Photograph of the County Club District Field Day, 1921, from the J. C. Nichols Company Scrapbooks. Courtesy The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center-Kansas City.
Since 1980, the State Historical Society has been collecting and sharing important Kansas City and western Missouri history through its Kansas City Research Center. Yesterday the center invited visitors to its newly-renovated location on the UMKC campus, and offered a vision for the future.
The Kansas City Research Center opened in 1980 to collect, preserve and give the public access to historical documents. Assistant Director Lucinda Adams said the collection includes 13,000 cubic feet of materials, ranging from the scrapbooks of the J.C. Nichols Company to an oral history of the Kansas City Monarchs to Jewish Community Center records.
Adams hopes those collections will grow, and she also intends to start focusing on new areas of collection.
“I hope to start getting documents related to the Hispanic community, African American community, and women’s organizations, for example,” she said.
She is also interested in documenting Kansas City sports history.
The staff of the State Historical Society Research Center also sponsors exhibits, publications, symposia and workshops like the Charles N. Kimball Lecture Series.
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