FEATURED ARTICLE
History In Place
The restoration of an iconic historic bridge in Wichita, Kansas, is a reminder that the city’s old bungalow neighborhoods remain vibrant elements of one of America’s most livable cities.
by Kathy L Morgan
Most of us conduct our day-to-day lives without giving much thought to the origins of the places we inhabit. Life is too full of activity and obligation for us to stop and question how the town or city we live in today was created out of nothing—or at least nothing we would find familiar—so many years ago.
Once in a while, though, some seeminglyordinary civic undertaking, because it involves an old structure or a notable historical event, catches a community’s attention, then itsimagination—and a glimmer of the past comes into view.
Something like that happened in Wichita in October, 2007. That month, work began on the long-planned renovation of the historic Minisa Bridge, an ornamental 250-foot span built in 1932 to connect the central business district with the tree-shaded parks and bungalow neighborhoods that had been developed over the previous two decades between the diminutive Little Arkansas River and its bigger sister, the Arkansas, or “Big Arkansas,” a couple of miles or so farther west. (Pronunciation note: in Kansas, the rivers’ names sound like the state’s: ar-KANS-as.)
Over the next three-quarters of a century, Minisa Bridge became a totem for the Riverside and North Riverside bungalow neighborhoods, both to their residents and to commuters passing through to and from later and larger residential developments farther west. Its renovation became an occasion for the residents to renew their connections with a relatively recent past that some of them could even remember, and also to the middle and later years of the 19th century, when Wichita arose on the Kansas prairie.
Defining Visions
As a professional historic preservation planner for more than 30 years, and in Wichita for the last 10, it has been a big part of my job to think about the origins of places, especially American ones, and about the people who made them what they are.
I have lived in several American cities during my career, and although the specifics of history, geography and climate have differed for each one, there has always been one underlying theme defining their formation and growth: the vision and determination on the part of civic founders to create legacies—and, of course, this being America, build fortunes in the process. The buildings they raised—large and small, public and private, residential and commercial—were the working out of these visions even as they became the infrastructure of the lives we live, in and around them, today.
Located at the confluence of the Big and Little Arkansas Rivers in south-central Kansas, Wichita had been a trading center and meeting place for nomadic hunting peoples for at least 11,000 years when Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the area in 1541. Over the succeeding century and a half, Spanish then French explorers and trappers moved into the territory, coexisting as traders with the native peoples.
By the turn of the 19th century, what is today Kansas was part of the French Louisiane territory that the U.S., under President Thomas Jefferson, purchased from France in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase prompted Jefferson to commission the Lewis and Clark expedition, which accelerated the westward expansion of the North American frontier that had begun in earnest soon after the Revolutionary War.
The trickle of American settlers that had begun moving into the Kansas and Oklahoma territories
to establish farmlands in the middle 1800s became a torrent in 1862, when the Homestead Act opened the Prairie West to rapid settlement. After the indigenous Wichita people were removed to Indian Territory in 1867, the visionaries went to work.
Among the men who set down roots and started businesses along the Arkansas River were James R. Mead, Jesse Chisholm, William Greiffenstein and Darius Munger—men who had built lucrative trading enterprises with the Wichita and other tribes. By the time white settlers began pouring into the area, Mead, Chisholm, Greiffenstein and Munger had the economic capital to shape the development of the fledgling city and led the campaign to incorporate in 1870.
The railroad arrived two years later, making Wichita the destination for Texas cattle being driven north along the Chisholm Trail for shipment by rail to eastern markets. Soon Kansas wheat was being shipped along with the cattle, and by 1900 three major rail lines passed through the city.