This account was written by Edgar A. Porter in 1952 at the prompting of Frank R. Grant. The original can be found in the Vertical Files at Johnson County’s Central Resource Library. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Prairie School District was born in 1865. The district comprised what is now Prairie, Roesland and Westwood. The district was bounded by 47th Street on the north, the State line on the east, 71st Street on the south, (only there wasn’t a 71st Street at that time) and Nall Avenue on the west. The school house was on a two acre tract on the northwest corner of 63rd and Mission Road. It was called the Crooked school because the building leaned slightly to the north. The building was forty feet wide and sixty feet long. Possibly it was built so much larger than was needed because the district fathers had a dim idea that at some future time they might need to divide it with a partition and have a two room school.
In 1874 the district was divided; the south part remaining Prairie and the north part becoming the Mission District. (Later, Mission became Roesland and Westwood.) The boundary of the new district began at 59th Street and Nall, east on 59th Street to State Line, south on State Line to 75th Street, (note the addition of the strip between 71st Street and 75th Street,) west on 75th Street to one-fourth mile west of Nall, north one-fourth mile, east to Nall, and north to 59th Street. This was an area of 2600 acres.
There were fifteen families in the district: Major Deering, William James, William White, August Hahn, Horace Tower, D.C. Odell, Joseph Thorpe, M.V. (Wash) Henderson, Mr. Hughes, Garret Barnes, T.C. Porter, T.A. Lewis, Thomas Nall, John Nall, and Herman Spielbusch. The new district purchased an acre of ground at 67th Street and Mission for $50.00 and gave Mr. S.M. Standish, a local carpenter, the two acres at 63rd and Mission Road in return for erecting a building on the new site. It was in this building that my mental garden was cultivated. It was a one room school. The heating plant was a big red stove that stood in the center of the room. Half of the pupils roasted while the others shivered. Our last chore before going home in the evening was to put our ink bottles under the stove so the ink wouldn’t freeze overnight.
One redeeming thing about this stove was that it sometimes interfered with the teacher’s line of vision, giving some pupils a measure of freedom from observation. In addition to the stove and the desks, the equipment consisted of a blackboard, a bundle of switches, a coal-scuttle, poker and shovel, a water pail and tin dipper from which we all drank. The play ground equipment consisted of an adjustable teeter-board, laid across a rail of the fence. We adjusted it by putting the stocky boy nearer the middle than the skinny one.
The teacher received from $25-$30 a month for seven months. The annual budget was between $300-$400 a year – about $18 per pupil. We didn’t study cooking, sewing, carpentering, mechanics, basketball or football. We played baseball at recess but the ball and bat were furnished by the pupils, not by the school.
The first church in the Prairie district was an open air one at 68th Street and Mission Road. It came about in this way. During the Civil War the commander of the Union forces in Missouri issued the famous, or infamous, Order No. II. One of the provisions of this order was that no minister might preach the gospel in Missouri without taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. Many ministers refused to do this because they considered it a violation of the Constitutional right to freedom of worship. Some who were near enough to the border took their congregations across the State Line to hold services. The Westport Cumberland Presbyterian Church had two elders living in Johnson County; T.A. Lewis at 67th and Mission and T.C. Porter at 69th and Mission Road. In those days there was a beautiful little grove midway between these homes. In nice weather the Westport Church held services in this grove. In stormy weather services were held alternately at the two homes. After the school house was built in 1866 this church held services in the school house until they built a church in Westport to replace the one that had been destroyed during the war.
Since the lives, loves and adventures of the early settlers in the Prairie district followed about the same pattern, a brief sketch of the family with whose fortunes and misfortunes I am most familiar may be of some interest. My father, Thomas C. Porter brought his bride to the Prairie District from Kentucky in 1858. They came by steamboat up the Mississippi to St. Louis and up the Missouri to Kansas City. At that time Westport was a thriving little town, but Kansas City was only a suburb of Westport, known as Westport Landing. Father bought 160 acres of land at $6/acre. His farm was 1/4 of a mile wide and a mile long between 69th Street and 71st Street, intersected in the middle by Mission Road. He had only a small house at first, a one room log cabin.
Life was rugged in those days. Conveniences were few and luxuries were nil. They didn’t have push buttons. They didn’t have electric lights, gas lights, or kerosene lamps. They had tallow candles made by hand in their own molds. Just as they were getting a good start in the new land, along came the great drought of 1860, which according to the old timers was a droughtier drought than any drought we have had since. Next came the Civil War when life and property along the border were in constant danger. What the Bushwackers didn’t steal the Jayhawkers did. The next great calamity was the visitation of grasshoppers in 1874.
During my boyhood days life ran much more smoothly, but still one of our chief pastimes was doing without things. We didn’t have television. We didn’t have radios. We didn’t have movies. We didn’t have telephones. About our only commercialized entertainment was the Priest of Pallas parade in Kansas City. We had to manufacture our own amusements, and yet, I sometimes wonder if we didn’t have more fun and feel better afterwards.
-Edgar A. Porter
