The 3700 block of Troost and Forest today plays an important role in Kansas City life, as the site of the DeLaSalle Education Center. The same block holds other important history: it was once the home of a man who made his fortune by believing in Kansas City’s future, and later the home of a Catholic high school dedicated to serving all children in the urban core of Kansas City.
As part of our Uncovering History Project, the Midtown KC Post is looking at the 1940 tax assessment photos of each block in Midtown. This week, we’re focusing on the block from Troost to Forest, from 37th Street to Manheim Road. Often, these stories rely heavily on these photos, but many of the pictures of this part of town aren’t available. The only photos from the 1940 collection of the block are three images of auto-related businesses that dominated the block.
The 3700 block of Troost and Forest today. The large building is DeLaSalle Education Center.
However, newspaper articles and old maps tell the early history of the block. In today’s Squier Park neighborhood, William Stewart amassed 100 acres of land between 36th and 42nd, Troost and Paseo. In 1881, he sold sixty acres of the land to James J. Squier.
J.J. Squire’s obituary photo from 1900.
Squier was born in Pennsylvania, served in the Union Army, and was in Ohio and Chicago’s dry goods and hardware businesses. According to his obituary,
“It was while in Chicago that Mr. Squier’s attention was attracted to Kansas City. The town was then forging ahead with rapid strides and he was so impressed with the future possibilities and so positive was he of Kansas City’s coming greatness that he heavily invested in real estate here in 1872 and came here to live. He engaged in the livestock and real estate business.”
Squier’s confidence in the future of Kansas City paid off for him. When he died, his estate was estimated to be worth between $350,00 and a half a million dollars.
A 1907 map shows residential development going on all around the Squier Property (which then belonged to Squier’s daughter Cora S. Jones). From Tuttle & Pike’s Atlas of Kansas City.
Many people knew the Squier home, a big white frame house J.J. built between Troost and Forest, Manheim Road, and Thirty-seventh Street. When he moved in, the home was far from town; the nearest street car line was a mule car on Eighteenth Street. The rural Squire property, its deer park a popular attraction, remained heavily forested as the city grew around it. By 1919, when plans were made to raze the Squier home so that Thirty-fourth Terrace could be built, the Kansas City Star called it “one of the landmarks now surrounded by the city in the sweep of the residence district southward.”
Squier left the property to his daughter, Cora A. Jones, whose husband, Robert Jones, developed Squier Park.
This 1909-1940 Sanborn Fire Insurance map shows the block when it was dominated by the Lillis High School. Troost Avenue was dotted with used cars lots and gas stations during this period.
1941, the Lillis High School opened on the former Squier home site. A year earlier, four Benedictine Sisters from Atchinson, Kansas, under the leadership of Sister Jerome Keeler, had been sent to open the school. Originally on the second floor of a business building at 3627 Main, the school moved when the building facing Forest was completed.
Sister Mary David McFarland, who helped found Lillis, told the Kansas City Star in 1976 that Sister Jerome set the tone of the school’s philosophy to serve the needs of the central city.
“I remember Sister Jerome saying over and over again, “We want anyone who wants to come to us. We want to serve everybody.”
When Lillis closed in 1979, the DeLaSalle school moved in.
Would you like us to focus on your block next week? Send us an email.
Two more of the auto-related businesses on Troost in 1940.
Historic photos courtesy Kansas City Public Library – Missouri Valley Special Collections.
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