DO YOU REMEMBER OLD ARMOURDALE?
By Robert W. Patrick
Armourdale was founded in 1880 by some Boston capitalists incorporated as the Kaw Valley Town Site and Bridge Company. These investors included Charles Francis Adams, Jr., John Quincy Adams, Charles Merriam, Nathaniel Thayer, H.H. Hunnewell, and John A. Burnham.
They obtained a large tract of land, approximately 3,000 acres, in the Kansas River Valley about one mile above the juncture of the Missouri and Kansas rivers and plotted a portion of it into a town. The town was first named Armoursdale in honor of the Armours of packing house and banking fame. It began to fill rapidly with industries and homes and soon had the necessary population for a city.
The first addition to the city was plated one year later, in 1881, by the Kaw Valley Town Site and Bridge Company. This extended Armoursdale from 4th to 10th street.
In the spring of 1882 it became a city. An election was held May 5, 1882. The officers elected at that election included: Mayor, Frank W. Patterson; Councilmen: Nememiah Shirrick, Daniel Herbert, E.W. Anderson, S. Snyder and Joseph Bradley. The first judge was John C. Foore. The Marshall was William Ross; and the City Clerk was Granville Patterson.
Also, in the spring of 1882, the old school district, in which a school had been maintained for more than twenty years, was divided and that portion of the district containing the school house was shifted over to south Wyandotte. In May, the Armourdale school district number 9 voted bonds for a $9,000 school house. This building was completed on October 5th of the same year....
Five hundred acres of land were set aside especially for manufacturing and railroad purposes. Tracks of the belt line railroad extended to all portions of this acreage. Many industries, including the Allcut Packing Company, quickly located on the Armourdale bottoms. Within six years, the few municipal restrictions, the light taxes, and cheap land had attracted farm machinery shops, a desiccating works (the Kansas Desiccating and Refining Company), a broom factory, the consolidated tank line works, an iron foundry, bridge works, a file and bat factory, two grain elevators, two cooper shops, and a basket factory.
A majority of the 1,582 residents lived near their place of employment. Wedged between Kansas City and Wyandotte, Armourdale, with its growing population and industrial potential offered a possible solution to the employment problem of the area. It was felt that the workshops of 5,000 employees, putting forth an annual product of $15,000,000 from the river bottoms, coupled with the 12,000 population of Wyandotte could build a commercial center at the mouth of the Kaw.
The residential development was generally in the center of Armourdale, with the meat packing plants toward the east and the soap plants to the west and the railroads on the north. The main east-west artery, Kansas Avenue, was not paved until about fifty years ago. The main north-south artery, which is now the 7th Street Trafficway, was built in the mid-1930s.
The soap plants, such as the Procter and Gamble plant on the cover of this magazine, were a natural outgrowth of the packing house industry. Some of the waste products from the meat packers were used in the production of soap and soap products. The picture, which was furnished courtesy of the Wyandotte County Museum, shows a somewhat different scene than exists today. The street has been widened, the ornamental street lights have been replaced. The building has been remodeled. A power plant stands where the Ivory Soap billboard was. The parking lot has been moved east to make far more room than was required when the picture was taken.
A few blocks down the street stood the Peet Brothers Soap Plant which became Colgate, Palmolive-Peet, and finally simply Colgate-Palmolive.
May 29, 1903 the area was flooded when after nearly one-fourth of the normal annual rainfall fell on the area drained by the Kansas River watershed. Only one of seven railroad bridges in the area withstood the flood. Property damage was in the millions. But Armourdale cleaned up and rebuilt.
On July 13, 1951, after forty days of rain, the supposedly floodproof community was again flooded when nearly half a million cubic feet of water per second smashed against levees and flood walls protecting the city. Dikes and flood walls were topped and finally crushed. Water 35 feet deep spread out over the area. In the Kansas City area 41 persons lost their lives. Property loss was over one billion dollars. Armourdale was hard hit. Many of the packing plants did not reopen. But Armourdale cleaned up and started to rebuild.
With the increased flood protection in
the form of dams upriver and higher dikes and floodwalls, there are some who
say the area could never be flooded again. We hope not.