened on Labor Day weekend in 1991. It shows a 20-foot mosasaur and a 14-foot Xiphactinus from the local chalk with smaller fish, turtles and birds, Chuck's paintings and a 24-foot mural of the Cretaceous sea. Monument Rocks is nine miles away.