Monthly Archives: April 2014

Mystery Solved at Wornall

"H"

Horse Parking?

By Tony Lawson

One of the tasks I was assigned as an intern at the Wornall House was to solve the riddle of the bronze “H” plaque.  None of the current staff of volunteers and administrators knew exactly what it represented or when it was put there.  Archaeologist Doug Shaver did a preliminary investigation over the summer and concluded it was put there sometime between 1890 and the 1930s and it was NOT placed by the NPS for its Historic American Building Survey (HABS) in the 1960s.  From experience in old buildings I knew it was not structural, and so did Doug.  It was surely commemorative of something.  But what?

I asked around locally.  Nothing.  For kicks and a learning experience I tried crowd sourcing.  I took it to hundreds of my Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee relatives and friends on Facebook.  There are lots of antebellum homes there.  Maybe one of my cousins has seen this.  Nada.  I took it to reddit.com askahistorian and whatisthisthing.  Some insisted it was structural.  Hospital?  Horse Parking?  A tiny vertical landing pad for helicopters?  I learned in the UK this “H” plaque is the designation assigned to building with a recessed fire hydrant.  I learned that in an episode of “Psyche” there was a button behind a plaque like this in a tourist trap type of museum that shut off a fountain that then allowed access to a secret portal.  Very interesting.  But, zilch in the hard facts department.

I suspected the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  They loved placing bronze markers in their hey-day.  They have several markers around the KC area and there was a file at the Missouri State Historical Society I was yet to lay my hands on.

I finally found the answer, in the last place I looked.  The last file in a box at the Jackson County Historical Society contained forgotten facts and documents .  It turns out the “H” confused the JCHS for a while too.  From 1965 to 1985 they apparently had no idea what it was until local historian Kathy Taggart found documents that told the story of the H.

“…the enclosed records were found which indicate the plaque was one three hundred which were purchased by the Kansas City Centennial Celebration on March 1923 and paid for by Mrs. AdaMacLaughlin.  Apparently the H indicates historic importance.  To date we know of no others in existence.”  — K. Taggart  January 1985

Mystery solved!  It was my first professional case and now I’m closer being a real live hard-boiled history detective.  Now where is my shot of whiskey, cigar and .38?  Somebody que up my theme song…

H file at JCHS

The last place I looked!

 

Help and Rescue

By Elizabeth Perry

When I studied the Holocaust as an undergraduate, part of my class focused on rescuers – we particularly looked at the book Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust by Eva Fogelman. While many of the survivors interviewed by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education state definitively that they received no help from non-Jews, others have some stories of receiving help. A Jewish family in Berlin received a warning from an officer just before their family was deported, enabling them to escape through Russia to Shanghai. A Hungarian Jewish family’s neighbor offered to take their daughter after the Germans invaded Hungary in order to protect her from deportation. The same family later escaped to Switzerland with 1,700 other Jews. Jewish-Hungarian lawyer Rudolf Kastner negotiated their freedom by bribing Nazi officials.

The most extensive rescue effort I found in the transcripts was a Jewish mother and son hidden for the entire war by an older Swedish man living in Berlin. The other accounts of going into hiding are less pleasant – some interviewees reported other Jews only being able to hide if they paid someone to hide them, and if they ran out of money they would be handed over to the Nazis. One survivor remembered being hidden in a tiny space under the floor of a barn with her sister – they almost drowned when the space flooded. Other events, which I would very much hesitate to call rescue efforts, affected survival. A young Polish Jew was taken out of a deportation transport group by a German officer who admired his skills as a plumber.

I can’t generalize about the attitudes of entire countries from the few survivor stories I’ve heard, but I see the fewest rescue stories in the interviews with Polish survivors. Poland indeed had one of the lowest rates of survival, despite having the highest Jewish population of any European country by far (see this graph for more info). Many of the survivors say the Poles did not want them there, that they were happy to see the Jews taken away and were irritated when a few of them tried to come home. While I am generalizing from limited sources, it’s hard not to see some connection between the attitudes of non-Jewish Poles and the survival rates of Polish Jews.

Kansas City Public Library Seeks Summer Interns in Digital History

The Kansas City Public Library welcomes talented graduate students to apply for digital history internships at the library for the Summer 2014 semester. Interns will earn course credits and gain hands-on experience with the library’s digital history projects, especially the Civil War on the Western Border project. Opportunities exist for students to work in the following areas:

  • Creating K-12 lesson plans and curricular materials based on the site (Honorariums exist for lesson plan creation);
  • Content development;
  • Designing or creating an RFP for a mobile history app;
  • Creating online versions of our local history exhibits; or
  • Metadata, digitization, and curation through the library’s content management system.

Interested graduate students should follow the instruction on the How to Apply page.

Defining and Introducing Neighborhoods

By Matthew Reeves

What’s a neighborhood? And more importantly, who gets to decide?

One of my tasks as an intern is to write introductions for a book on historic buildings and structures in Kansas City. We’re revising the first edition of the book, which had its own neighborhood by neighborhood introductions. For the revision several neighborhoods will be condensed into one introduction. For instance, I’ve just submitted a draft introduction for a mega-neighborhood that includes the West Bottoms, the Westside, the Central Business District, and the Northeast.

Does the opulence of the suburbs...

Does the opulence of the suburbs…

Each of those areas used to have its own introduction — about 1,000 words — that told the story of the people that settled in the area: who they were, why they came to Kansas City, and in some cases, why the left the neighborhood. In the process of consolidating introductions, I was inevitably forced to cut some material. I dislike editing history because it comes with terrible responsibility.

Neighborhoods are geographically static but sometimes transform dramatically in terms of prestige, population, and ethnic character. Many readers are familiar with the “White Flight” into the suburbs that struck many urban areas in the 1950s and 60s, but might be surprised to learn that such urban shifts have been going on in Kansas City for much longer.

Much of my anxiety results from a desire to share history in a fair and responsible manner.

...outweigh the decline of the urban core?

…outweigh the decline of the urban core?

In that sense, defining neighborhoods is a lot like being a historian. You have to make conscious (and hopefully conscientious) decisions about how to frame any project, which always includes political choices about what to include and what to leave out. That kind of power – to silence by omission – weighs heavy.

Of course, most of the practical issues about what constitutes a physical neighborhood are less complicated than theoretical debates about the ontology and propriety of history. And thankfully, boundary issues have already been decided by the city. But describing and defining neighborhoods still present difficult choices – how to look at issues, how to frame them. Do we celebrate the opulence of the suburbs, or should we lament the loss of tax base and resulting urban decay that accompanied suburbanization?

Does it have to be a zero sum game?