America’s 19th century expansion west of the Mississippi was led by wagon trains inching along at walking speed via well-worn trails. Independence, the Queen City of the Trails, became the jumping off point for three such legendary routes, the California, Oregon and Santa Fe. As the century progressed, the Iron Horse arrived to revolutionize transportation. The rest is “history” as they say, with steam-powered trains replacing the horse drawn variety as the favored means for settlement of the vast American West.

By Brad Pace

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Across 1755 acres of what are now homes, businesses, roads, and parks once stood a massive assortment of farms collectively known as Sni-A Bar Farms. These not only served as demonstration farms, research centers, and pillars of international agricultural innovation but also served as the heart of Grain Valley’s local economy. With the help of the late William Rockhill Nelson and the trust he left behind, Sni-A-Bar shielded the community from the worst of the Great Depression.

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This month’s article, detailing Kansas City’s Black gospel legacy, first appeared in the Jackson County Historical Society Journal in 2013.

Ten years later its author, Paul Wenske, a journalist and filmmaker, debuted the documentary film that grew out of his research.

“I’m So Glad: Kansas City and the Roots of Black Gospel Music, The Untold Story,” since has been exhibited at many locations across the Kansas City area.

Wenske is a principal in Electric Prairie Productions, a three-person collaborative that includes his son Chris Wenske, who served as videographer and editor on the project, and his wife Nancy Meis, who served as co-producer.

The three spent much of the past 10 years visiting historically Black churches to document more than 200 gospel music performers. They also interviewed archivists, historians, pastors, choral directors and authors.

Wenske long has been active on both sides of the state line.

As a journalist he served as a national and investigative reporter for the Kansas City Star. As an educator, he taught at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas.

He also served as a senior community development advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, where he supervised neighborhood revitalization programs across the bank’s seven-state Tenth District.

“I’m So Glad” is narrated by Isaac C. Cates, an internationally renowned local gospel composer, conductor and performer. 

Two more showings of “I’m So Glad” are scheduled in the coming weeks.

At noon on Friday, February 23, the documentary will be shown at the Cleaver Family YMCA, 7000 Troost Ave., in Kansas City.

At 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 6, it will be shown at the Englewood Arts Center, 10901 E. Winner Road, in Independence.

To learn more about the film and Kansas City’s Black gospel music legacy, go to ImSoGladProject.com.

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The annual Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 10, with the various nominations scheduled to be announced on January 23.

Whatever one’s opinion might be regarding the annual broadcast, what is not in dispute is Jackson County’s role in making possible the prosperity of the country’s film industry from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Just as it had for meatpacking merchants in the later 19th century, Kansas City’s central location and its vast railroad network enabled its growth as a national distribution center for many of the leading film studios in the mid-20th century. Paramount, Disney, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and several other studios built and maintained warehousing and distribution centers across four square blocks between 17th and 19th streets in what is now known as Kansas City’s Crossroads District. 

From these buildings film studio executives organized the storage and shipping of an unknown number of film canisters to and from theaters across the Midwest.

Just as important as the transporting of these films, meanwhile, was their timely promotion. In that role few Jackson County residents were more crucial than Landon Laird, appointed in 1924 as the Kansas City Star’s film critic.

This story first appeared on FlatlandKC, a digital news site operated by Kansas City Public Broadcasting. The Jackson County Historical Society appreciates its permission to reprint the article here. 

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So is December tornado weather now?

Around these parts, we often associate tornadoes with the spring months - but don’t say that to residents of Tennessee, where seven tornadoes killed six people and injured 83 on December 9.

But whenever they arrive, tornadoes are routinely devastating, and likely none was more so than the tornado that left the south Jackson County’s Ruskin Heights district in ruins on May 20, 1957.

How bad was it?

According to the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Pleasant Hill, since 1950 more than 300 tornadoes have been reported across the district the office covers, with the majority of them being classified as “weak to moderate.” 

Less than 20 percent have been deemed “significant,” while “the most destructive and deadly of these occurred on the evening of May 20, 1957.”

Carolyn Glenn Brewer, a Jackson County Historical Society board member and the author of two books about the tornado, “Caught in the Path” and “Caught Ever After,” witnessed the storm as a child.

Her story about what her family experienced - along with their friends and neighbors - follows.

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President Harry Truman’s decision to issue de facto recognition to the infant state of Israel 75 years ago was one of the most consequential moments in 20th Century world politics.

The international ramifications of that decision were profoundly significant in 1948, and remain so today.

The account of how Truman reached that decision included a remarkable Jackson County story.

That involves the president’s longtime Army friend and later haberdashery business partner, Eddie Jacobson. 

The story is told here by Shirley Christian, a Kansas City area journalist and historian.

Christian worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Miami Herald,

In 1980 she joined the Herald’s Latin America Bureau, where she covered the wars then being fought in Central America. 

She received a 1981 Pulitzer  Prize for international reporting.

Her first book, “Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family,” appeared in 1985.

She also is the author of “Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier,” published in 2004.

This article first appeared in two parts in 2014 in the Jackson County Historical Society Journal. 

The Society is pleased to reprint this article, and it thanks the author for her permission to do so.

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It’s harvest season in Jackson County which - of course - often prompted Harry Truman to play the piano.

It was before World War I, when Truman helped operate the family farm in Grandview. Following the custom of the time, he hosted members of neighboring farm families to bring in the crops before, in turn, doing the same for them.

But those neighbors helping out at the Truman farm not only received the customary courtesy meal but also the impromptu piano concert - which some thought unusual.

“It could not help being noticeable,” Gaylon Babcock, one of those neighbors, told a Truman Library researcher in 1964.

The future president, however, knew the value of down time.

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Yes, it’s been hot enough for us.

Starting in mid-August high temperatures prompted a heat wave not experienced in the Kansas City since 2012, according to the National Weather Service.

But there are different kinds of weather extremes.

Thirty years ago the rain never seemed to stop in the Kansas City area, leading to the 1993 Flood, which very much earned its uppercase status.

The high water and what happened after it arrived is described in this month’s E-Journal.

A slightly different version of this story appeared earlier this year on FlatlandKC, the digital news site operated by Kansas City PBS. The Jackson County Historical Society thanks FlatlandKC for its permission to republish this article.

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St. Mary’s Catholic Church has had a place in the center of Independence for many years. Missionary work began in 1823 and continued until Ft. Bernard Donnelly arrived in 1845 to establish the parish. Construction of the church began just before the Civil War and the church added a school in 1878. Through the hard work of Sisters, parishioners, and the community, St. Mary’s stands today as the oldest established church in Jackson County. They are celebrating their 200th anniversary this year and have events planned for all to enjoy.

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The Jackson County Historical Society thanks all those who donated Kansas City Chiefs collectibles to the society before the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory over the Philadelphia Eagles in February. 

Anyone interested in donating their Chiefs items for preservation by the Society can send an email to archivist@jchs.org describing the item and its condition and including any photographs of the item. The Society will follow up about scheduling an appointment to complete the donation.

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The thought of a grist mill today may conjure the charming image of a structure long idle.   But from the earliest days of European settlement in North America working mills supplied communities and travelers with essential flour and cornmeal for cooking. 

They were built along rivers and streams to harness the power of the current to turn a water wheel, which then rotated heavy stones that ground wheat and corn.  This simple and effective process was used as early as Roman times.    When a water source was not available, horses, manpower, or even wind and sails were used to turn the grinding stones.  As the stones turned grain would be poured through a hole in the center of the top stone.  

The local mill was critical to its community as a place of commerce and as a social gathering place, sometimes becoming the town center.  They were the equivalent of gritty frontier truck stops.
Numerous working mills once dotted the Missouri landscape.   Today Clay County boasts a complete reproduction of a mill built in 1824 by Humphrey “Yankee” Smith on the Platte River near Smithville (named for him).   Smith was an outspoken abolitionist, hence the nickname “Yankee.”

The reproduction was built in 1980 and is known as the Yankee-Smith Mill.  It is operated by the Shoal Creek living history museum. 

Grist mills and the flour they produced were particularly important in Jackson County given its association with trails westward.  Independence became the Eastern terminus for the Santa Fe Trail, and later a key provisioning post for emigrants heading for the Oregon and California Trails.  Families on the long wagon trains were big consumers of the wheat and corn processed by the mills.

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