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Alumni Revitalize Historical Downtown Warrensburg
Strategic Restoration Efforts Preserve the Past While Defining the Future
By Trevor McLanahan
Downtown Warrensburg is home to many different businesses, organizations and restaurants. Housed in buildings dating to the late 19th century, these establishments make for a vibrant downtown with an abundance of history.
Warrensburg Main Street, one of only nine Missouri Main Street Accredited Communities in the state, applied for a Paul Bruhn Historic Revitalization Subgrant from the National Park Service. In the summer of 2024, three Warrensburg properties were among the 13 projects statewide that were awarded funding for exterior preservation: the building that originally housed the iconic Jones Brothers Mule Barn, a section of the C.W. Cord Building that now houses The Next Door Agents, and the historical Star Theater.
History and Progress
When Revolutionary War veteran Martin Warren arrived from Kentucky in 1833, he established a blacksmith shop located at the corner of present-day College Avenue and East Gay Street. A few years later, when Johnson County was established, the township became the county seat and was named Warren’s Burg in Martin’s honor. In 1855, it was incorporated as the city of Warrensburg.
Between 1860 and 1890, the population of Warrensburg grew from just under 1,000 to more than 4,700, according to the Johnson County Historical Society. The end of the Civil War in 1865 ushered in a new era for Warrensburg, which the year before had become a stop on the Pacific Railroad as it proceeded westward.
Col. B.W. Grover and Maj. N.B. Holden advocated for the railroad to come through Warrensburg and established plats of land that would facilitate the track and the city’s eastward expansion. As development progressed after the war, Holden Street gradually replaced Main Street as the hub of commerce and extended south to what would become the campus of State Normal School No. 2 in 1871.
As the turn of the century approached, construction was booming downtown. The building on West Pine now known as the Star Theater opened as Gilkeson’s Dry Goods Store in 1883 and became a theater in 1915.
In 1897, grocer C.W. Cord constructed a building on Holden Street using locally quarried sandstone, and the following year, Johnson County’s new courthouse opened across the street. The original courthouse, built in 1842 and now home to the Johnson County Historical Society, was the first Warrensburg building to earn a place on the National Register of Historic Places. It was listed on the registry in 1970, thanks to the early efforts of a group that would evolve into Warrensburg Main Street.
Since 1994, Warrensburg Main Street has been a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the economic growth and betterment of the downtown area and community. The group is part of Missouri Main Street Connection, which encourages communities to revitalize historical buildings in both rural and urban settings. Since 2015, Warrensburg Main Street has logged more than 30,000 volunteer hours, helped open more than 90 new businesses and posted more than 230 new jobs.
“I’ve watched downtown change, especially in the last five to 10 years; it has really just blossomed,” says real estate broker Eva Norton, ’14, who purchased the north section of the Cord Building to house The Next Door Agents in January 2023.
Driving Downtown Growth
When the Star Theater was gifted to Warrensburg Main Street in August 2023, they were not sure what the building would become. Warrensburg locals and alumni may remember previous names for the space, including the Star Bar, the Warehouse, Club Blue or the Red Carpet Lounge.
“We didn’t want it to become a parking lot, and we wanted that building to have life again,” says Jamie DeBacker, ’16, Warrensburg Main Street’s executive director.
Warrensburg Main Street held open houses where community members could tour the building and give their opinion on what they would like the historical theater to become. Ideas included a community space, event center, arcade, museum or even a skating rink.
"It all revolved around a place of gathering," says Jamie. "It’s just a place for people to be together.”
Jamie’s work with nonprofits started while she was a Business Administration and Management student at UCM, participating in the Integrative Business Experience (IBE), where students secure a bank loan to start a real business. They have one semester to develop and sell a product to generate enough to pay off their loan, with additional profits being donated to their selected nonprofit. The group Jamie was part of created a MuleNation-branded filtered water bottle to raise money for the Thirst Project, a nonprofit organization that works to end the global water crisis by building freshwater wells in communities that need clean drinking water.
By choosing UCM, Jamie followed in the footsteps of her mother, Jennifer DeBacker, who graduated in 1987. Jamie was involved in numerous student activities at UCM, serving as the social chairman for the Sigma Kappa Delta Eta sorority, volunteering with MO Volunteers and being part of the Homecoming leadership committee. After graduation, she became the event planner, then assistant director, at Warrensburg Main Street. This January, Jamie celebrated one year as the organization’s executive director.
“I quickly became assistant director because I did have those leadership and management skills of helping, talking to people and doing public speaking,” she says.
Having that business degree, it really helped me dive into helping other small businesses because that’s what we’re here for — to provide them with resources.
But Jamie would be the first to tell you that Warrensburg Main Street’s successes couldn’t happen without a strong team, which includes Maggie Burgin, ’16.
Jamie, a Warrensburg native, was one of the first locals to befriend Maggie when her family moved to town in 2004. Maggie was 10 years old when her father, Dave Slifer, became head coach of Jennies Basketball at UCM. Her mother, Tammy Slifer, has served as assistant head coach since 2018.
Maggie graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Merchandising and a double minor in Business Administration and Marketing. After graduation, she left Warrensburg, but only for a short time. When she moved back, she worked at MKT Clothing downtown before taking the position of Warrensburg Main Street’s marketing and event coordinator in 2023. She says she has been in love with her line of work ever since:
My heart just always wanted to come back to Warrensburg. A lot of people think of Warrensburg Main Street and they only think of our events, but there is just so much more to our organization. We do a lot of revitalization and helping our downtown businesses grow and keeping them here, and all the little things we do behind the scenes.
Waymon Hollister, ’22, ’24, is the newest member of the Warrensburg Main Street team as program coordinator since January. She is from Omaha, Nebraska, and moved to Warrensburg in 2018 to pursue her bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education. She continued at UCM to earn her MBA with a concentration in Public Relations. Waymon’s love for the farmers market and Warrensburg helped her come into her role with Warrensburg Main Street. She says she already sees that her work is making a huge impact in the community:
I just love Warrensburg. I think the community is the most important part of it.
Jamie, Maggie and Waymon work as a team to serve the downtown community. Jamie still comes to visit the UCM campus for volunteer fairs, to catch up with former professors and to be a guest speaker.
“You have such a tight-knit relationship with your classmates and with your professors,” Jamie says. “You can tell they all care about you, and you also get such a wide variety of knowledge from them.”
Alumni Next Door
Jamie, Maggie and The Next Door Agents co-owner Eva Norton knew one another at UCM as sorority sisters. Many of Eva’s family members attended UCM, including her parents, David, ’67, ’71, and Martine, ’84, Gann, and her sister, Nina Gann, ’15.
Eva graduated from UCM with her bachelor’s degree in Biology. One research project she worked on involved studying how snakes eat. She would weigh the snakes each morning, taking into account the caloric content of the prey each snake consumed. She says that at one point there were more than 200 snakes in the basement of the Wilson C. Morris Building on campus for the study.
“I love UCM; I loved my time as a student there,” Eva says. “This is the perfect size university where you can really get one-on-one with your teachers. … It gives you the opportunity to experience college life without it being crazy, overwhelming or scary.”
During her time at UCM, Eva studied abroad in China and has lived in several states, including California, Florida, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona.
“Once you experience things from different perspectives, you experience other cultures, you experience other ways of life, it made me so thankful for how I was raised,” Eva says. “I’ve been to a lot of places, and there’s no place like this town … I am very, very happy. I would not raise my kids in any other place.”
Community Collaboration
Warrensburg Main Street hosts more than 50 days of community events downtown each year. When they were gifted the Star Theater, they held community cleanup days, then opened up the space for events.
Warrensburg Main Street partnered with the UCM Alumni Foundation for free screenings of “The Grinch” in 2023 and “Home Alone” in 2024 after the holiday parade downtown. The building has also served as the venue for MuleNation graduation celebrations for graduating UCM seniors in December and May.
“I really feel like our partnership with UCM continues to grow and bond,” says Jamie.
As of Jan. 31, 2025, Warrensburg Main Street found an investor who shares the vision of restoring the Star Theater as a community gathering venue. The Paul Bruhn grant is transferable from Warrensburg Main Street to the new investor, so they can use the funds to help renovate the roof of the building.
Jamie says that, as of December 2024, the vacancy rate in downtown Warrensburg was 11%. In 2019, when she started with Warrensburg Main Street, it was 22%.
As Warrensburg continues to thrive as a hub for both local businesses and university activity, the hard work and collaboration of UCM alumni will ensure ongoing growth that respects and preserves history while building a vibrant future.
Public Relations undergraduate student Caitlin Mendenhall and recent graduate Cloe Pohlman, ’24, contributed to thisarticle. Historical photos are courtesy of the Johnson County Historical Society. Learn more at jocomohistory.org.
