Kansas City Public Library: This Kansas City Beach Was A Destination... Until Disaster Struck Again And Again

Press release from the Kansas City Public Library:

August 11, 2021

Finding a beach during the dog days of summer can be a real problem for landlocked Kansas Citians. The quest often requires long-distance travel and can decimate vacation budgets.

Reader Tyler Smith recently came across some old photos of locals wiling away long summer days at a picturesque beach, a mere 20-minute train ride from downtown. He asked What’s Your KCQ?, a partnership between The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library, to help explain where it was located and what exactly happened to it.

The place was Winnwood, a Clay County resort that encompassed multiple lakes and featured a variety of amusement attractions, and 300 building lots on the water. The park took its name from its founder, Frank Winn.

Winn’s family arrived in the county in 1850. He was educated at William Jewell College in Liberty, and with his father, became a successful hog farmer. Winn became known for his prize-winning Poland China hogs and seemingly could have been a success focusing solely on livestock, but the young entrepreneur had real estate on the brain.

He began planning a lake on the family property abutting the planned Kansas City, Clay County and St. Joseph Electric Railway line. The Armour-Swift-Burlington (ASB) Bridge, connecting downtown KC with Clay County to the north, was completed in 1911, and interurban trains began running to St. Joseph and back in 1913. Winn dammed a creek on the property, and the clear, spring-fed waters of Winnwood Lake were born.

The initial plan was only to subdivide the land and sell lots to those seeking a rustic home or vacation cottage with easy access to hunting and fishing, but a 1911 trip to Atlantic City changed Winn’s mind.

Back in Clay County, he created an 800-foot sandy beach along his lake’s shore. By 1913, the dance pavilion and a canoe rental house were added. Two more lakes to the south were dug: Lake of the Woods and Lake Janet, named in honor of Winn’s wife.

He was just getting started. Over the years, Winn added a three-story bathhouse, a diving platform, water slides, amusement park rides (including two roller coasters), a zoo, a roller skating rink and even a “monkey island.” In 1931, a group of mischievous children placed a makeshift bridge between the island and the shore, allowing 18 monkeys to escape. Two years later, an unknown trespasser released 43 monkeys from their winter quarters on the Winn farm. Both incidents required multiday efforts to track down the elusive primates.

The feather in Winn’s cap, however, was a 40-foot-wide boardwalk built to mimic the one he had seen on his trip east. Winnwood Beach took on the nickname “The Atlantic City of the West.”

Once the roads were improved, buses and automobiles brought even more people to the park. At the height of its popularity in the 1920s, Winnwood Beach occupied 150 acres and saw upward of 10,000 visitors on busy Sundays. The cottages springing up around the resort were in demand and sold well.

Many making the trip couldn’t afford the rides and other entertainment, but Winn kept the picnicking and swimming free of charge. He even provided free firewood for cookouts.

While the cost of admission was a problem for some, others were excluded as policy. Like many early-20th-century attractions, Winnwood Beach was not open to Black people. At the same time, jazz musicians and other Black entertainers were frequently hired to perform for white customers at the park.

According to Chuck Haddix, historian and curator of UMKC’s Marr Sound Archives, two exceptions were made that allowed Black people to enjoy Winnwood Beach as paying customers.

When researching his book Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History, Haddix learned that the park welcomed Black visitors during two anniversary celebrations for the American Legion post named for Wayne Miner, the Black soldier from Henry County, Missouri, killed in action in France just hours before the armistice that halted fighting in World War I. Twelve thousand Black Kansas Citians attended a two-day gathering in 1931, and Frank Winn complimented the event’s organizers in the next week’s issue of The Call. In 1932, the event was expanded to three days.

This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.