How did Westport, near no body of water, get its name? KCQ provides a history lesson

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26-01-2025

What's Your KCQ is a collaboration between The Star and the Kansas City Public Library series that answers your questions about the history, people, places and culture that make Kansas City unique. Have a suggestion for a future story? Share it with us here, or email our journalists at [e-mail].
Francis Parkman's 1849 book 'The Oregon Trail' recounted the author's harrowing travels through America's frontier, including an 1846 stop in a burgeoning western Missouri community:
'Westport was full of Indians, whose little shaggy ponies were tied by dozens along the houses and fences. Sacs and Foxes, with shaved heads and painted faces, Shawanoes and Delawares, fluttering in calico frocks, and turbans, Wyandottes dressed like white men, and a few wretched Kansas wrapped in old blankets, were strolling about the streets, or lounging in and out of the shops and houses.'
Susan A. Dillon, who was born in 1830 and claimed 'the proud distinction of being the first white child born on the site of Westport,' wrote in 1878 about the early days of the Santa Fe Trail settlement:
'Westport was a lively village. It was all tents and looked like the resting place of an army. Few buildings went up. Nearly all the arrivals came with tents and lived in them while waiting for a cavalcade of soldiers for safety going through the plains and over the mountains.'
B.H. 'Barney' Regan, 70, recalled the Westport of his youth in a 1929 story in The Star:
'I can remember when if you didn't get across Westport road by 9 o'clock in the morning you couldn't get across until 4 o'clock in the afternoon. When the wagon trains started moving out West, when the boats were landing at the foot of Main street — then things started moving. … You just stayed on your side of the street. Whips cracked and popped like firecrackers. Drivers yelled: 'Pow-e-e-e-e-e, ho, ho!''
All of which depicts a place that is a far cry from Kansas City's Westport entertainment district of today — except perhaps for the occasional gunplay that still troubles the area.
Reader Ryan Reed, who lives a bit east of Westport in South Hyde Park, wanted to know about the origins of Westport and posed an even more basic question for What's Your KCQ?, a partnership between the Kansas City Library and The Star:
'How did Westport, which is near no water and was founded before the Kansas-City-To-Be Westport Landing, get its port-themed name?'
That's a natural question, given that Westport isn't — and never was — on a body of water. The more famous Westport in Connecticut is on Long Island Sound. Westport, Massachusetts, was the westernmost port in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Even Westport, Kentucky, is on the Ohio River.
So, what's the deal with our Westport?
Well, it might not have been on water, but it was a port of sorts for pioneers beginning their ventures into the great unknown of the American West.
Westport was the first stop south of Independence on the Santa Fe, California and Oregon trails, which eventually parted ways after crossing into what is now Kansas. The settlement also was the ultimate destination for provisions that were sent by boat to the upstart Westport Landing (eventually to become Kansas City) a few miles away on the Missouri River.
Marty Wiedenmann Jarvis, president of the Westport Historical Society and a sixth-generation Westporter, said:
'I think the way they phrase it, and I've even seen it in old print, it's the furthest western port before the pioneers jumped off into the territories.'
We're talking about nearly 200 years ago, though, so the records are sketchy. And, as with much of Westport's history, there are conflicting reports.
Carrie Westlake Whitney, best known as the first director of the Kansas City Public Library, wrote in her 1908 book 'Kansas City, Missouri: Its History and Its People, 1808-1908' that 'John C. McCoy … chose the name because the town was a port of entry into the great Western country.'
But McCoy, considered the founder of Westport as well as of Kansas City, didn't actually choose the name; he simply adopted a name that already was in use. Moreover, records show that the name was 'West Port' before the one-word version became standard a few years later.
In a 1933 Kansas City Journal article, Albert Doerschuk, a Kansas City druggist and self-styled Westport historian, provided his own theory on the town's name:
'It was called West Port and came into use, freighters said, because of the extremely difficult bit of road just west of town, across Mill Creek. The Harris hotel site was a steep elevation above the creek, with a mud wallow in front of it. From this elevation west across the deep gulch that existed was one of the toughest pulls of the entire trail. So the prairie voyagers, seeking to make port across the creek, named the goal at the journey's end West Port, and the name stuck.'
Doerschuk provided another tidbit:
'It was said that in the East the settlement of Westport was also known as the 'Town of Sundown,' since here men basked in the last rays of civilization before departing into the unknown future that a plains journey held for them.'
Doerschuk also conducted a one-man campaign — nearly 100 years after the fact — to convince people that McCoy wasn't Westport's founder. After researching deeds and land records, he concluded that John Campbell, a government Indian agent who had come to the region in 1827, was the 'original proprietor of the old town of West Port.'
'The more records I examined, the more likely it seemed that there was a plat of the town of West Port before McCoy made his,' Campbell told The Star in 1925. 'That would make Campbell the real father of the town.'
The claim was not without merit.
In her 1983 book, 'Westport: Missouri's Port of Many Returns,' Patricia Cleary Miller wrote that 'McCoy's plat was just northwest of another little plat, 'West Port,' spelled in two words, that the loquacious Indian agent John Campbell had already drawn up.'
It should be noted, however, that McCoy's plat included what became the main section of town and that Campbell left the area before developing his adjoining plat, never to return.
In any case, it is generally agreed that Westport was founded in 1833; it had a post office by 1835, with McCoy as its postmaster. By then it had become a bustling area because of the trade the trails brought as well as because of its proximity to the Indian territory a few miles west.
Whitney wrote in her 1908 book that 'for fifteen years it seemed that this was to become the city of destiny.'
'It really blossomed quickly,' said Wiedenmann Jarvis, whose family owned and operated a store in the building that now houses Kelly's Westport Inn. 'But then it also died back fairly quickly because of the war. And then it built up slowly again because people started coming back.'
Westport overtook Independence as the primary eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail by the mid-1850s. Whitney estimated that 40,000 immigrants bought outfits in Westport between 1849 and 1850 and that its population was 5,000 by the time it was incorporated as a town in 1857.
According to the Westport Historic Resources Survey of 2017, the Westport of 1855 included three hotels (all with taverns), 37 businesses and two churches.
The principal hotel was the Harris House, where explorer and military commander John C. Fremont, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, author Washington Irving and newspaper publisher Horace Greeley all stayed.
Among Westport's early inhabitants were Albert Gallatin Boone, the grandson of Daniel; John Sutter, who later discovered gold in California; Jim Bridger, the famous frontiersman and mountain man; Johnny Behan, who became sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, and was known for his opposition to the Earps before and after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral; and Mamie Bernard Aguirre, who married a Mexican-born trader, ventured west and became one of the first female professors at the University of Arizona.
'Those were the good old days of Westport,' Regan recalled in 1929. 'Men were men. You weren't in it if you didn't carry a six-shooter or two and a bowie knife. But if fellows fell out in town, they didn't use their guns. They fought it out with their fists right there in the square of Penn and Westport.'
Regan befriended Bridger, who died in 1881 blind and penniless after living his final years in Westport, and rubbed shoulders with the James brothers. According to The Star's 1929 story, Jesse and Frank James frequented Westport, and they didn't have to worry about the law when they did.
'Whenever Jesse James rode into town, as he did freely, the sheriff always disappeared, it was told.
''I ain't lost no James boys,' the sheriff is said to have commented. 'And I ain't lookin' for no James boys.''
The Civil War took a heavy toll on the largely pro-slavery town.
Many pro-Union businessmen and residents fled Westport for more friendly environs such as St. Joseph or Leavenworth. Meanwhile, Union Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr.'s Order No. 11 forced the evacuation of rural areas near Westport and elsewhere in western Missouri.
The Westport Historical Society's Wiedenmann Jarvis points to the Harris family, which operated the Harris House hotel but also owned slaves. The Harrises lived in what became known as the Harris-Kearney House outside of Westport at present-day Westport Road and Main Street (the eventual site of the Katz drugstore) until they were forced out by Order No. 11.
'The Harrises had to leave town,' Jarvis said. 'What I think is funny is that they … moved about 10 blocks north to Kansas City, where the Kearneys were living.'
The Harris-Kearney House survived the war, but some Westport buildings were damaged or destroyed during the Battle of Westport, fought Oct. 21-23, 1864. Most of the battle took place south of town in the area now encompassing Loose Park, with Union forces defeating the Confederates in what has been called the 'Gettysburg of the West.'
As Native Americans were displaced from eastern Kansas and railroads replaced the trails west, Kansas City overtook Westport to become the area's primary trading center. By 1870, Westport's population had dropped to 1,500.
Kansas City's population exploded, surpassing 32,000 in 1870 and 132,000 in 1890, with the city swallowing up Westport as it grew south. Westport voters approved annexation into Kansas City in 1897.
The 1855 Harris-Kearney House was moved two blocks to its present location at 4000 Baltimore Ave. in 1922 when it was threatened with demolition.
The house, where the historical society is headquartered, underwent a 17-month renovation before reopening last July. It is closed for regular tours through March 1, although group tours can be arranged.