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Just south of Kansas City’s River Market, between 7th and 8th Street, sits a wall of rock about 30 feet high. The stone looks out of place amidst the tall buildings of the skyline.
The barbershop built beside it almost seems to lean into outcropping.
Steven Wade knows this corner well — he’s come to this block of Grand Avenue for decades in order to catch the bus.
Nowadays, he doesn’t think much of the golden-colored rock stacked behind him. “I don’t really think too many people pay attention to it,” he says, smoking a cigarette.
Yet, this mostly-forgotten stone serves as a window into Kansas City’s rugged original geography. In the early 19th century, giant walls of silt and limestone like this one towered up to 120 feet above the Missouri River.
These natural barriers made business in the area difficult — until hundreds of hard-working Irish immigrants, led by a charismatic priest, cut through these bluffs to create Kansas City’s streetscape of today.
When bluffs ruled Kansas City
Before Kansas City existed as a city, bluffs rose upward roughly from present-day 5th Street in the River Market south to 10th and 11th Streets downtown, according to Pat O’Neill, a local history expert who wrote the book, “From the Bottom Up: The Story of the Irish in Kansas City.”
Gullies and ravines snaked through the rock, and formed small valleys in between the mountains of limestone.
Indigenous peoples — including the Kaw, Missouria, Otoe, Osage and more — lived and passed through this area for centuries. When white settlers came along, they started to make a life for themselves in this rocky landscape too.
“People first lived building houses in those little gullies,” he says.
By the 1840s, the town of Kansas had blossomed around the foot of the bluffs, near where Main Street begins today.
Unlike most of the area directly south, the land was flat. A natural limestone ledge made an easy place for steamboats to dock. In those days, the settlement was only a small collection of buildings.
The town of Kansas served as a convenient waystation to transport people and supplies to the nearby settlement of Westport, a doorway to the American West along the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails.
But to reach Westport, travelers had to traverse a muddy, steep and narrow ravine — the ancestor of present day Grand Avenue. People called the makeshift street “the grade.” It barely fit a wagon across.
The situation wasn’t great for trade. In the early 1850s, a group of prominent investors — among them John Calvin McCoy, James McGee and Nathan Scarritt — decided to do something about it.
They envisioned a terraformed version of Kansas City, where flat land ripe for expansion replaced the bluffs.
Kansas City needed space for more than just business. “There was dozens of steamboats a week coming through or more,” O’Neill says. “And they might have 150, 200 people aboard.”
In the early 1850s, roughly 500 people lived in Kansas City. By the end of the decade that number had grown to over 7,000.
To accommodate the rapid growth, those bluffs needed to be removed to make more space for residents. Yet, hauling away all that limestone posed a huge, back-breaking challenge.
“There weren’t enough laborers in town to do that massive task of starting to dig street corridors that are through 60 or 80 feet of bluff,” O’Neill explains.
An Irish priest in Missouri
Luckily, an enterprising Catholic priest named Father Bernard Donnelly had a plan. At the time, Father Donnelly oversaw St. Mary’s Parish, which stretched across most of western Missouri and included a mix of Irish, French and German immigrants.
Born in the Emerald Isle’s countryside, Donnelly grew up with illiterate tenant farmer parents. Discriminatory British rule against Irish-Catholics dominated his early life — he learned to read and write at a secretive hedge school.
“It was taboo to have visible Catholic education, or sacraments," O’Neill says.
A talented student, Donnelly moved to Liverpool after his graduation to take a job as a civil engineer. He always attended mass before work, and hoped to one day become a Catholic priest.
Before long, Donnelly decided to leave the isles in search of freedom and opportunity in America, taking an 80-day-long voyage by boat to New York City. He landed a job as a teacher in Philadelphia, yet grew restless and moved further and further west. According to his biography, Donnelly hoped to flee the “confines of civilization.”
”He didn't want to serve the aristocracy, if you will, the established Catholics … merchants and all that,” says O’Neill. “He wanted to serve the people like he had served in Ireland who were poor, jobless, landless.”
Donnelly finally achieved his goal of priesthood in 1845. For his assignment, he was sent to Missouri. At first, Donnelly primarily lived in Independence and served as a missionary to a church in Kansas City. It was daunting, though: Donnelly liked to say his parish was the size of a European kingdom, and he spent cold winter nights and hot summer days riding on horseback across it.
By 1858, he had constructed his own church downtown — the Church of the Immaculate Conception — and moved to Kansas City full-time.
In the decade since Donnelly left Ireland, though, conditions in his home country had only worsened.
Irish tenant farmers depended on potatoes for almost their entire diet. A series of potato blights in the late 1840s decimated the crop. Since the country was still under oppressive British rule, Irish farmers were forced to export the food they did grow back to England.
By most accounts, the resulting famine killed a million people or more. Nearly twice that many fled the country. Between 1851 and 1860, it’s estimated that Irish immigrants made up over 80% of all new arrivals to the U.S.
Yet, life in America didn’t offer easy relief. The opportunities available to Irish immigrants were often menial labor jobs —the dangerous work of expanding America’s footprint. Their living conditions were difficult as well.
“Unfortunately they'd get here and hit New York or Boston or someplace and ended up in a tenement,” O’Neill says. “It was all the same kind of squalor they had at home. Maybe a little better, but not much.”
Like many immigrant groups, the Irish faced discrimination in the U.S. Job notices in newspapers and storefronts commonly announced that “No Irish Need Apply.”
Nativism emerged as a potent political force under the Know Nothing Party, running on anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant platforms in the 1850s. Missouri voters elected five Know Nothings to Congress in 1855, and another two the following year.
In some places, attitudes turned violent. By 1844, anti-Irish mobs terrorized major cities like Philadelphia, where Irish American homes were targeted until the state militia stepped in. The following decade, nativist assaults occurred in St. Louis, New Orleans and Baltimore. On Election Day in 1855, for example, anti-Catholic violence in Louisville, Kentucky, earned the name “Bloody Monday” after 22 people were killed.
Nevertheless, moving westward represented an attractive option for these new Irish immigrants.
“They'd be looking for places to escape to and they'd read stories about the West,” O’Neill says. “Kansas City came up as kind of one of those romantic places with cowboys and cattle and land for the taking.”
In the bluffs of Kansas City, Father Donnelly saw an opportunity to help both his home country and his adopted home. He went to the city council and proposed bringing Irish immigrants to Kansas City to carve out the limestone.
Donnelly would recruit the workers, pay their way west, and take care of them once they arrived. He published notices in East Coast newspapers like The Boston Pilot and Freeman’s Journal of New York, which were widely read by Irish immigrants.
He sought 150 laborers from each city — “willing” and “husky fellows.” They’d get paid more than they were making on the East Coast, but Donnelly set a few extra conditions. He required workers to have migrated from the same Irish province of Connaught (also spelled “Connacht”), which in theory would limit infighting. Laborers also needed to swear off alcohol and attend church.
“Apparently it was an easy sell, because they came in small droves,” O’Neill says.
Down in the dirt
Donnelly helped settle the initial Irish laborers in boarding houses and shacks along present-day Broadway near 6th Street. The area became known as Connaught Town, after the province where the workers originated.
“It would've been muddy streets and shacks and a lot of boarding houses at the beginning for the laborers,” O’Neill says.
In 1857, Kansas City leaders directed the excavations of several roads running north to south: Main, Delaware, Broadway, and Market Street (present-day Grand Ave). Next, the city turned its sights on thoroughfares moving east to west. Gradually, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets grew into canyons.
Excavating workers usually removed the layer of silt that built up on top of the limestone. The silt could be five feet thick, or 10 times that, and then could they get to the actual rock.
“You're drilling down the middle of it, picks and shovels and horses and wagons and mules, and then have to widen it and widen it and widen it to where there was room for buildings on the side,” O’Neill explains.
Kansas City hadn’t exactly been much to look at before. Now, it was a certified muddy mess — knee-deep at some points. Sewers ran openly into the streets.
“Just to get around town you were slipping and sliding in mud,” O’Neill says. “It was just kind of miserable.”
Some Irish immigrants took the initiative to form their own construction businesses, even while most manned the pick and shovel. These crews were pretty informal at first, according to O’Neill. With Father Donnelly’s helpful connections to city leaders, they’d compete for local public works contracts on specific roads.
The contractors dug sewers, wells, cisterns, curbs and basements too. For residents wanting to build a house on uneven land, they’d level the plot, for a price.
In addition to picks and shovels, laborers relied on horses, mules and wagons. Closer to the turn of the 20th century, companies also had explosives and new hydraulic tools to blast through the rock.
“When I think of how many cubic yards we would move a day versus in the 1850s, that had to have been just excruciatingly painful work,” says Pete Browne, president of Kissick Construction Company.
Browne is part of a long line of Irish laborers: In the 1890s, his great-great grandfather worked in Kansas City’s construction industry.
Despite the physical difficulty, and the constant loud noise, Kansas City’s bluffs fueled excitement in the city. As workers hauled away rock, buildings popped up behind them on the leveled roads. Laborers paved streets with bricks from a quarry Donnelly ran by his home around present-day 11th and Pennsylvania.
“Our city is alive with business, bustle, work and trade,” wrote the Kansas City Weekly Journal in March 1858. “Under the bluff, on the bluff, and beyond the bluff for a mile, the air is vocal with the welcome music of… the trowel.”
Dangers around every corner
Kansas City took decades to finish this grading process. Most of the work lasted until the 1880s, according to O’Neill. Some accounts put the end date even later, at the turn of the 20th century.
Construction didn’t always go as planned — and on many occasions, seemed to be undertaken without a plan at all.
Leveling a street usually meant cutting the road down to “street level,” not necessarily the level of the nearby land. So some Kansas City home owners would look out their front doors to see a sudden, unexpected drop of several stories.
Much to the annoyance of downtown residents, many streets went half-finished, or had to be excavated multiple times.
“Contractors, like anybody else, they’re going to work as fast as they can to get their money,” O’Neill says.
Some homeowners solved the issue by building multiple basements. Others extended long staircases down to the graded road. As a more drastic option, residents moved entire houses.
The bluff work also regularly endangered the lives of the laborers, through cave-ins and worksite accidents. Irish worker deaths rarely made the front pages of newspapers, if they made it in at all.
One incident that did warrant a mention was in 1879, when the Kansas City Daily Journal reported that a deep cut into the bluff near the beginning of Grand Ave collapsed. Five thousand yards of earth rushed downward “with the swiftness of light, with a thundering sound, burying men… under the tremendous mass.” Six men died, and dozens more barely escaped.
Local residents frequently fell from the edge of the bluffs to their deaths, too. Or sometimes the bluffs fell on them, instead.
In February 1873, for instance, a brick wall holding up the bluff at 12th and Walnut Street in Kansas City collapsed on top of a small house, killing the wife of Irish laborer Patrick Donohue and their child Ellen Donohue. “A SUNDAY HORROR,” read the headline in the Kansas City Times.
In response to tragedies like these, the Irish community banded together.
“Once you were hurt, you couldn’t work and you’d starve, your family would starve,” O’Neill says.
Father Donnelly and local leaders founded and funded social institutions to care for those in need. Starting in the late 1850s, Irish benevolent societies acted as homegrown insurance companies or mutual aid organizations.
Workers paid dues to become members, and in return, the societies distributed benefits to keep the families of injured laborers afloat. They’d also visit workers in the hospital and set up funerals for those who didn’t make it.
Donnelly cared for the city’s Irish immigrants by focusing on their personal issues, too.
Since his days in Europe, Donnelly had been a member of the temperance movement, which advocated against drinking alcohol. He was known to step in when a worker struggled to manage their money and drank too much.
“They don’t talk a lot about him, at least in my research, as being a very affable, easygoing guy,” O’Neill says. “He was very practical. I think people respected him as much as liked him.”
By the 1870s, Donnelly’s investments in Kansas City’s Irish community had begun to pay off. Many Irish immigrants worked in the local fire and police departments, and had gained political power — upward mobility made easier by the color of their skin. As new arrivals came to Kansas City, they could count on jobs with the established contracting companies.
O’Neill likened the priest’s efforts to that of a pragmatic social worker. Donnelly set up some of Kansas City’s first schools, along with an orphanage and a local hospital.
“He used his money and his time to create institutions to help people,” O’Neill says. “He had to push Kansas City’s Irish community into the fabric of the city.”
No longer at the bottom of the hill
In 1873, the Irish community held Kansas City’s first St. Patrick’s day parade. The procession passed by Father Donnelly’s church and St. Teresa’s Academy, which was built with the bricks from Donnelly’s quarry.
“The parade was their way of showing that, ‘We’ve arrived and we’re not gonna stay down here at the bottom of the hill forever,’” O’Neill says.
Father Bernard Donnelly died in December 1880, less than a decade after that first parade. That year, he had concluded a letter with a simple prophecy: “Kansas City is surely to become one of the large cities of the United States.”
Fast forward a century and a half, Pete Browne and his workers are back digging up Kansas City’s streets. The modern-day laborers are improving them through projects like the recent streetcar extension — using tools Donnelly probably couldn’t have imagined.
The parallel isn’t lost on Browne. He wants people to understand not only the resilience of Kansas City’s original Irish laborers, but also the universality in their journey. People who immigrate to the U.S. today, especially those who are undocumented, still do some of America’s most dangerous jobs.
“Irish immigration reminds you of all immigration, and reminds you of all eras,” he says.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Jacob Smollen with editing by Suzanne Hogan, Mackenzie Martin and Gabe Rosenberg.
