A newly-formed Missouri nonprofit group, Friends of Englewood Theater, is in the process of acquiring the former theater at 10917 E. Winner Road in Independence.

The group is led by Brent Schondelmeyer, a former president of the Jackson County Historical Society and author of this month’s E-Journal.

The movie theater operated for decades, and in more recent years served as a country-western music venue. But it has been closed for almost 20 years. The nonprofit is also purchasing the former Ben Franklin store that stands adjacent to the theater.

Both properties are being acquired from the estate of Wade Williams III, who passed away in 2023.

Williams owned several Kansas City area movie theaters and was well known in the film industry for owning the rights to an extensive collection of vintage sci-fi films.

The pending acquisition is the latest development in the Englewood Arts District, where community residents are today supporting an array of shops, galleries and restaurants located about two miles southwest of Independence Square. In his article, Schondelmeyer details how Independence annexed the Englewood neighborhood in the late 1940s and how community opinion was divided about that idea at the time.

To learn more about the nonprofit, its plan to acquire the buildings and how to donate to its redevelopment efforts, go to englewoodtheater.org.

BY BRENT SCHONDELMEYER

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Kansas City area writer and photographer Bruce Mathews, with collaborators, has published several books documenting the beauty of local cemeteries and the diversity of those families whose loved ones chose to be interred there. 

In “Mount Washington Cemetery: In Search of Lost Time,” Mathews details the grand chapel built by the family of Kansas City Star co-founder William Rockhill Nelson, as well as the vision of George Kessler, the landscape architect who designed the cemetery.

Mathews reminds us that, many years ago, cemeteries were not exclusively a site of sorrow but a place of refreshment and contemplation.

Further, the book details not only the resting places of many prominent and accomplished Kansas City area residents, but also the varied and fascinating lives they lived before their passing.

On Memorial Day, May 26, the Mount Washington Cemetery Historical Society will be hosting an open house at the Nelson Memorial Chapel between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.The cemetery is at 614 S. Brookside Avenue, in independence. Copies of Mathews’ book will be available, with proceeds benefitting the Mount Washington Cemetery Historical Society, for the preservation of the Nelson Chapel.

For more information, go to mwchs.org, or call the cemetery office at 816-252-4141.  

BY BRUCE MATHEWS

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It’s February and students across Jackson County are in their classrooms, immersed in their spring semesters.

But one Independence school building remains closed. 

That’s the Howard Schoolhouse, the one-room 19th century building that had been open to visitors at the 1859 Jail Museum since 1960.

The 12-by-16 foot schoolhouse, which stands adjacent to the jail at 217 N. Main St., was placed on its current foundation in 1960. Concerns have arisen about the stability of the foundation and the Jackson County Historical Society, which owns both the jail and the schoolhouse, restricted visitor access out of an abundance of caution last autumn.

Beyond the possible foundation problem, the schoolhouse’s windows need to be repaired or replaced, as does its front door and transom. The building’s exterior walls need to be scraped of its peeling paint and re-painted; the schoolhouse’s interior walls need new paint, as well.

Still other issues include the restoration of the interior wood flooring and wainscoting.

Society board members hope to one day to re-open the schoolhouse to visitors if it can secure the needed funds.
“The Society intends to be a proper steward of the historic structures that have been entrusted to it,” said Gloria Smith, Society president. 

“Just as the Society recently received generous financial assistance to complete needed repairs to the 1859 Jail Museum, it now respectfully asks supporters to consider assisting in the restoration of the Howard Schoolhouse,” Smith added.

The society received the building as a donation in 1959.

Both it, and one-room schoolhouses across the country, have a long legacy.

BY BRIAN BURNES

To learn about how to donate to the restoration of the Howard Schoolhouse, go to jchs.org/save-our-schoolhouse

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The 1859 Jail and Marshal’s Home on the Independence Square has a long and storied history. It held countless felons, petty thieves, and even a few outlaws. Meanwhile, just a few feet away from the cell block, generations of jailers and their families lived in comfortable domestic quarters in the adjoining home built for their use.

Of all that has played out at the jail over the past century and one half, one of the most dramatic and tragic events was the murder of Sheriff Henry Bugler on the evening of June 13, 1866. The shooting of one of the area’s most prominent law enforcement officers sent a shock wave through the county, which was still struggling to heal deep wounds from the just-ended Civil War. With controversial Reconstruction policies being implemented across the South and the border states, the murder carried political overtones and was covered by newspapers nationwide.

Despite the attention it received, no one was ever charged or convicted of the crime. To this day, mystery surrounds the events of that violent night. All the witnesses and participants have long since passed away. We will never know for sure who fired the fatal shot. What we can do is review the known facts and consider who had the motive and the means.

By: BRAD PACE

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He was the leader of the free world and he would be home for Christmas.

That’s what Harry Truman, alone in Washington, decided. In the earliest days of presidential air travel, he authorized a dicey flight through winter storms to Kansas City on December 25, 1945.

A photograph of Truman taken the following day just outside his family’s Independence home - cradling an armful of presents with a wide smile - presented the personification of the bountiful life put on hold during the world war that had ended only months before.

Behind the home’s front door, however, the mood was way more bah humbug. Upon returning from Washington the president had found a scornful spouse, not impressed with his efforts to bring in the holiday right.

“So you’ve finally arrived,” Bess Truman told her husband. “I guess you couldn’t think of any more reasons to stay away.

“As far as I’m concerned, you might as well have stayed in Washington.”

From the perspective of 2024, Truman’s 1945 holiday looks like the white Christmas that no one was dreaming of - an icy post-World War II case of contemporary holiday stress.

Perhaps it started with unrealistic expectations of yuletide bliss bumping up against the pressures of presidential imperatives, leading to a marital spat, complicated by concerns over health and workaholic fatigue.

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As the Kansas City Public Library continues to celebrate its 150th year of service to the community, supporters have taken special note of its history and especially its first full-time director and so-called “Mother of the Library,” Carrie Westlake Whitney. In a remarkable career of nearly 30 years, she defied the patriarchal expectations of her time to leave an enduring mark on the library and the city. 

Whitney, who became the library’s first full-time Head Librarian in 1881, built the library from a modest collection of 2,000 books into Kansas City’s most indispensable civic institution with nearly 100,000 books.

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There have been many Hell’s Half Acres.

There were the sections of Labette County, Kansas terrorized by the murderous Bender Family in the 1870s.

There was the Fort Worth, Texas red-light district, also in the 1870s.

Kansas City had a Hell’s Half Acre, too - from the 1870s through there 1890s.

In this month’s E-Journal Pat O’Neill - retired Kansas City marketing and public relations professional, as well as long-time historian of the area’s Irish community - serves as our guide through the district that earned that name in Kansas City’s West Bottoms.

O’Neill - who co-founded the annual Kansas City Irish Fest and is a former president of the Kansas City Irish Center - also is the author of several books. Those include “From the Bottom Up: The Story of the Irish in Kansas City,” published in 2000, and an updated version of the same title in 2015. 

In 2017 O’Neill published “Dearest Mother: Letters from a Lonesome Sammy, 1915-1919,” which compiled letters from George Wigert, an Army artillery sergeant during World War I - and a grandfather of the author.

In 2021 O’Neill, with co-author Tom Coffman, published “Ted Sullivan: Barnacle of Baseball.”

And in 2023 O’Neill co-wrote, with Pat and Kyle Kelly, “Kelly’s Westport Inn:
The Poorman’s Playground.”

O’Neill, a JCHS member, is also a former board member of the historical society.

The article below has been adapted from a lecture O’Neill delivered earlier this year at the Kansas City Public Library.

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The Truman Sports Complex opened more than 50 years ago.

But right now - as the Kansas City Chiefs prepare for their regular season home opener on September 5 - its future is unclear.

Jackson County voters in April soundly defeated a sales tax extension ballot measure that would have helped fund a new downtown Kansas City baseball stadium as well as upgrades at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

In June the Kansas legislature approved a plan that would expand a state incentive program in an effort to lure both the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals from Jackson County.

In July, during a Kansas City visit, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson said he expected the state to present a plan to keep both teams in Missouri by the end of the year.

So - in the words of Missouri native Yogi Berra - it’s ain’t over ‘till it’s over.

And, if it’s any consolation, during the mid-1960s, the eventual construction of the Truman Sports Complex seemed anything but inevitable.

This story previously appeared, in slightly different form, on FlatlandKC, a digital news initiative operated by Kansas City PBS. 

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The 1905 Rock Island Railroad Bridge spanning the Kansas River in Kansas City’s West Bottoms was built to last. It dominates the area immediately west of the Hy-Vee Arena (formerly known as Kemper Arena).

Its weathered and lanky form is studded by countless large protruding rivets, binding together over 2,000 tons of “Carnegie” branded steel. More than 100 years ago skilled workers inserted each rivet glowing red hot into precisely-drilled holes and then hammered down the unformed end to close the joint. As the steel cooled it would contract to squeeze the joint tightly together. A strong build was needed to handle the heavy steam locomotives used at the time, along with their loaded freight cars.

The bridge ultimately outlasted the big livestock operations it was built to serve, and even the Rock Island Railroad itself, which filed for bankruptcy in 1975 and was liquidated five years later. But the men who built it so long ago would surely be amazed to see it today beginning a new phase of use as America’s first trailhead and entertainment district over a river.

What follows is the story of this remarkable transformation.

By Brad Pace

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The latest phase of the continuing architectural conservation of the 1859 Jail Museum in Independence has begun.

In May, representatives of a local historic preservation firm started their six-month project, working to further restore the pre-Civil War landmark and stabilize its northwest corner.

The building, which opened for its annual visitors season in April, will remain accessible throughout the process.

The project, budgeted at $300,000, is paramount to officers of Jackson County Historical Society, which owns and operates the structure just northeast of Independence Square at 217 N. Main St.

“The society takes seriously its responsibility to provide appropriate stewardship of the 1859 Jail Museum,” said Gloria Smith, JCHS president. 

“It is important to preserve this unique and historic structure not only for today’s visitors but for those in the future.”

The work, arguably, has enhanced the visitor experience. 

While guests will not be able to enter the marshal’s office, located in the northwest corner of the building’s first floor, they will be able to look into the room from two separate doorways and monitor the project’s progress.

“If anyone wants to peek in there, absolutely, please do,” said Corey Thomas, a vice president of Pishny Restoration Services of Lenexa, which is conducting the project.

“We only ask that no one step into that space.”

Visitors are enjoying the rare opportunity to examine the 19th century building from a 21st century perspective, added Kaija Laney, the society’s visitor services coordinator.

“People are loving being able to see all the different aspects of the building.”

Guests, she added, “think it’s really cool that the jail is remaining open while the work is going on. This project has been planned for a long time and it’s exciting for them to actually see it come to fruition.”

There were also a few surprises after initial excavation work began in early June - ones that prompted, out of an abundance of caution - a call to the Independence Police Department.

Spoiler: the officer found nothing that concerned him.

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Almost everyone knows about “Wild Bill” Hickok - the legendary frontier lawman, poker player and gunfighter who died, shot and killed, in 1876 while playing cards in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in what is today South Dakota.

Far fewer people, meanwhile, know about the incident-rich life the younger Hickok lived in what is today known as the Kansas City metro area.

In the summer of 1856 James Butler Hickok, a 19-year-old Illinois native, boarded a riverboat in St. Louis and got off in Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.

As detailed here by Craig Crease, a longtime overland trails researcher, Hickok had been drawn to the territory by descriptions of the rich farmland available there.

Today, nobody remembers Hickok as a farmer.

By 1859, as Crease writes in this month’s E-Journal, Hickok “had staked out a claim in the new Kansas Territory, fallen in love with a beautiful half-Shawnee girl, served as a bodyguard for a famous future United States senator, taken part in two battles in the Border War leading up to the Civil War, ridden for days and nights as a scout and spy in those same actions, and got his first taste of being a frontier lawman....all before his 21st birthday. He was not even known yet as Wild Bill Hickok.”

All that occurred, over just three years, to the west of the Missouri-Kansas state line. 

On the Missouri side Hickok - by then widely known as “Wild Bill” - found relative quiet in Kansas City, spending much of 1872 living in or near what’s generally known today as the River Market district.

He would still grow restless, moving onto Springfield, Missouri in the fall of 1872 and then, in late 1873, joining a traveling show operated by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and partner John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro for seven months before returning to Kansas City in the spring of 1874. Hickok continued his wandering before arriving in Deadwood in the summer of 1876.

He died there on August 2, 1876, at age 39.

This month’s E-Journal is adapted from Crease’s book, “The Wanderer: James Butler Hickok and the American West,” scheduled to be published on June 3.

Crease, a former Kansas City area resident, in the 1990s was among the founders of the Kansas City Area Historic Trails Association, whose members since have marked the paths of the Oregon, California and Santa Fe trails across the Kansas City metro, especially in suburban Johnson County. 

Although today he lives in South Carolina, Crease remains a member of the KCAHTA executive board. 

In the almost 150 years since Hickok’s death, the frontier lawman’s legend often has obscured his actual life.

In an effort to separate fact from fiction Crease, for the past 20 years, has dug deep into the historical archives, studying letters and documents written by Hickok and many others, and placing them in the context of his times. 

Excerpts from those letters have been reprinted as they were written.

On June 3 copies “The Wanderer” can be purchased at caxtonpress.com and amazon.com, as well as at ocal booksellers. It also soon will be available at the 1859 Jail Museum, 217 N. Main St., in Independence, owned and operated by the Jackson County Historical Society.

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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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