Jackson County celebrates Missouri Bicentennial
By: Brian Burnes
Come for the ice cream – stay for the Cole Younger exhibit.
Younger, perhaps Lee’s Summit’s most familiar historical figure, is scheduled to be front-and-center during the community’s observance of the Missouri bicentennial on August 10.
A main event on that day, in both Lee’s Summit and across the state, will be ice cream socials. In Lee’s Summit, those lined up for ice cream in the 200 block of SW Main St. also will have the option of free admission to the nearby Lee’s Summit History Museum.
There, visitors will be able to inspect artifacts involving Younger – such as his timepiece and a copy of his autobiography – and ponder his role in the Border War-Civil War era, when Younger rode with Missouri bushwhackers raiding eastern Kansas. Museum officials, meanwhile, will hope to see past museum patrons and also meet new ones.
“We see the bicentennial as an opportunity to introduce community members who probably have not been to the museum before,” said Fred Grogan, board chair of the Lee’s Summit Historical Society, which operates the museum.
Fred Grogan, Lee’s Summit
Fred Grogan, Lee’s Summit Historical Society board chair, will help welcome guests at the organization’s history museum during the city’s August 10 bicentennial celebration. The museum includes information on Cole Younger and his activities during the Civil War era in western Missouri.
Historical societies, nonprofit groups and civic organizations across Jackson County have begun observing Missouri’s 1821 entrance into the Union.
While acknowledging the historical anniversary, they also have been making the moment their own - which is what statewide organizers had hoped would happen. The bicentennial celebration is accordingly large, with events and programs planned in all 114 of the state’s counties. The challenge faced by bicentennial planners has been how to make that large event local.
“As a matter of philosophy, we knew we wanted to do something that was truly state-wide,” Michael Sweeney, bicentennial coordinator with the State Historical Society of Missouri, said recently.
“But how do you do that in a state that is, for lack of a better phrase, fairly fragmented? There is the urban-rural divide but, even beyond that, my friends down in the Missouri Bootheel often identify far more with Tennessee and Arkansas.”
In response, organizers across the state – including Jackson County - have planned a long list of events, programs and initiatives. Many, reasonably enough, will include ice cream, given that the bicentennial falls on a Tuesday in August.
In Lee’s Summit, the ice cream social begins at 5 p.m., just outside the history museum. In 2015 the community’s historical society moved its museum into its new home, a former Lee’s Summit post office built in the late 1930s. Every year since 2015, Grogan said, museum attendance had increased about 20 percent.
“And then COVID-19 hit,” he said. “We had very little attendance during 2020. “We are just now getting back in stride.”
Kraig Kensinger, Puppetry Arts, Independence
Kraig Kensinger, artistic director of the Puppetry Arts Institute of Independence – joined here by a Harry S. Truman marionette – in August will help present a bicentennial historical revue for families at the National Frontier Trails Museum
In Independence, the bicentennial also has allowed the Puppetry Arts Institute to re-engage the community following the pandemic. The institute, which offers student workshops in the Englewood district of Independence, resumed operations in May.
“We went about a year without any shows, any workshops,” said Kraig Kensinger, institute artistic director.
But this summer Kensinger and his institute colleagues have been celebrating their “Missouri Birthday Bash.” That includes a bicentennial museum display at its location at 11025 E. Winner Road, and – on August 7, 13 and 14 – a free revue offered at the National Frontier Trails Museum, 318 W. Pacific Ave. A Harry S. Truman marionette will serve as master of ceremonies for a family-friendly program that will incorporate several Missouri cultural symbols, among them the Missouri mule.
Kensinger believes the institute’s lighthearted presentation sits nicely alongside more weighty bicentennial lectures or symposia focusing on the state’s complicated path to statehood. He also considers the support the institute has received from a variety of funding sources, among them the Missouri Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as evidence of that.
“I personally think we are one of the most unique bicentennial programs,” Kensinger said. “A lot of the bicentennial observance is made up of talks, lectures and slideshows. But we were one of the few groups presenting a program that people of all ages could enjoy.”
In Raytown, the bicentennial observance will be held just over a month later, with the celebration of another 200th birthday, that of the Santa Fe Trail. Raytown’s Festival of the Trails, scheduled September 11, is being planned by several community organizations, among them the Cave Spring Association, the Raytown Historical Society, and the Raytown Area Chamber of Commerce & Tourism.
At the Rice-Tremonti Home, 8801 E. 66th St., guests on September 11 will find musicians, a petting zoo and blacksmithing demonstrations- a tribute to William Ray, the blacksmith for whom the community is named. “I always felt that we needed to do something for the bicentennial and I’m delighted that the other groups felt the same way,” said Leigh Elmore, president of the Friends of the Rice-Tremonti Home Association. “The whole trail awareness in Raytown has really come a long way.”
Rice-Tremonti Home, Raytown
On September 11 Raytown residents will celebrate the bicentennial by hosting the Festival of the Trails, which also observes the 200th anniversary of the Santa Fe Trail. The Rice-Tremonti Home that day will feature a petting zoo and blacksmithing demonstrations.
Bubbling up from below
Part of the challenge facing organizers of the state-wide bicentennial observance has been to gently remind Missouri residents that they share a common statewide legacy.
That can be challenging, given that anything that smacks of an official directive from Jefferson City can play poorly among some residents, Sweeney said. That became clear during focus group discussions years ago, he added.
“There was the sentiment that ‘I don’t need the state to come down here and tell me how to do the bicentennial,’" Sweeney said.
The answer was to ask individual communities to come up with their own proposals that showcased individual regions or communities, but also spoke to the larger Missouri legacy. “We wanted to see some level of local control, but how is that done without being parochial?” said Sweeney. “If you emphasize the local too much, you end up with 100 different things with no unifying theme.”
In response, Sweeney and his colleagues came up with what they called “Community Engagement” projects. One example was the Missouri quilt initiative. The State Historical Society of Missouri worked with area quilting organizations to talk up a state bicentennial quilt, asking that quilters submit proposed blocks – small squares of fabric – that conveyed some sense of their home county’s history, life or culture. Submissions arrived from across the state and since the quilt’s completion, Sweeney has helped display it in counties across Missouri.
In July he brought the quilt to the Courtyard Community Center in Plattsburg, in Clinton County, north of Kansas City. There Sweeney watched as local quilters first examined the block representing Clinton County – and then stepped back to take in the entire quilt, and consider their own county’s block in context of all the others.
“So, that kind of moment happened,” Sweeney said.
The same logic was at work behind the planning of another community engagement project, the “My Missouri 2021 Photo Project,” which Sweeney said was inspired in part by the now-ubiquitous cell-phone camera.
“We got 998 photographs from more than 300 contributors in 97 different counties,” Sweeney said.
Visitors to the state bicentennial website (missouri2021.org) can see all of the submissions. But bicentennial officials selected 200 images to present in a formal exhibit. Visitors to the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence could examine the photo exhibit this past July. Rather than arrange the photos by region, exhibit organizers instead presented them by season. Winter snow, the images suggested, looked pretty much the same in northern Missouri as it did in southwestern Missouri.
“The project was an opportunity to connect pieces together that you might not have connected before,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney especially prized the wisdom of inviting ideas and programs to bubble up from below rather than imposing suggestions from above. One example is a photo exhibit on display this summer at Lee’s Summit City Hall, 220 SE Green St.
Lee’s Summit Photo Exhibit, City Hall
Another Lee’s Summit bicentennial event is a photo exhibit on display at Lee’s Summit City Hall. One display case features this view of Longview Farm alongside examples of antique cameras.
In mid-July visitors could inspect photographs, exhibited on lobby walls as well as inside display cases, that illustrated life across Lee’s Summit and the state. Some photos depicted the community’s annual Downtown Days celebration; others featured views that immediately signaled their location, such as a view of Longview Farm.
A local artists’ group, Summit Art, supplied the images at the city’s invitation, said Glenda Masters, Lee’s Summit cultural arts manager.
“We had an opportunity to use our calendar to help tie into the bicentennial,” Masters said. “And so I approached them and said ‘Hey, I have this window. Why don’t we work together and create an exhibit?’
“It was a collaboration. Our role as the city was to create the space.”
Community legacies
Two other statewide bicentennial initiatives have been represented in Jackson County.
The goal of the bicentennial “Community Legacies” program was to showcase Missouri traditions, places and organizations while also building enduring resources for students, teachers and others.
Visitors to the bicentennial commission website, can find reports detailing the Ozarks Genealogical Society of Springfield, the Madonna of the Trail sculpture, a monument to women of the 19th century westward migration unveiled in Lexington in 1928; and the 74-foot tall “Big Tree” of McBaine, Mo., near Columbia, considered to be the largest bur oak in the state.
Sweeney himself prepared a report about Kansas City’s annual Juneteenth celebration, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. For the report, he went back to the observance’s origins in Kansas City, interviewing Makeda Peterson, whose late father, Horace Peterson III, founder of the Black Archives of Mid-America, Inc., organized Kansas City’s initial Juneteenth celebration in 1980.
“The report included how the organizers wanted to see the celebration in five years,” Sweeney said. This past June, well after Sweeney completed his survey, Juneteenth became a federal holiday.
Still another initiative was an endorsement program, through which bicentennial organizers could spotlight various projects, programs and events that represented the state’s bicentennial mission, which is to promote a better understanding of Missouri and its regions, communities and people.
One of the first projects to receive this endorsement was the Jackson County Historical Society’s ongoing project to process, catalog and digitize the Wilborn Photographic Collection. In 2017 the society received the collection as a donation from supporters Steve and Marianne Noll. The approximately 300,000 Wilborn images dating from 1921 through 2007 is considered among the largest collections of historic photographs of the Kansas City region.
Kevin Ploth, Jackson County Historical Society
Kevin Ploth, Wilborn Collection Lead for the Jackson County Historical Society, has processed about 152,000 images in the Wilborn Photographic Collection.
“Since then, we have endorsed more than 225 projects and programs,” Sweeney said.
If Sweeney expects a criticism to come of the bicentennial observance, it may be how some residents missed a stadium-sized historical spectacular. The “KC150” celebration of Kansas City’s 150th anniversary in 2000 was climaxed by an Arrowhead Stadium pageant that included a flyover of vintage military aircraft, a 1,000-voice choir, remarks by longtime network news anchor (and one-time Kansas City journalist) Walter Cronkite and songs delivered by entertainers Kenny Rogers, Oleta Adams and Little Richard.
But Sweeney believes the money and time invested in supporting and showcasing local community events and programs will prove the more rewarding investment. Residents of communities across the state, he said, routinely have thanked him for coming to see them.
“The over-arching message I heard as I did this was ‘No one knows who are are,’ or ‘We are always forgotten about.’ You want to know something that unites Missourians? It’s that.”
But, Sweeney added, that oft-heard sentiment tells him something. “I think that suggests how so many of the bicentennial programs have worked, given the desire that folks have to tell us about their own communities.”