Seeking the Good Life
Seeking the Good Life, the new permanent exhibit at the Museum of History, traces the history of Johnson County through changing ideas of home, family, and community. Their main ideals are used to define the county’s development: the Agricultural Ideal, 1820-1889; the Suburban Ideal, 1880-1945; and the Edge City Ideal, 1945 to the present.
Individuals and families are used throughout the exhibit to represent particular visions of the good life. These people are profiled with life-size photographs and accompanying quotations. The multi-media exhibit features video, music, and sound to evoke the mood of a particular time period or interaction between groups of people. Fourteen hands-on opportunities, or interactives, help visitors further understand the changing visions of the good life. Learning Centers stationed in each gallery provide in-depth information about the exhibits and related topics.
The first Visions
“Settling the Land” shows how a region once considered a vast wilderness became a rich agricultural community. Native American settlement is introduced with a colorful map that identifies the settlements of the Kansas, Missouri, and Osage peoples who lived in the Kansas City region until the 1820s. A recreated Shawnee council house serves as a mini-theatre where a short program on the history of the Shawnee people is presented.
The next area chronicles the relationship between the Shawnee and Christian missionaries, who settled in eastern Kansas during the 1830s. Methodist, Quaker, and Baptist missionaries all sought to Christianize and “civilize” the Shawnee, but they approached their task differently, with distinct ideas about the “good life” for the Shawnee. This experience divided the Shawnee people: some adopted Christian values and American lifestyles, while others sought to preserve their own native cultural traditions.
Land ownership became a critical issue for the Shawnee by the 1850s, when the federal government began pressuring Native Americans to surrender their promised lands. A treaty negotiated in 1854 changed the Shawnee vision of the good life again, by forcing them to choose between becoming individual landowners or relocating elsewhere. “Land Hunger” examines the effects of this treaty on the Shawnee and the subsequent development of Johnson County.
“Free or Slave?” examines the struggle among free-staters, abolitionists, and slave owners during the 1850s and 1860s. Positioned along the Kansas-Missouri border, Johnson County residents lived in fear as these interests competed for their own separate causes. Photographs and graphics of slaves and free Blacks, who yearned to live in “free Kansas,” place these voiceless participants at the center of this debate.
Post-Civil War growth in Kansas City, Missouri, brought railroads to Johnson County, connecting local farmers with national markets. By the 1870s, farm life was the leading vision of the good life. The Agricultural Ideal section of the exhibit portrays Johnson County’s farm heritage and chronicles the growth of its early towns and cities. “Country Life and the Modern City” juxtaposes Johnson County and Kansas City, Missouri, to interpret the tension between the city’s rapid industrialization and the farmers’ attempts to preserve their rural lifestyle ideal. This sets the stage for the Suburban Ideal.
Building the Suburbs
This area explores how a new vision of the good life — the suburban ideal — came to fruition in Johnson County. During the late 1800s, industry and new technology changed how people lived and worked. New ideas about raising children encouraged families to live away from the dirty, immoral city. By 1880, a home surrounded by the beauty of nature was considered the best place to live and protect the family. As more people pursued this suburban ideal, farmers began to sell their land to developers.
Three thematic areas interpret changing visions of the good life in Johnson County: “Farm to Market”, “The Suburban Ideal”, and “The Good Life on Hold.” The first, “Farm to Market”, analyzes how Johnson County’s farmers moved from mixed farming to raising specialized crops for the growing Kansas City market. Eggs, milk, fruits, and vegetables were transported into the city daily, providing cash for farmers to purchase their household and farming needs. Two profiles help to interpret this transition. Theresa and Anton Hauser represent a new type of farm family in Johnson County. When farm land became less available in Kansas City, Missouri, the Hausers moved to Johnson County to continue their agricultural lifestyle. Countering this profile is J.W. Breyfogle, representing the farmers who sold their property for speculative development. Many farmers like Breyfogle subdivided their land when William Strang’s interurban railroad line was constructed through northeast Johnson County.
The Suburban Ideal
Three main ideas shaped the suburban ideal: the belief that social distinctions required physical separation, the shift in the family from an economic to an emotional unit, and a complex ideology of domestic life. The new emphasis on home and family occurred at the same time that industrialization took men and their work away from the home. Railroad expansion and an area real estate boom during the 1880s encouraged families to look beyond the city. Amusement parks in outlying areas also began to draw people for weekend entertainment. By the turn of the century, the desire for suburban living and an accessible interurban trolley system fueled a variety of residential developments in Johnson County. By the 1920s, a house in the suburbs was generally accepted as the best place to raise children and preserve the family. By the 1920s, Johnson County had lost its image as only a rural area and increasingly became a desirable place for Kansas Citians to live.
A primary part of the suburban ideal was the reunion of the family with nature. After learning about early speculative developments, visitors are able to see a recreation of a waiting station found along William Strang’s interurban line.
As visitors exit the waiting station, they encounter two suburban backyards: one from J.C. Nichols’ Mission Hills, the other from William Strang’s Overland Park. These profiles highlight two different approaches taken toward the suburban reunion with nature. J.C. Nichols build Mission Hills as an exclusive planned community where individual yards and public areas were professionally landscaped. At the same time, William Strang’s suburb retained aspects of the agrarian ideal by offering lots large enough for families to raise a garden and keep a milk cow and some chickens.
The reunion with nature theme continues with general displays on the new familial ideal emphasizing togetherness and healthy outdoor living. Two other types of suburban living in this period are also highlighted: the resort community and the gentleman’s farm. Lake Quivira was established in the 1920s as a weekend and summer resort for city dwellers. The family’s reunion with nature in this instance centered around a man-made lake. Wealthy businessmen such as J.C. Nichols, Nelson Riley Studebaker, and Herbert Woolf each established gentleman’s farms in Johnson County. These weekend and summer retreats were used for hunting, fishing, and entertaining. Hunt clothing and equipment, and a mural painted by Mission Hills resident-artist Margot Peet are highlights of this section.
The Good Life On Hold
The pursuit of the good life was put on hold during the Depression and World War II. Here, the exhibit concentrates on how local farmers fared during the Depression and the impact of federal aid programs on local economies. Johnson County farmers fared better during the Depression than those elsewhere in Kansas who relied on grain markets. Real estate developers like J.C. Nichols and Charles Vawter continued buying farms for suburban housing developments.
Wartime industrialization altered the area’s landscape and economy once again. An ammunition plant and a naval air station built in Johnson County during the 1940s were precursors to the industrial growth following the war. Traditional gender roles were altered as men and women left to fight for the good life and significantly more women entered the work force on the home front.
“East Terms, Low Down Payment” prepares visitors for the post-war suburban housing boom. Here, a profile of President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives a radio address to assure the American public. This serves as an introduction to an interactive showing how government-backed loans made new suburban homes available to most Americans. Exhibits highlight neighborhoods in Johnson County that benefited from these programs.
Developing An Edge City
After World War II, families flocked to the suburbs, where new houses were built in record numbers. Government housing programs made new homes affordable for more people and defined the American Dream. By the 1950s, the good life was found in the suburbs.
“Developing an Edge City” examines the government’s role in shaping this vision of the good life; the effects of racial discrimination and the movement of jobs and shopping from the city to the suburbs. Again, three themes organize the main issues: “Suburbia for Everyone?”, “A New Urban Form”, and “What is the Good Life?”.
Suburbia for Everyone?
Here, visitors consider the difference between the postwar ideal and reality. The suburban vision of the good life promoted by the popular press and subsidized by the federal government excluded many from the dream of a home in the suburbs. Others questioned whether this particular definition matched their own ideas about the good life.
Six profiles present different perspectives on the postwar suburban expansion. The Watkins family profile introduces the baby boom and Prairie Village, a prototypical postwar suburban community. An interactive illustrates the phase “a house a day;” by pushing buttons for different years, visitors light up the various subdivisions in Prairie Village and see the suburban expansion from the mid-1950s through 1962.
Victor Regnier represents the commercial developers who opened shopping malls in Johnson County’s suburbs. His profile stands amidst a turquoise and white 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air parked below a recreated neon sign from the Mission Shopping Center. Commercial growth not only made suburban living more convenient, it brought jobs to the suburbs and ultimately created a new type of living environment.
The next set of profiles focuses on who was excluded from the post-war suburban ideal and presents alternative ideas of the good life. Reverend Robert Meneilly, founder of the Village Presbyterian Church leads off this section. Excerpts from his sermon “Majorities, Minorities or Neighbors” discuss racial exclusion in suburban neighborhoods. Other profiles include Donald Sewing, who moved his family from Kansas City to Fairway in 1966; they were the first African-American family in this suburban neighborhood. Teacher Corinthian Nutter walked out with her students when families decided to boycott the segregated schools in South Park. Nutter taught students at home until the school district was ordered to integrate its schools in 1949. The interactive in this area is a door which when opened reveals a list of people and activities excluded from the suburbs.
A New Urban Form
Metropolitan areas changed again in the 1960s and 1970s. Improved highways, new technology, and inexpensive land drew businesses and manufacturers to the suburbs. New edge cities developed with jobs, shopping, and entertainment. This new urban form operates independent from the older central city. Overland Park’s College Boulevard—with its office and industrial parks, corporate headquarters, and financial institutions—is a prime example of an edge city. While edge city residents live, work, and play in one community, the central city and older suburbs struggle to compete for resources.
“A New Urban Form” examines these issues, highlighting the effects of jobs moving to the suburbs, dual-income families, and the tensions between farms, cities, older suburbs, and the new edge cities.
A photographic collage of edge city residents illustrates this emerging vision of the good life, along with displays of high-tech office buildings and the technology that drives this new lifestyle.
In the last section, “What is the Good Life?” , civic leaders and a local farmer share their vision of the good life. An interactive features a magnetic board on which visitors can place images and phases which define their own ideas about the good life.
The exhibit concludes by asking visitors to take an active role in shaping the community’s future. In “New Visions”, viewers learn about current issues facing the metropolitan area and share their views by casting a vote or writing their comments in a notebook. The exhibit’s continual focus on people, the Learning Centers, and interactives provides a rich museum experience that warrants repeat visits.
--ALBUM vol. 11, no. 2 (spring 1998)