Tag Archives: Wornall-Majors House

Stewards of History

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By Tony Lawson

I have been immersing myself in the history of the Wornall House these last few weeks and I’ve learned as much about the present as I have the past.  What strikes me most is the depth people have for caring about the past.  The archives I visit, the historic objects I observe, and the meetings I attend all indicate the collective concern of individuals toward preserving the past and handing it down to future generations to study, analyze and evaluate.  I feel the weight of the generations before me–as well as my profession and my moral obligations to myself and the society I live in–tasking me to do the best job I can in dissecting this history to learn from it and pass it down to the next generations. Like teaching, as a historian I am always asking myself; am I doing a good job?   Have I learned all I can?  Am I fair and honest? Am I a worthy of being a steward of history?  

Tony@JCHS

What one person deems an important piece of history and worth preserving, such as genealogy, ephemera, or financial records, may be insignificant to another, but all these types of things wind up in archives.  I’ve been sorting through some archives at the new digs of the Jackson County Historical Society piecing together the puzzle of the past so that I may tell a compelling story of the Wornall House.  I did not think I would be interested in genealogy, but I got sucked into a black hole for about 90 minutes yesterday.  I barely escaped.  I’ve always prided myself on being a local history geek, but I am stunned by the amount stuff I did NOT know about the Wornall family in Kansas City history.  So far, I seem to only be working around the edges of my topic picking up tidbits of information here and there.  Hopefully, this thing will start to come together when I write some papers and start to organize my research. 

Major Reconstructions at Wornall House

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Wornall House Feb 12, 2014

By Tony O’Bryan

Hello!  My name is Tony O’Bryan and I am a graduate student at UMKC finishing up a MA in History with a focus on 19th Century Missouri.  I have dual BAs from UMKC, one in Secondary Ed and another in History and I am thrilled to be involved in the History Department’s Public History program.  I specialize in the history of the greater Kansas City region and this internship opportunity is not only right up my alley of expertise, it is also my exact area of interest and study.

I will doing archival work, research for museum exhibit design, and developing curriculum content for the Wornall/Major’s House Museum community education programs.  While working at the Wornall House I will get to witness firsthand some of the construction work and foundation repair that was begun to save the south wall of the old house from buckling. You can see in the photo how the construction crews have braced some of their repair work.

I will feel right at home on a construction site.  Before I returned to college full-time I spent 17 years in the construction trades in Kansas City.  I have seen many regional historic homes and buildings quite literally from the inside out and these old buildings always interest me the most.  According to the common narrative this house was built with the labor of just four enslaved African-Americans and two free white laborers who worked for John Wornall.  The bricks were manufactured on the site.

When I see the massive size of the foundation stones of the Wornall House I always say to myself, “Just six guys to lay those huge blocks and make all those bricks?  No way!”

Maybe I will find out how they did it when I begin my work at Wornall House.  I cannot wait.