You asked: was there a livery stable in Westport?

Courtesy Kansas City Public Library, Missouri Valley Special Collections.

Our story and slide show yesterday about the area around Westport Road and Broadway brought a question from a reader. He asked if we knew anything about a livery stable that had once stood in the 300 block of Westport, just east of Broadway, near where Dave’s Stage Coach Inn stands today.

Since it was a slow news day, we did some checking and found that there was, indeed, a livery at 306 Westport Road. The photo above, obtained from the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Room, shows the Country Club Livery and Boarding Stables in 1906.

Col. James Rout ran the stable, where local owners boarded horses and others could rent a rig for a ride. Edward R. Schauffler, writing in the Kansas City Star in 1942, said renting a buggy was the thing to do at the turn of the century.

“It brings back memories of red-wheeled buggies, of yellow-wheeled runabouts, of jaunty roadsters rented from livery stables on a Sabbath afternoon at fancy rates, to take the best beloved out through the golden autumn, that she might see it and that the world might see you in her company.”

The stables he remembered were Rout’s, which later became the Rock Front Garage on Westport Road. There was another on Main Street where the Warwick Theater later stood; there horses reached the street on a high wooden ramp that echoed below with their hoofs.

The picture below, from the Dec. 13, 1953 Kansas City Star, is an 1880 scene of the stables before the stone facade was added in the 1890s. And below that, a Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1895-1907 shows where the livery stood in relation to the Westport Bank on the corner of Broadway, and the Harris House Hotel two block west.