Apple Trees Drew Crowds in the Spring

The year is 1897, and the Kansas City Star told the story of the hundreds of apple trees that drew a large crowd to 40^th and Warwick, not far from today’s Westport High School.

In 1867, Lowell Alonzo Goodman built a red brick home there and added an orchard on the surrounding 53 acres, from 40th to 43rd and from Oak to Main Streets. L.A. Goodman was widely known as a man who learned much about growing fruit. He became the general manager of the Ozark Orchard Company and even served as president of the American Pomological Society.

His home, “Forty hundred Warwick,” became a local landmark, noted especially for its acres of apple trees. Even after the property was platted and the building of homes began in the neighborhood, everyone knew the orchard.

“His orchard is now cut up with streets, and in and among the trees are the cottages of thankful householders,” the Star reported on the first of May in 1887. The orchard was in full bloom, which led to the pilgrimage of Kansas Citians to 40th and Warwick.

“By 3 o’clock Sunday afternoon the Westport streetcars were crowded with people who remembered the previous spring days in the Goodman orchard and went forth to rob it of its bloom. Apple blossoms seemed to be public property in Westport because the trees blossom in vacant lots as well as those that are fenced in. Vagrant boughs well laden hang over the side walks and neglected trees everywhere hang their heavy limbs so low that even a very small child can reach up and pick the blossoms.

“Cable cars returned to town full of people with armloads of white blossoms. Women on bicycles carried whole boughs before them and women and children walked through Hyde Park streets well laden. Buggies and carriages and express wagons with improvised seats crowded with clean faced happy children,” the Star said.

The paper went on to report that “an old man” who lived in the area helped himself, like everyone else, to the fruit.

“There’s no such thing as keeping these trees from bearing. Last spring we all thought we want goin to have no apples but in the fall I picked thirty bushels off the tree in my little lot and my share from the trees in vacant lots which seem to be anybodys. I made a little hand cider press and got three barrels of cider. We had cider to drink all winter and I had a barrel of vinegar left. Mother put up a good many gallons of apple preserves and we are em all winter and had em to give away.”

Goodman’s was perhaps the best-known but not the only orchard in Westport in those years. The paper said that people saw blooming white orchards wherever they went in old Westport.