6 minute read
KC ORIGINALS
Kansas City Board of Trade.
One of the United States’ largest financial markets was headquartered in Kansas City for over a century. The Board of Trade first came together in 1857 as a merchant association and by 1876 was trading futures commodities.
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Traders bought and sold the winter wheat used to produce the nation’s bread – at first glance, not a sexy or terribly exciting market but undeniably indispensable.
And ever since the Board of Trade moved to Chicago in 2013, a former executive has been concerned its existence in, and importance to, Kansas City will be forgotten.
Walt Vernon, retired attorney and the chief administrative officer at the Board of Trade from the early 1970s to early 1980s, says he’s a romantic at heart.
“I always thought that in the later years, Kansas City got far away from its agricultural beginning, which was cattle in the West Bottoms and the Board of Trade and the grain elevators that started Kansas City,” Vernon says.
The first two locations of the Board of Trade were at 8th and Wyandotte and 10th and Wyandotte, and the second still bears the sign. The third and final location was at 4800 Main Street off the Country Club Plaza, from 1966 until its purchase by Chicago’s CME Group in 2012.
As far as Vernon could tell, no one was planning to mark the Main Street building to preserve the memory of the grand institution it once housed – one that once defined so much of Kansas City’s prosperity and culture.
“I just thought that was terrible,” Vernon says, “perhaps an emotional reaction, not necessarily logical. In any event, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going do something about it.’”
But that proved a much greater challenge than he’d imagined.
First, Vernon approached the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, thinking that its historical ties with the Board of Trade might compel interest in supporting a marker. He says that he “couldn’t get the time of day.”
That response from the chamber puzzled him because, by his research, it appears that in the earliest days of what is now Kansas City, the chamber came together largely in order to track and disseminate information about the grain and cattle trades.
Ultimately, after also striking out with the owner of the property and anyone else he’d approached about a marker, Vernon says he gave up.
However, Vernon’s late wife, Barbara, spent three decades as the city administrator for Prairie Village, Kansas, and had a lot of connections to civic-minded Kansas Citians. One of those people was Steve Noll, former Prairie Village city councilmember and retired executive director of the Jackson County Historical Society.
Vernon mentioned his desire for a marker to Noll not knowing that Noll, aside from having a personal passion for local history, was also a member of the Native Sons and Daughters of Greater Kansas City.
The NSDKC is a 90-year-old nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history and heritage of the Kansas City metro through the placement of markers and plaques. They’ve put up about 60 over a 10-county area that spans both sides of State Line; all are listed on the website.
But, as Vernon remembers it, he didn’t expect anything to come of it. A year passed before he had a phone call from the organization saying that the marker was a go.
Noll had looked into the Board of Trade’s history. He thinks about the key contributors to Kansas City as a major American center of commerce. Events like the 1869 completion of the Hannibal Bridge over the Missouri River, which created
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a permanent rail connection into the West Bottoms and led to the construction of Union Station; the Kansas City Livestock Exchange as a driver for all local commerce and wealth; and, of course, the Board of Trade.
“The Board of Trade served as a way for all these individual grain farmers across Missouri, Kansas – especially Kansas with hard winter wheat – Nebraska, probably up into the Dakotas,” Noll says. “…it was the economic vehicle where those people could get their products sold and into the hands of the food processors or the export grain merchants who would then get it on to its final use.”
Noll didn’t think this information was readily available and that bothered him.
He told the NSDKC that if they would handle the details, his personal nonprofit, the Minnesota Prairie Wind Foundation, would fund the marker. They agreed.
“Our purpose is to not only to preserve history, but to get it out to the public for knowledge and for interpretation,” says Ross Marshall, longtime member of the NSDKC and chair of the historical markers committee. “Part of that is done by these historical markers that are put in place to stand there for decades.”
Noll imagines into the future and sees thousands of people walking by the marker, which is by the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library.
He says sometimes a marker next to a building is all it takes to preserve local history. “If it’s the starting point for somebody to want to learn more, well, it was well worth the investment.”
“Our purpose is to not only to preserve history, but to get it out to the public for knowledge and for interpretation,” says Ross Marshall, longtime member of the NSDKC and chair of the historical markers committee. “Part of that is done by these historical markers that are put in place to stand there for decades.”
Noll imagines into the future and sees thousands of people walking by the marker, which is by the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library.
He says sometimes a marker next to a building is all it takes to preserve local history. “If it’s the starting point for somebody to want to learn more, well, it was well worth the investment.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Kniggendorf is a Kansas City-based freelance writer and the author of Secret Kansas City. She's a regular contributor to KCUR 89.3 and other local publications like the Kansas City Star and The Pitch. Her work has also been published by the Smithsonian, National Public Radio, the Saturday Evening Post, and other national publications.
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