The Johnson County Museum will soon unveil a new special exhibit titled: TRAINS: Transportation and the Transformation of Johnson County. The exhibit opens on Saturday, May 13 – National Train Day – and explores just how instrumental the railroads were in shaping Johnson County. Below find three surprising ways that railroads changed this area.
1 – Agriculture and New Markets
From the county’s founding in 1855 through the postwar suburbanization of the 1940s and ‘50s, the main thing happening on the Johnson County landscape was agriculture. During the 1850s and 1860s, most county residents were subsistence farmers, growing, raising, and making the things they needed to survive. If a farmer had a particularly good year for a crop, they might trade that surplus with neighbors for other things they needed.
When the first train rolled into Olathe in 1867, Johnson County was suddenly part of a vast rail network that connected it – via Kansas City and over the Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri River – to larger markets such as Chicago and New York, and eventually to Galveston and New Orleans on the Gulf Coast. Rail access meant farmers could sell their crops and livestock to the railroad to sell in these larger markets. Farmers earned money for growing just one or a few crops and they used that money to purchase the things they needed in new stores that sprung up in Johnson County’s depot towns. County residents were no longer limited to what they could grow, raise, or make. With railroads, mail orders from New York City could arrive in Olathe in a matter of a week or less.
2 – Employment and New Residents
Railroad employees lived in nearly every town through which rail tracks ran. Some railroad workers were planners, engineers, and accountants, working in offices. Others were station agents, conductors, and locomotive engineers working in localities. Still others were section workers, those who built and maintained sections of railroad track, working wherever the need arose. In 1930, nearly 8% of Johnson County’s working age male population worked for the railroads. The railroad was the third largest industry employing county residents – the top two were agriculture and the retail/wholesale trades.
The railroad also attracted and recruited workers from around the world. Germans and Eastern European immigrants moved to Kansas (especially Central and Western Kansas) to help build new rail lines and settle in emerging railroad towns. After 1910, workers were recruited from México, which was experiencing the Mexican Revolution. The Santa Fe Railroad and others shipped workers to Kansas City, Chicago, and across the United States to form section labor gangs. These track workers – or traqueros in Spanish – lived in railroad-provided housing and built and maintained the miles and miles of track that stretched across the American West.
In Johnson County, section housing was sometimes small houses, barracks-style dormitories, or even old boxcars. Communities of section housing existed near Gardner, Olathe, De Soto, Holliday, Bonita, and Craig Station, among other locations. Today these section houses and often the depots, too, have been removed from the county’s landscape.
3 – Town Building and Town Moving
Perhaps the most significant way that railroads shaped Johnson County was in the building, growing, or withering of towns. In the 19th century, a railroad depot signaled prosperity and rail access typically brought growth to business districts. Johnson County had a number of railroad lines crossing its landscape on their way to the Kansas City, a national railroad hub. Counties in western Kansas were lucky to have a single depot located at their county seat. By contrast, Johnson County had perhaps 20 depots at the height of the railroads. A surprising number of these depot towns were founded by the railroads. Small depots were located in the rural countryside for agricultural purposes; freight depots in growing towns for business commerce; and passenger or combination depots in high traffic areas such as Olathe, De Soto, Gardner, and Holliday.
Residents believed access to the railroad was vital to a town’s future success. The small town of Lanesfield is a prime example. When a predecessor to the Santa Fe Railroad built a line through southwestern Johnson County in the early 1870s, it bypassed Lanesfield and instead located depots in Gardner and Edgerton. Residents of Lanesfield moved their homes and businesses board by board and brick by brick to Edgerton in order to have rail access. The town of Lanesfield ceased to exist and is home today only to a stone one-room schoolhouse that was built in 1869 and today is a national historic landmark operated by the Johnson County Museum. But Lanesfield was not alone – the closure and demolition of depots in smaller communities such as Stilwell, Wilder, Bonita, and Clare diminished the economies and populations of those communities in the 20th century. Visitors to the exhibit can walk across a large map of Johnson County on the floor with informational stanchions marking the county’s railroad towns.
To Learn More
To learn about the many other important ways that the railroads shaped Johnson County, visit the TRAINS exhibit at the Johnson County Museum. The family-friendly exhibit opens Saturday, May 13 at 9:00am and is included in the cost of regular admission ($6 adults, $5 seniors, $4 children). The exhibit will feature fun interactives for all ages, a number of historic artifacts, video footage of section workers building the railroad, and a model train display based on Johnson County’s rail history. The Museum will host a series of special programs, including the first on May 18, “Kansas City and the Power of the Railroad,” with a special guest speaker from the Linda Hall Library, a repository for science and technology materials. The exhibit will be open during the Museum’s quarterly Free Days on June 11, Sept. 16, and Nov 22. Trains will be on display through January 13, 2024. Learn more at https://jcprd.com/1914/Special-Exhibit—TRAINS.
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