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History -- Our Proud PastIn business, technology, housing and transportation, Overland Park lives the 21st-century life. Its roots, however, reach back to 1905, when a builder of railroads tried his hand at real estate on the Kansas prairie. He focused on Johnson County, which was just a country cousin to two big-city neighbors, both named Kansas City. In the early 1900s nearly a quarter-million people lived in those booming urban areas, making money in a myriad of pursuits. For every 13 of those citydwellers, Johnson County had barely one resident, and that one typically lived in a rural hamlet or on a farm. It was an ideal prospect for William B. Strang, a New York-born railroad man and developer. Attracted by large plots of open land at the edge of a metropolis, Strang assembled 600 acres in northeast Johnson County. Fresh in local memory was the flood that devastated the Missouri and Kansas river valleys in 1903, so Strang made sure all his parcels sat safely on high ground. As Strang divided his new acreage into communities, he turned to local history for names. In the years before the Civil War, traders plied a 700-mile trail from the Kansas City area to Santa Fe in New Mexico territory and returned with silver, mules, wool and pelts. Their long overland path crossed the prairies near several of Strang’s new communities, so Strang plucked the word “overland” out of history and put it on his developments -- Overland Heights, Overland View, Overland Hill and Overland Place. Strang liked to describe his properties as “park-like,” and he named one of them Overland Park. These new communities lay seven miles from Kansas City – too far for easy commuting in the days before roads were paved and Americans turned to the automobile. So Strang, who had spent a career building railroads across the country, plowed money into a rail line. Streetcars would carry people all the way from his subdivisions to downtown Kansas City and back. The name for lines like Strang’s was “interurban” and residents soon were calling this new interurban “The Strang Line.” Just like wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail, Strang’s route followed high and dry ridgelines. To add a touch of romance, he had the words, “The Santa Fe Trail Route,” painted on each of his cars. Besides taking people to work in the big city, those cars could bring customers from the city out to Strang’s residential developments. He built attractions to encourage them. In the early 1910s, Strang laid out an air field with grandstands for aerial demonstrations. Less than a decade after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, airplanes were still a marvel, and Aviation Field was visited by famed barnstorming pilots of the era. On weekends, it drew as many as 25,000 spectators. Strang also opened a dance emporium called Santa Fe Trail Hall, staged baseball games and offered camping, hunting and fishing excursions, all to lure potential buyers. At every event he stationed one of his real-estate agents. Even after his death in 1921, Strang’s communities kept growing. Mass production reduced the price of automobiles, creating more and more middle-class motorists, and newly paved roads sped them out to what had been the countryside. A business district grew near the Overland Park station of the Strang Line. Just to the east, Metcalf Avenue was designated U.S. 69, which brought tourist courts and eateries. In the late 1940s, suburban developments gobbled up more of once-rural Johnson County, and homes popped up for families of returning World War II veterans. In the mid-1950s the Interstate Highway Act brought Interstate 35 – along with legions of families who could now commute in minutes from new homes in Overland Park to jobs in Kansas City. By then, the Strang Line was only a memory, victim of the automobile and the mobility it provided. For decades, William Strang’s unincorporated “Overland” communities were part of Mission Urban Township, a simple governing structure meant for rural areas. By the late 1950s, the population boom outstripped the township’s capacity. In 1960, the City of Overland Park was born. In its first year of incorporation, 28,000 people called it home. Thousands of people and more homes were on the way. Shopping centers, car dealers and scores of other businesses moved where the traffic was and brought jobs with them, numbering in the tens of thousands. Today, nearly 175,000 people call Overland Park home. The city maintains 1,800 lane-miles of streets – more miles than the entire Santa Fe trail from the Kansas City area to Santa Fe and back. William Strang’s real-estate venture has grown into Kansas’ second-largest city. Beginning with a dream and a dash of entrepreneurship, Overland Park and its people have built and maintained a good environment for business, a good place to work and a good place to call home. ~Monroe Dodd |
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