On the south side of 50th Avenue in Stavely is a nicely preserved red painted one storey brick building with brick corbeling at the cornice. In a small parapet on the front elevation is the date of construction of the building, 1925. On the unpainted east side of the building is a ghost sign advertising
Adams & Bright Cut Rate Drug Store. The sign also mentions that doctor's appointments are available at the drugstore.
Oddly, the sign directs the viewer to a location
7 miles east of Holcomb on Route 50. At first this seemed a bit strange, given that Alberta's Highway 50 is a short, 14 kilometre stretch of road between the tiny towns of Tees and Mirror, Alberta, without a community named Holcomb anywhere along it. Further, Highway 50 is no less than 260 kilometres north.
A little sleuthing solved the mystery with the revelation that the TV miniseries
In Cold Blood, based on the book of the same name by Truman Capote, was filmed in Stavely in 1996. The grisly murder of the Clutter family, the central event of the story, took place on a farm near Holcomb, Kansas.
Seven miles east of Holcomb on old Route 50 is somewhere along East Kansas Avenue in downtown Garden City, Kansas.
As for the
Adams and Bright Drug Store, it is actually a historic drug store in equally historic Hamburg, PA, a tiny bit outside Kansas.