The Jarboes and Shannons in Early Kansas City

The Jarboes and the Shannons in Early Kansas City
By John Dawson


The Jarboes (1)
Kansas City (5)
Patrick Shannon and his Brothers (12)
Shannon’s Hotel and Saloon (18)
J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods Co. (22)
War (30)
Pearl Street (44)
Post-war Kansas City (50)
Patrick Shannon’s Public Service (62)
Patrick Shannon: Irish and the Church (67)
Book of Shannon’s Dry Goods (71)
Bernard Corrigan (75)
The Later Years (79)
Bingham’s Order No. 11 and Shannon’s Dry Goods (82)
The Mayor’s Portrait Gallery (85)
General Philip Sheridan (85)
The Confederacy Error (86)
Acknowledgments (89)

The Jarboes

John Jarboe (possibly originally Charbon, in early America known as Jarbo) was born in 1619 in Dijon, Burgundy France.  He was a high-ranking soldier in the court of Louis XIV and once saved the king’s life on a hunting expedition when a wounded wild boar attacked the king. For his bravery he was awarded a knighthood and a coat of arms which shows a figure of a man spearing a boar. In the Norman French Tongue, “Jar” means spear. Jarboe was a member of the Gallican, or French Roman Catholic church.

The first English Civil War was a series of conflicts between “Protestant Parliamentarians,” favoring abolition of the Catholic monarchy, and Catholics loyal to the King. Sir George Calvert “Lord Baltimore - the founder of Maryland” was one of King James I’s Secretaries of State, but in 1624 he resigned that position and announced that he had become a Roman Catholic.  King James expediently named him Baron of Baltimore and granted him land patents in America. He died before the new charter was sealed, leaving the settlement of the Maryland colony to his son Cecilius, who inherited the rights and title of Lord Baltimore.

  On November 22, 1633, The first Catholic colonists in America embarked on a three-month voyage aboard two ships, the Ark and the Dove, and according to the charter King Charles granted Cecilius Calvert, took possession of St. Mary’s County – Terra Maria – Maryland.  The grant made Calvert the absolute owner of all the land lying within the bounds of the “Province of Maryland.” He apportioned 100 acres of land to each immigrant, subject to a small rent payable in two equal installments; if they transported indentured servants they could obtain 100 more. Each settlement bore the name selected by the colonist and was often that of the locality from which he came; thus there are tracts in Kent County with names such as Buckingham, Denbeigh, Essex, Kimbolton, Ratcliffe, Suffolk and Wickcliffe. Under the rule of the Lords Baltimore, thousands of British Catholics immigrated to Maryland over the next ten years. The colonists found that the climate and soil was ideal for growing tobacco, and the colony became a prime tobacco exporting colony.  Tobacco was often used in lieu of money in land commercial transactions.

Captain Richard Ingle was an English colonial seaman known as a “Parliamentary Privateer.” He sailed to America in 1645 and attacked the colony of St. Mary’s “in the name of Parliament.” He confiscated the arms and ammunition of the Catholic settlers and forbade the presence of any Catholic in St. Mary’s City during the session of the “Protestant Associators.”  He and his men plundered the property of anyone who did not swear allegiance to the English Parliament, viz., and made prisoners of the colony's leaders. Calvert appointed Lt. Col. John Jarbo to organize the first Maryland Militia to repel the invaders. At the same time, Kent Island, the largest island in Chesapeake Bay and included in Calvert’s land grant, had been occupied since 1621 by William Claiborne, a fur trader who had developed trade with the Susquehannock Indians for beaver furs that he sold for a huge profit in England. When Calvert arrived to claim Kent Island for the new colony, Claiborne refused to allow his land to become part of Maryland and  assembled an army of his own to defend it. In series of battles, Jarboe’s forces seized Kent Island and in 1647 expelled Ingle and his forces. The conflict is known as “Claiborne and Ingle's Rebellion.”

In return, on December 1, 1648, Calvert awarded John 100 acres of land on the west side of Bretton’s Bay (later Newton) to which he subsequently added other large tracts. That year he married Mary Tattershall, daughter of William Tattershall and Ann Lewger, who were emigrants from Wiltshire in England.

In 1658 John Jarboe is recorded as “in command of all military forces from Poplar Hill to the Wicomico River.” He had the distinction of having been granted the first known petition for naturalization in British America, which on July 30, 1661declared “John Jarboe, a Subject of the Crown of France, a free denizen of the Province of Maryland.” In 1663 he was commissioned Justice of the Peace for St. Mary’s County, a position he held through 1666; in 1667 Calvert appointed him High Sheriff of St. Mary’s County, a position he held until 1671, and he became a delegate for St. Mary’s County in the Lower House of Burgesses. Jarboe negotiated treaties with the Susquehanna Indians, copies of which still exist today. In 1667-8 he organized an expedition of twenty-three soldiers to battle the Nanticoke Indians on the Eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay.

At the time of his death on March 9, 1674 he had amassed a substantial fortune in land and property, including “St. Lawrence Creek,” 500 acres; “St. Peter’s Hills,” 500 acres; “Jarboe’s,” 150 acres and “March’s Hope,” 150 acres. He operated a mill and owned a 1500-acre plantation. The plantation house, in a style known as “Marine Colonial” is still standing, about fifty yards back from Chesapeake Bay.  Now known as the Long Lane Farm, the walls of the house consist of brick laid two feet thick, built to be as impenetrable as a fortress in protection against Indian raids. Nearby is the old brick meat house with the original, hand-forged iron meat hooks. Jarboe’s old tobacco barn still stands, wooden pins supporting the timbers, along with the other granaries and out-buildings, “a little village in themselves.”

John was the first Jarboe in North America. He and Mary Tattershall had five children: John Jr, Mary, Peter, Henry, and Joseph, all born in St. Mary’s County.  His will, dated September 2, 1671, gives the bulk of his property to his son John Jarboe Jr.

During the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) regiments from St. Mary's County fought engagements from New York to South Carolina and were present at the British surrender at Yorktown. After the war, the vast expanse of land west of the Appalachians became available to citizens brave enough to migrate. Some of the land was given out in grants to Revolutionary War veterans in payment for their services, and more was available for purchase at low cost.  Many farmers had been ruined by the war and had lost their lands; they saw migration as a way out of their economic woes.  The result was a massive movement of people to the western lands in the decades following the war. The first large migration into Nelson County, Kentucky, was begun in 1785 by a group of Catholic families from St. Mary's County. The area became known as the Kentucky Holy Lands.

John Jarboe’s great-grandson Joseph Jarboe (b. about 1755 in St. Mary’s County-1834) was a tobacco farmer; he married Mary Clarke; the couple moved to Spencer County, Kentucky  in 1773. The seventh of their ten children was Joseph Jarboe Jr. (March 27, 1792 – Dec. 25, 1867at Kansas City).

Joseph Jr. was to marry the “glamorous” Lydia Ann Clements (pronounced Cleh-moan) on September 15, 1822 in Bardstown, Kentucky. She had been born in 1803, the daughter of William Hanson Clements and Winifred Hardy of St. Mary's County.  The Clements and Hanson families had participated in the Catholic migration from Maryland to Kentucky and settled “alongside the creeks.”

Clements family biographer J.W.S. Clements: “Our ancestor, ‘John the Tailor’ Clements, came from Clopton, Middlesex County, England, to America as early as 1647. He and his family were Roman Catholics, and left England to escape Parliamentarian persecution. In a deposition given in 1725 when he was 78 years old, ‘John the Tailor’ stated he had set up in business in Maryland in 1675. (The primary business of Maryland consisted in growing tobacco, shipping it to England and receiving in exchange hardware and materials for clothing.) As a merchant tailor, John Clements was a citizen of some importance. He was ‘educated,’ which is known by his being able to sign his own name on a guardian’s bond in 1677.”

John the Tailor obtained a tract of land called “Pomfret” in Bryantown, Charles County, Maryland on August 9 1677, in exchange for 2,000 pounds of tobacco.  He married a young woman of the Irish gentry, Elizabeth Plunkett from County Meath, about 1677. Her family was headed by earls and barons.  Their third son was William (1685 - d. 1754).

William Clements married Mary Hanson (1700-1749) in Charles County in 1725. She was the daughter of John Hanson, first President of the Continental Congress, whose statue resides in the U.S. Capitol in Washington.  Their third child was Bennett Hanson Clements (1732 in Bryantown – d. 1777.

Bennett Hanson Clements owned a 100 acre tobacco farm. He married Believe Overton (1735-1760) about 1753 at Bryantown. Their first child was Bennett Clements II (1754 –October 5, 1804). He married Charity Davis (b.1748- d. 12/24/1804 in Montgomery County) in 1768. Their third son was William (1786).

Bennett Hanson Clement II’s will is dated October 5, 1804, Excerpt:

  “…I give and bequeath unto my dearly beloved wife Charity Clements my Negro man called Dos, a Negro girl called Jenny, one bed - bedstead and furniture being the bed she sleeps on, one three feet oval table, six chairs, all of the China delft and glass ware belonging to a tea set, the water vessels belonging to the kitchen, two Iron pots of her choice, two iron pot racks, one tea kettle, one Woolen wheel, one dutch oven, six killable hogs, her choice, when fat, one sow and pigs, four ewes, six knives and forks, best kind, one black horse  Dob, one cow and one calf, one large Tea canister. It is my desire if she dies before my daughter Ann, her feather bed and furniture and Negro girl falls to my said daughter Ann and the balance of her Estate to be equally divided amongst my other Children that will be living at that time…I also leave her twenty Barrels of Corn, ten bushels of wheat to be delivered to her in the month of December.”
 
William Clements married his cousin Lydia Ann Hanson on September 15, 1822 in Bardstown, Kentucky. Lydia Ann was the daughter of William Hanson and Winifred Hardy of St. Mary's County. Their daughter, Lydia Ann Clements, married Joseph Jarboe Jr.

Joseph and Lydia  left Kentucky in 1834 with their young children, traveling by wagon to the western Missouri River settlement of “Choteau’s Town,” where they joined the other 250 French Catholic settlers. They were accompanied by an “old hunch-backed slave woman” who had been a gift from Lydia’s father. This slave helped raise their  children, six of whom were born in Kentucky: William Joseph (1823-1894) married Cecilia Barada, daughter of Louis Barada and Marie Bienvinu, in 1851 at St. Joseph, Mo. They had nine children; Rachel (1825, died in infancy), twins Theresa Althelia and Catherine (born July 16 and 18th 1826); Catherine died July 18); Frederick Henry (1828-1900) married Cecilia’s sister Elizabeth Barada in 1856 in Kansas City. They had eight children. From Elizabeth’s obituary, February 22, 1899: “Mrs. Elizabeth Jarboe Dead. Wife of Fred Jarboe. Had Lived in Kansas city for forty years. 68 years of age, died at home 1607 Springfield Avenue Funeral St. Vincent’s, burial Mt. St. Mary’s. Mrs Jarboe was one of the oldest living settlers in Kansas City, coming to Kansas City from St. Louis. Her maiden names was Miss Barada, one of the oldest French families in this country. Mr. Jarboe is credited with being the first salesman in KC when he and his brother William started a trading store on the levee, over forty years ago.

David Mullholland (1830-1886) married Emily Hoagland in 1854. They had four children. The remainder of Joseph and Lydia’s children were born on the Jarboe farm in Kansas City:  Caroline E.(b. 1832-?) married William White in 1856 at Kansas City; John Carrol (1834?-1886) married Josephine Ferguson. They had five children; Mary Eleanor (August 4, 1836 - April 21 1902) married Patrick Shannon, with whom she had six children; Henry Joseph (1839-1845) married Evaline Flook in 1840 at Frederick County, Md. They had five children; Theresa Rose (1840-1848) Catherine Susan (1841-?) and  Samuel (1846-1903), who married Mary Virginia Haverty, with whom he had two children.

The 1850 census of Kaw Township enumerated Joseph Jarboe, 58, grocer; wife Lydia and children William, Frederick, David, John, Caroline, Mary Eleanor, Edward and Samuel.

Lydia Ann Clements Jarboe died, aged 28, on September 6, 1851. The first telegram ever sent from Kansas City was to Father Donnelly at Independence, summoning him to Lydia’s deathbed to perform the last rites of the Catholic Church. On October 6, 1857, at 65 years of age, Joseph remarried to Cordelia Wilson Jarboe, 37, the widow of his fourth cousin Charles W. Jarboe. He died on Christmas Day, 1867 “of jaundice produced by over-smoking cigars.” Joseph and Lydia are buried together at  Mount St. Mary's Cemetery in Kansas City.  His estate was estimated at  “one or two hundred thousand dollars,” equating to $1.6 to $3.2 million today.

“Mr. Jarboe, a man of education and means, was identified with the first commercial growth of Kansas City, where he settled at an early date.  Immediately west and adjoining the McGee tract was his home, all now within the city limits. He settled there in 1834 and died only a few years ago. No one of the early settlers enjoyed to a greater degree the confidence, respect and esteem of his neighbors.” (John Calvin McCoy, Reminiscences)


Kansas City

In 1821, 24 year old Francois Choteau established a camp for the purpose of buying, trading and shipping furs on the Missouri River. He set up his first location near the  confluence of the Missouri and Kansas (Kanza or Kaw) rivers, but that location flooded, and about 1824  he resettled perhaps a mile upriver on the south side, opposite the Randolph Bluffs, under 200-foot limestone bluffs beneath the northern terminus of the present Forest and Troost streets of Kansas City. The river location was ideal for  shipping and Chouteau set up a trading post on the banks facilitate the collection and shipment of furs to St. Louis, New Orleans and New York. The site expanded over the next few years.  Father Joseph Lutz, missionary to the Kansa Indians and the first Catholic priest in Kansas City, wrote to his bishop November 12, 1828:  “Messrs. Francis, Cyprian and Frederick Choteau have begun to erect at the Kanzas River a large building which will be soon be looked upon as a sort of emporium for the sale and exchange of goods among the Shawnee and Kanza Indians.”

The first ferry across the river was operated in 1828 by the grandfather of the Younger Brothers of Jesse James fame. Steamboat traffic, which had centered on a few small settlements and Fort Leavenworth, began to increase due to trade at “Westport Landing.” In 1838, the town started calling itself “Kansas” (The French called it "Petite Riviere des Cansez" after the Kansas (Kaw) River and Kansa Indians.) The earliest map of the area dates from 1840, drawn to chart the location of the French Catholic settlers around the river banks.

Francois and his brothers were grandsons of Pierre Laclede, the influential French fur merchant acknowledged as the co-founder of St. Louis. Laclede had four children with his common-law wife,  Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau. Their son Jean “Pierre” Choteau was born in 1758.*) He was a “French creole fur trader, merchant, politician and slaveholder” who operated the St. Louis Fur Company, which held exclusive rights to the large fur trade of the  Osage Indians. Thomas Jefferson appointed him U.S. Agent for Indian Affairs in 1804. Jean Pierre married a French Creole named Pélagie Kiercereau of New Orleans in 1783, and together they had two sons: Auguste Pierre “Col. A.P.” Chouteau (b.1786) who, while living among the Osage Indians, took two Indian sisters as wives simultaneously; Pierre “Cadet” Chouteau (b.1789) established  American Fur Company trading posts along the upper Missouri River and founded Fort Pierre, South Dakota; Chouteau County, Montana was named for him. Shortly after his first wife’s death around 1794, Jean Pierre Chouteau married again, to Brigitte Saucier; it was of this union that the three pioneering Kansas City Chouteaus were born.

François Gesseau “Jesse” Chouteau (1797–1838) was the first official European settler and founder of Kansas City, Missouri. He married Berenice Therese Menard (1822-1888), the daughter of Pierre Menard of  the southern Illinois French-Indian community of Kaskaskia. Pierre Menard was the first Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois and Berenice was “very probably the first white woman to set foot on the Kansas City site. Her light hearted, easy manner, French hospitality and cultivated social graces  distinguished the best element in the early Creole population.” Their son, Pierre Menard Chouteau, was “the first white child to grow up at the mouth of the Kansa River.” “Jesse” Chouteau died at “Kansas” in 1838.

 Cyprian Chouteau (1802–1879) conducted the Chouteau-Sarpy Fur Company based in Kansas City. The third brother, Frederick Chouteau (1809–1891), was a “fur trader and broker in Westport, Missouri, who was married four times.”

*The children were baptized as children of Mdme. Chouteau’s legal husband Rene Auguste Chouteau, who had deserted her and returned to France; because divorce was prohibited by law of both the Roman Catholic Church and in France, their children took his  name.

As families with the names Bartholet, Montardeau, Uneau, Prudhomme, La Libertie, Tourjon, Ferrier, Vertefeuylle and Le Sarge began to arrive, Choteau’s trading post grew into a village as patches of the forest were cleared away for log homes.  “Jesse” Choteau traded with the Kansa, Seminole and Osage Indians; Berenice, just 20 years old when she came to Kansas City, established warm relations with them. During the cholera epidemic of 1827 she “baptized seventy-five dying Indian children, sewed burial shrouds, brought comfort to survivors and taught them about the Catholic faith.”

In 1828 Gabriel Prudhomme, operator of a grocery and tavern (hotel) and one of the original  owners of the land south of the river (he received 150 acres as a government grant and had purchased additional land after Missouri’s admission to the Union) was killed in a barroom brawl;  his widow advertised his 271 acres on the levee for sale as “one of the best steamboat landings on the river; an excellent situation for a warehouse or town site.”  The land was subdivided and sold at public auction for $1800, but that sale was eventually voided, declared fraudulent because the purchaser was in collusion with the Prudhomme heirs.

 After the ensuing litigation was settled, the land was resold for a total of $4,200 to a company of 14 settlers including John McCoy of  West Port, “who in 1832 had received his first stock of goods by steamer John Hancock at Choteau’s warehouse at the foot of Grand Avenue.” James H. McGee was first white man in the settlement excepting the French Catholics. William Gillis,  Francois “Jesse” Choteau and Benedict Roux all were buyers of Prudhomme’s land. But during the years of litigation over the sale of the land the settlers were already expanding the settlement, then known as “Westport Landing.”  By 1833, James H. McGee owned 520 acres of what became mid-town Kansas City. McGee is said to have been the first man to bring slaves to Kansas City.  Jesse Chouteau had several hundred acres; Pierre La Liberti owned much of the land bordering the bluffs to the west. On April 10, 1834, Benedict Roux purchased 166 acres at “Quality Hill.” Joseph Jarboe Jr. purchased his eighty acre farm in “the west half of northeast quarter, Section 7, Township 49”  on November 3 1834, which encompassed the area today identified as 17th to 23rd Street, Summit west to Broadway.  He built a farmhouse  and estate on that piece of  land which would today encompass the 1800 block of Madison (if it wasn’t lying under Interstate 35.) Joseph’s property  abutted  William Gillis’ 80 acres to the south..

Joseph engaged in real estate, farming and the mercantile dry goods and wholesale grocery and liquor trade.  His other neighbors were James H. McGee, Phillip Choteau and W. B. Evans (who owned much of the levee property), in various ways all important figures in Kansas City history.

The first  plat of “Old Town” was drawn in 1839. It consisted of 153 acres,  bordered by Water Street on the north, Elm on the East, Second Street on the South, and Vine Street (later Market, then Grand ) on the east. There were 14 vertical, numbered lots facing Water Street and the river, divided by a 60’ road labeled “Commerce St.”    Lots 1-8 were on the west side of Commerce, lots 9-14 on the east; lot 9 was on the west  corner of the east lot, bordering Commerce; lot 14 bordered Walnut to the east. Each lot had a fifty foot “frontage” and was 132 feet deep, north to south. South of those two blocks was a thirty-one foot thoroughfare marked “Alley,”  later called “Commercial Alley.”  Behind Commercial Alley were twelve horizontal “blocks”, ranging in size, containing lots numbered 15 through 86. With the exception of the irregularly shaped blocks bordering  on the west, each of the lots measured 60 feet by 140 feet.

Father Benedict Roux was a Jesuit priest from Lyon, France whose assignment was to minister to Catholics “along the western Missouri frontier and to convert the Native Americans to Catholicism.” He received a donation (actually he paid $6.00) of 40 acres of land atop the bluffs on the western edge of the city from Pierre La Liberti. Excerpted from a later 1856 deed on the property: “The Southeast quarter of the North East quarter of section six (6) in Township forty-nine (49) and range thirty-three (33) containing forty acres, entered by Pierre La Liberti at the land office and sold to Benedict Roux on the 5th day of April 1824, reserving “ten acres of land  by the said Benedict Roux for the purpose of erecting thereon a church and upon which a church has been erected.” The sale also included an additional forty acres Roux had received as a government grant. The location of Roux’s ten-acre church property corresponds to today’s Eleventh to Twelfth Streets, Broadway west to a hundred feet west of Jefferson.  The church was built at what is now 11th and Pennsylvania. Roux’s first baptisms there in 1834 were Daniel Boone’s grandchildren Elizabeth and Eilalia Boone, daughters of Daniel Morgan Boone, said to have been the first white man to settle in the vicinity of Kansas City. Another Boone grandson, Albert Gallatin Boone, operated a “General store and slave market” in Westport.

On October 20, 1832 Roux sold the eighty acres (reserving the ten on which the log church was built) to Francis Moubleaux for $700. In 1839 “Choteau’s Church” was officially christened “St. John Francis Regis Church.”  Jesse Chouteau’s brother-in-law, Edward Menard of Kaskaskia, acquired the eighty acres in 1846 and sold it to his sister, Berenice Chouteau, in November 1852. (After Roux sold the property in 1832 he left the area on a new assignment to the French-Indian settlement at Kaskaskia.)

Gilbert Joseph Garraghan’s 1871 Catholic Beginnings in Kansas City excerpts a letter from Fr. Roux:

 “I say Mass at ten o’clock sharp every eight days in our little chapel two miles from my residence, preceded by the Rosary and by a hymn, a  verse of which is sung after each decade. A French and English hymn is sung immediately after Mass. Before the Credo I preach in French on the foundations of Christian doctrine. I preach immediately afterwards in English... I have the pleasure of seeing  many non-Catholics in regular attendance with our little congregation.  They join eagerly in the singing-of the English hymns, in such wise that I see a sort of emulation existing between them and the French as to who will sing the better. I am accustomed to say Mass every Thursday at seven o'clock at my place of residence. Some of the French assist at it; it is followed by morning prayer and by reading from the life of a Saint.” Father Roux  refers to the Jarboes as “an exemplary Catholic family.” Their children, along with the  Chouteau family children and "several other children from the French settlement on the river front were students at the Catholic rectory school in 1836, on 12th Street and taught by father Benedict Roux, being the only school in all this wild territory at the time,” according to Caroline Smart (also known as Mrs. E. P. Graves) in a 1911 from an interview in the Kansas City Star.

Father Donnelly wrote the French settlers: “…were substantially clothed, and they generally manufactured their clothes at home. There was a spinning wheel and loom in almost every house, and young women of the family all spun and wove, and the piles of blankets, quilts and clothing attested the skill and industry of the farmer daughters. They could dress richly and elegantly, and always with studied propriety and unaffected modesty. They were a very sociable people – they had their innocent balls and dances, especially in winter. There was no liquor drank, no boisterous talk, no unbecoming word or act seen among them. All were happy; all danced. There were no quarrels, contentions, no scandals among them, not thefts, nor wrongs, nor impudicity, no adulteries, no injustice, nor slanders, nor deceit. They were all Catholics.”

  On June 22, 1834, Father Donnelly  baptized John Carrol, Joseph Jarboe and Lydia Ann Jarboe’s  third child. On September 8, 1839, a visiting priest, Father Anthony Eysvogels, a  missionary to the Kickapoo Indians, baptized their newest son, Henry.  A daughter, Theresa Rose, was baptized by the first Jesuit priest in Kansas City, Father Charles Van Quickenborne at St. Francis Regis Chouteau's church in 1840. Her baptismal sponsors were James O'Toole, an Irish immigrant and the pioneer Catholic of Buchanan County, Missouri and Madame Francis Chouteau.

The Jarboe’s eldest son William J. established his store in 1843 on Lot 3 (East Levee), but it is believed a flood in 1844 destroyed both Jarboe and adjoining Evans structures. Later in 1861, his brother David Jarboe operated a “Forwarding and Commercial Merchandise” enterprise on Lot 3, East Levee.

William Gillis (1797-1869) was one of the most colorful characters Kansas City ever saw. He was the son of a French mother and Scottish father from Somerset County, Maryland.  Around 1820 William, his brother John and widowed mother located to the old French-Indian settlement at Kaskaskia, just across the Mississippi River from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, an important outfitting post for the regions of south Missouri. The village had been settled around 1700 by “French voyageurs who  married Indian women." Of 21 children born before 1714, 18 mothers were Indian and twenty fathers were French. Many of the French and their mixed-race (Métis) descendants at Kaskaskia became voyageurs and coureurs des bois, who would explore and exploit the Missouri River country for fur trading, especially in beaver pelts, and learning the trades and practices of the Native people who inhabited there.

Gillis, considered a man of distinction and wealth because he owned slaves and property,  met the Delaware Indians in Kaskaskia and was inducted into the tribe. Around 1822 he traveled with them to their encampment called “Delaware Town,” on the James River near Springfield. A contemporary describe Gillis as tall, muscular and broad-shouldered, with a “face that was square and ruddy. A man of handsome athletic figure, romantic temperament and youthful ardor, it was not surprising that he found charms among the Indian Maidens, and by all accounts his affections among them were of a roving and unceremonial disposition.” Gillis took several Indian brides and at least two children with them, but he maintained throughout his life that he had never married.

During the early 1820s he operated trading posts in southern Missouri, supplying goods to the Delawares and other Indians in exchange for their government annuities. When the Delaware and Shawnee were relocated to reservations just west the Missouri border, Gillis moved with them, arriving at Choteau’s Town in 1831. He bought a 600 acre tract of land encompassing much of the area now known as Kansas City’s “West Side,”  abutting  Joseph’s Jarboe’s property on the south and extending south from 23rd to 34th Streets, and east of Summit to State Line. His property included the area now known as Coleman Highlands and the land on which Penn Valley Park lies today. He built a colonial-style plantation house at (later numbered) 2727 Holly Street on grounds which extended from today’s 27th and 28th Streets, Holly to Jarboe. Gillis was commonly referred to as “Kansas City’s richest man.” In 1846, he donated a tract of  land in Old Town (Main and Walnut, 4th to 5th Streets) “for public use forever.” The site has served as Kansas City’s “City Market” ever since. I suspect it was Gillis who named Delaware Street.

In 1845  newly-ordained Catholic priest Father Bernard Donnelly arrived with an appointment reading “For the Missions of Westport Landing, Independence, Westport, Liberty, Clay County, and about a hundred other places.” He traveled on horseback throughout the area and ministered to local Catholics from the  log structure built by Benedict Roux.   He remained  at the log church for 34 years, spanning the pioneer and modern eras of Catholic history in Kansas City.

On June 17, 1879, the Sedalia Weekly Bazoo carried an illustration and story about the old log church:

“The above is one of the first, if not the first, house ever built in Kansas City at a time when that city was known as Westport Landing. To-day, built around this primeval and dilapidated structure, is a city of 50,000 inhabitants. It still stands, alone and neglected, a silent
memento of the day of the voyageur, the trapper and the Indian. But old and dilapidated as it is,
 it was the first Christian church in this region, being erected in 1834 for Rev. Bernard Roux, a pious French priest. Around it is the pioneer graveyard, and as the properly has been condemned, the old log cabin will in a few days disappear.  Here, surrounded by Indian tribes and French traders, was laid the foundation of a rich and powerful church. And here, too, as a missionary, did Father Donnelly endeavor to instill in the mind of the untutored man a hope of a better life and home beyond the river. The old log cabin where Father Donnelly resided for so many years is rapidly giving way to decay. Part of the east aide has been knocked out and carried away. The chimneys stand almost solitary and alone amid the lonely surroundings. They almost seem to be living monuments, watching silently over the dead in the old adjacent graveyard. The floors of the cabin have in several place been torn up, and the ground underneath dug up by persons who thought that treasure was buried there. An elm tree stands majestically at the Northwest corner, planted by Father Donnelly years ago, never imagining that he would live to see it rise to such large proportions. Here in this old log cabin, in times gone by, were sheltered men of high distinction, from all over the broad land, and to Father Donnelly are we indebted for the list of dignitaries who have slept and supped beneath its roof. In a certain place under the cabin was kept the holy wine used by the church. Father Donnelly in his primitive dwelling was as happy as the lords of England in their fine mansions. The demand for the land for the purposes of the living has become imperative and the dead will have to remove its inhabitants. The area of the cemetery covers one entire block, bounded by 11th. 12th, Penn and Jefferson streets, and will make one of the most beautiful building sites within the borders of the city.”

Bernard Donnelly (1810-1880) was “Kansas City's first historian.” He was born in Kilnacreva, county Cavan, Ireland. He became a civil engineer and worked on the construction of the Liverpool docks in the 1820’s.  His diary and sacramental records document the life events of Kansas City’s early Catholics. In Latin, with a meticulous, florid hand, he chronicled the many Shannon and Jarboe family births, deaths, baptisms and marriages. It’s been written that he facilitated the Shannon brother’s emigration to the United States and to have convinced Patrick Shannon to come to Kansas City from St. Louis.

The second plat of April 30, 1846, raised the number of blocks to 33, containing about 300 lots. The only change in the Water Street  lots is that the westernmost is numbered “1” and the other “2.” Water Street has become “Front,” Commerce St. has become “Main St.,” Vine has become “Market,” Delaware appears to the west of Main, and Wyandotte to the west of Delaware.

  In 1847 the Liberty Tribune wrote the town “contained four immense warehouses, several grist and saw mills, blacksmith and wagon maker’s shops, grocery and provisions stores…in the immediate vicinity are well-stocked farms, and wagons, mules, cattle, ponies, harness, grains and provisions – everything.”  The bulk of the freight going west was clothing, hosiery, shoes, hardware, flour, whiskey and ammunition. Traders prospered on their return trips, as wool and hides were in great demand in the east. Fur trappers, Indian traders and French-Catholic homesteaders had laid the foundation for what was to become “the main embarkation point to the westward expansion of America.”

In the spring of 1847 Jesuit missionaries established a mission in the Neosho area to school the Osage Indian children. Father John Schoenmaker hired Joseph Jarboe Jr. and his two-horse wagon to escort a group of six Sisters of Loretto from Kentucky on a 150 mile southerly trek into Indian Territory on the Neosho River.  The missionaries travelled up the Mississippi River to Independence by steamboat, where they boarded Jarboe’s covered wagon and ventured west. They had least one encounter with Indians, when one evening “a band of Indians on horse-back surrounded the small camp and rode, furiously, in a circular formation, frightening the six sisters half-to-death.  The Indians did not harm the nuns but rode-off, leaving them in peace, whispering prayers of Thanksgiving.”

When Joseph and Lydia’s second son David Mullholland “D.M.” Jarboe was nineteen, he “caught Gold Rush Fever and made a trip to California on foot” where he “successfully mined until 1851.” When he returned to Kansas City he entered the family’s wholesale grocery and other mercantile enterprises with his brother William. The 1850 census confirms that “David Jarbow” 20 years old, born in Kentucky 1830, resided at an encampment with about 20 others at Coloma, El Dorado County, California, the heart of Gold Rush territory.  It is possible he became acquainted with William Tobener, Henry’s younger brother, in Coloma.

By 1849 there were some 58 steamboats or “paddle wheelers” operating on the Missouri river, most originating in St. Louis. They handled the migration of the Mormons to the west, the surge of settlers traveling west on the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails, Irish coming to America to escape the Great Famine, and the horde of treasure seekers to the California gold mines. The configuration of the landing site at Kansas City – extending from about present day Troost west to Broadway - was ideal for landing steamboats and far better than that of St. Joseph or Leavenworth. The  Enterprise reported on the comings and goings of ships such as the Fanny Ogden, Spread Eagle, Calypso, Marcella, Emilie, Isabella, Florence, West Wind, Jennie Dean, Welcome, Live Oak, Minnehaha and the Mary E. Forsythe. That year, William Gillis and Benoist Troost built the city’s first hotel on the riverfront, The Gillis House. (In the early years, Gillis’ name is often spelled Gilliss – that is the name that appears on photographs of the “Gilliss Hotel.”)  

In 1853 a charter created the “City of Kansas.”  The  incorporated area was about ten blocks west to east, and five blocks north to south, bordered by Bluff Road (overlooking the West Bottoms atop Quality Hill) on the west, Holmes Street on the east, Independence Avenue (between 5th and 6th Streets) on the south and the Missouri River on the north. At the first municipal election there were 67 voters. Farmer William S. Gregory of the Whig Party defeated Benoist Troost of the Democratic Party to become Kansas City’s first Mayor. Gregory, owner of six slaves, served ten months before being ousted due to his living on a farm on Locust Street east of the city limits. Kansas City politics had been born!

Although difficult to conceive a less inviting spot for town-building, the natural landing space at the levee provided the best natural access from miles around to the south and west, where transfers from boat to wagon could be made. The city pioneers recognized that an ideal landing place on river wasn’t enough – they had to build a city to entertain, house and equip the constant flux of visitors and settlers they expected to come, especially when Kansas would be admitted to the Union and the prospect of the railroad coming to town. . In order to do that, they had to find a way to cut through the massive limestone cliffs and centuries-old forest that lay beyond.  

As riverfront traffic thrived, so did the city. From 1855 to 1859, the population increased a phenomenal 1600% as Kansas City’s first “boom period” was underway. Advertisements in  1855-1856 show several dozen establishments along the riverfront  During the mid-to-late 1850s, wholesalers and retailers in dry goods, clothing, groceries, hardware, drugs and liquors, saw and grist mills, horses and cattle, professional services, hotels, restaurants, billiard parlors, and numerous saloons lined the riverfront and dotted the acreage beyond.  Houses perched precariously atop canyons created by the digging of the first crude roads extending south, east and west.










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Patrick Shannon and his brothers


Patrick Shannon

The Irish Civil War of 1922-1923 caused the loss of the Record Office of Ireland, which kept the vast majority of administrative records from the 14th century on. The building was used as an ammunition store; hit by a shell, the munitions exploded and destroyed all of the records. Significant losses were the 19th century census returns, about two-thirds of pre-1870 Church of Ireland parish registers and all of the surviving probated wills in Ireland. What records are available – municipal and non-Church of Ireland parish records - are increasingly sparse before 1840 and rare before 1800.  The vast majority of Ireland was Roman Catholic, and the most important source of Irish genealogical information is Roman Catholic records. The National Library of Ireland has copies of virtually all the surviving registers.  Griffith’s Primary Valuation of 1847-1868 recorded all occupiers of property in Ireland in county-by-county in volumes published between 1847 and 1868. These sources do provide some information, but the end result is that for many genealogists, the line of their ancestors stops at the emigrant ancestor; information regarding preceding generations is often confusing, especially so in the case of a common surname like Shannon, which was one of the three most common names in Cavan (with Sheridan and Reilly.). The names Patrick and John were so common that, with the loss of 1800’s census records, it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish members of one family from another in the records that do exist. DNA testing has today become the most effective means of identifying family origins in Ireland.   There is only one known possible published reference to Patrick, John and Philip Shannon’s parents, which is located on an LDS genealogy website. That entry lists their father as Felix Shannon and the mother as Anne Sheridan and their marriage date of 1823, but given Patrick’s stated age at death, either the 1823 date or the purported names of the parents are wrong. John’s obituary states that the brothers were from the parish of Drumlane in Cavan County.
   
Patrick Shannon was 52 years old, according to his death notice, when he died on December 17, 1871.  He and his brothers John (born either March 1 or March 25, 1825) and Philip (birthdate unknown, but he was the youngest) were, according to John’s obituary, “apprenticed in the dry goods business at the nearby market towns of Belturbet and Carrickmacross” - indicating their father was a tradesman rather than a farmer or laborer.  There is an indication (see Patrick Shannon and the Border Wars and the Civil War) that Patrick may have fought in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, also called “The Famine Rebellion.” John’s obituary stated he was educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland’s oldest university.

Cavan, (An Cabhán, e.g. The Hollow) Ulster, Ireland is on the border with Northern Ireland and measures 212 acres. Known as the “Lake County” for its 365 lakes, Ireland’s longest river, River Shannon, flows through the county. “Shannon” is a form of several Gaelic surnames. The Celtic deity associated with the river is the Goddess "Sionna," pronounced SHAN-nen, who sought out the hazelnuts of wisdom which were believed to contain éigse, the spirit and inspiration of poetry.

A remembrance written by one of Patrick’s granddaughters says that “as landowners, the Shannons were considered among the gentry.” Griffith’s lists forty-seven Shannon land records in Cavan, including those of Anne Shannon, Drumlane; Felix Shannon, Kilmore; Patrick Shannon, Kildallan and Thomas in Drumlane. A Shannon with roots in Cavan writes:  “The elusive Shannons of Cavan. My grandfather Terence Shannon was the youngest son of Hugh and Anne (Reilly) Shannon of Cavan.  Their 1866 wedding record identifies Terence’s father as Patrick Shannon and Anne’s father as Hugh Reilly. I contacted the Diocese in Cavan and found information on his parents, Rose Fitzpatrick from Drumlane and Patrick Shannon.  I learned Hugh Shannon was born around 1846, thus I conclude his parents were born around 1820-1825.  In the Griffiths Valuation of 1850’s I find that this Patrick was a leaseholder on three properties in the area. It would be our Patrick’s were born around the same time—thus they could have been cousins. (More likely, uncle/nephew.)  My grandfather had brothers named Philip and John, as well as an Uncle John and Philip. Philip and Felix were not common names in Ireland.”
 
Between 1820 and 1852 more than 700,000 Irish, the poorest people in Europe, sailed to America due to The Great Famine. The survivors who washed up on the shores of the United States had few resources.  On passenger lists the men claimed to be laborers; women said they were domestic servants. There were some who were blacksmiths, stonemasons, boot makers and the like, but the majority had no formal training.  Being unskilled, uneducated and typically illiterate, they accepted menial, poorly-paying jobs that other immigrant groups did not want, while living in mostly deplorable conditions. They were exploited for the construction of canals, roads, bridges and railroads, and also found work in the mining and quarrying industries. Nearly all of them had a fierce loyalty to the Catholic Church.

The Shannon brothers were different. University-educated and from a family of apparently wealthy landowners, they may have had Cavan connections in New York, New Orleans, and St. Louis. According to written accounts, they knew Father Bernard Donnelly, a fellow Cavanian.  One immigration passenger list database shows nine men with the name of Patrick Shannon immigrating to America 1840-1850. One  places a Philip Shannon arriving at New York on July 8, 1848, aboard the ship Jamestown sailing from Liverpool.  Ireland itself kept no record of its emigrants – what passengers lists exist today were compiled at the point of arrival, not departure. Apparently Philip found work in  the dry goods business in New York and Patrick and John went to New Orleans where they opened an import business, perhaps listed in the 1850 city directory as “J.C. Shannon, grocer, at 53 New Levee Street.” John evidently stayed in New Orleans to run that business, while it has been written that Patrick went to St. Louis to establish a dry goods store, but finding conditions not propitious he then relocated downriver at the urging of Father Donnelly. Robert Van Horn wrote in a reminiscence of Patrick that the two  travelled from St. Louis to Kansas City on the same riverboat. Whitney quotes Van Horn: “I landed from the steamer Polar Star at Kansas City on the last day of July, 1855.” In 1853 the Polar Star made the run from St. Louis to St. Joseph (600 miles) in sixty hours, the fastest time ever made on the river. It was “one of the finest and most popular boats ever on the Missouri river.”

Of the brother’s life in Ireland, their immigration and the years before 1855, virtually nothing is known. If it is true Philip worked in the dry goods business in New York, he could have learned the American trade from experts, perhaps the wholesale and buying side of it. John, in New Orleans and married into an old French family, could have learned the ins and outs of the importing business, particularly that of France. Patrick would have learned some lessons from an unsuccessful business venture in St. Louis. But to my knowledge, no proof has yet placed the brothers anywhere in the United States except Kansas City.  

“Gregarious and educated, Patrick Shannon stepped quicker and more confidently into the local history books than any other Irishman.” The brothers were regarded as “businessmen of superior education, polite address, and cosmopolitan bearing.” They were “handsome, cultured men,” wrote Virginia Koogle, Patrick’s granddaughter.

In the years 1850-1860, over three thousand migrants of all ages settled in Kansas City. They came from every state in the union and nearly one-third of the new citizens had themselves been born, or had family members who had been born, in Europe. In the 1860 census of Kaw Township, several dozens showed their birthplace as Ireland; the Irish population in the main consisted of about three hundred laborers, bricklayers, stone-cutters, carpenters and a few “teamsters.” Irish women were “housekeepers” or “servants.” Germany was represented with perhaps two hundred new settlers. Their primary occupations were “brewing or brewers, grocers and butchers, barkeepers,” although there were a few brick makers and stone masons among them. Henry Seeger, a jeweler and J. & P. Shannon’s neighbor on the levee, listed his birthplace as Württemberg in Germany, the same region the Tobener family had emigrated from. Other countries of origin represented were Prussia, Scotland, France, Canada, Italy and Switzerland.

To attract the manpower necessary for cutting through the solid limestone to establish the city’s first roads,  Father Donnelly passed the word back east to Irish immigrant communities. He knew their labor would be cheap and they could perform the backbreaking work. He insisted that all of them come from the same county; otherwise “they wouldn’t get along together.”  He recruited three hundred Irish immigrants from Philadelphia and elsewhere, many from the  from the province of Connaught. They settled into boarding houses around what  is today’s  Sixth and Broadway, and the area became known as “Connaught-town.” They men toiled with picks, drills and other tools through the thick stone of the bluffs while their womenfolk worked as domestics and tended house. As the cutting was complete on the first roads, Donnelly put his engineering expertise to work, founding a brickyard and quarry on today’s Quality Hill: he supplied not only the laborers, but the tens of thousands of bricks that paved the city’s first streets.  

Not all of the Irish were employed in common labor, excavating rock and laying brick. John Campbell, the “prairie schooner” operator and one of city’s wealthiest men, was born in Ireland in 1822. He became Patrick’s friend, neighbor, business and political ally;
 George Sweeney was a grocer (the term “grocer” commonly included liquor sales), grain dealer and a neighbor of Patrick’s on the levee. He was born in County Donegal in 1820.  Matt Foster and his brother Francis (Frank) operated a large book and variety store at 515-517 Delaware (in a building that is still standing.) Frank was Postmaster 1861-1867, a Captain of the 77th E.M.M. and Kansas City’s first Fire Chief in 1867. J.P. Duke was born in Patrick’s home county of Cavan in 1824; he emigrated in 1846, first settling at Philadelphia and subsequently residing in Cincinnati and St. Louis. He came to Independence in 1854, established himself as a boot and shoe maker. Joseph C. Ransom, of County Louth, came to the U.S. at age 13 in 1832 and to Kansas City in 1851. He was variously a fur-trader, commission merchant and grocer; he held an exclusive 30-year license to operate a ferry across the Missouri River from the levee. Ransom became immensely rich and was a director of Jesse Riddlesbarger’s Mechanics Bank in 1857 and later Justice of the Peace. He was intimately involved in the machinations (and money) involved in bringing the railroads to Kansas City.  Still other Irish in Kansas City were tailors, upholsterers, shoemakers and a few worked in various merchant enterprises.
 
Troost was a Catholic from Holland who had come to Kansas City as early as 1847. Reputedly, he was the city’s first doctor. But it was through real estate investment that he accumulated his vast fortune. His fingerprints dot the landscape of developing Kansas City in the form of over ninety deeds and related documents issued  in Kansas City, Independence and Clay County during the years 1847-1870. Troost may have been a rich and wily speculator, but an overly generous man, he was not. He willed his entire estate to his wife, the former Mary Ann Kennerly (or Kenerly) whom he had married April 13 1845, and gave his three grandchildren, Margaret, Mary and Nathaniel Troost, five dollars each, “to be paid to them when they demand the same, and not before.”  When the old Indian trader William Gillis died July 1869, he left his substantial estate to Mary Ann, his niece (On December 17, 1896, the Kansas City Journal reported his estate was worth  $2,000,000.) I haven’t identified Mary Ann’s parents, but having been a niece of William Gillis, she may well have had Indian blood.

On April 30, 1853, in the midst of a Yellow Fever epidemic in New Orleans, John Shannon, 23, married Eloise Felicite Padron (b. December 1, 1831) the daughter of Vincent Anastasie Padron and Marie Angèlique Manette DeJan of New Orleans. The ceremony took place at the St. Louis Cathedral.  Vincent’s lineage traces to Spain, and Marie’s to France. The 1842 New Orleans city directory shows a V. Padron as a “collector” living at 45 Union Street. John and Felicite’s first child, Felicite Marie Shannon, was born there in 1855. A second daughter, Marie Elizabeth Shannon, arrived in New Orleans on August 15, 1856. Three months earlier, John had opened the firm of J. &. P. Shannon with his brothers Philip and Patrick.

The Enterprise newspaper, at first a weekly, was founded in 1854 in Kansas City by a consortium of leading citizens including then-current mayor Milton J. Payne, previous mayor William Gregory, and future mayor Elijah. Milton McGee, William Gillis, Benoist Troost and others.  They selected David K. Abeel and editor William A. Strong  to conduct the paper, but by the following year some of the owners had become “unhappy with Abeel’s abolitionist views.”  A new group, formed to buy the paper and conduct a search for a new publisher, included  Joseph and Henry Chick, Jesse Riddlesbarger, Pierre Choteau, Gillis and Troost.

“By accident, in the summer of 1855, being temporarily in St. Louis, staying at the Virginia Hotel, Robert T. Van Horn met a gentleman from Kansas City who was on the lookout for a printer to take charge of a small weekly paper – The Enterprise – that had been launched a few months before and was then on the point of suspension. The Enterprise was owned by an association of citizens in search of a new editor. Taking a steamboat downriver to look it over, Van Horn arrived in Kansas City on July 31, 1855.” (Col. Robert Van Horn, His Life and Public Service, J.M. Greenwood 1905) Greenwood’s date differs from Whitney’s by thirty days; also noted that Greenwood’s account doesn’t mention The Enterprise being located above a saloon.)

Van Horn liked what he saw and the people he met – politics and business were sure to have been discussed at length - and he agreed to purchase The Enterprise for $500*, promising to pay $250 cash on the first of October and $250.00 due twelve months later. A conflicting biographical account reports the price of $1000.

“He returned to his home in Ohio, and by the first of October he was back in Kansas City here with Mrs. (Adelia) Van Horn and their three little children. They  lived in the second story of a brick building at the corner of Walnut Street and the Levee, over John Bauerline’s Boot and Shoe store. He called at Merchant’s Bank, the business place of Jesse Riddlesbarger, one of the gentlemen who had been authorized to sell the paper, and he informed Mr. Riddlesbarger that he was ready to take possession of the office. ‘He gave me a receipt for the first payment, took my note for the other, and walking back with me a block (east) from Delaware to Main Street on the levee, put me in possession of the office and paper. The office was in the second floor of a building at the corner of Main Street and the Levee.’”

Robert T. Van Horn (1824-1916) was the grandson of a Dutch immigrant who fought in the Revolutionary War.  Born in Ohio,  he had been a steamship operator, lawyer and newspaperman. He took over The Enterprise in October 1855, and his “popularity and willingness to engage in civic affairs” led to rapid growth of the paper He quickly became influential in city politics, known for his “sensible editorials on the subjects of slavery and war” in contentious times among contentious people.  He was appointed Postmaster of Kansas City 1857 and in 1861  was elected on the Democrat ticket to the first of three terms as Mayor. Commissioned a Major in the Enrolled Missouri Militia (E.M.M.), he organized the 25th Missouri Infantry.  Later, as a full-fledged Colonel in the regular Union army, he fought in two major battles in Mississippi. He  served in the Missouri State Senate 1862-1864 and was elected to the United States Congress, serving one term 1865-1871. As a member of the Railroads Committee, he pushed through the legislation that in 1869 gave the Hannibal Bridge to Kansas City.  Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Van Horn became one of the most important politicians in Missouri history.  The 1860 census shows Van Horn, Editor, 36 with wife Adelia, two small sons and servant Rose McDaniel, 40, from Ireland.

In 1921, The Journal of Commerce published Van Horn’s recollections of the paper. He listed a chronology of its headquarters: (1) "Main street and the Levee" in 1854;  (2) "Walnut street and the Levee" on its purchase and renaming in 1855; (3) "Main street and Commercial alley;"  (4) 2nd and Main Streets (etc.).

Whitney: “The Journal moved to a new frame building one-half block east of Walnut Street on the levee (2). This proved to be too far from the business center, and William Campbell of Clay County erected the three-story brick building at the corner of Main and Commercial Alley (3) where the newspaper was published until the fall of 1867, when it  to a building on the east side of Main Street, just south of Second Street (4).”

Whitney: “The (Enterprise’s) first place of publication was on the second floor of a brick building at the southeast corner of Main Street and the Levee over  “Kit” Cole’s saloon. But…the whole building was later taken by the Shannon Brothers for the first exclusive dry good house in Kansas City. The (Enterprise) moved to a new frame building one-half block east of Walnut Street on the Levee.  (At some undated point)…erected the three-story brick building at the corner of Main Street and Commercial Alley.”  

The KU Field Archaeology report of March 1992  places the “’Daily Western Journal of Commerce,’ erected in the mid 19th century,” in the east half of Block 2, Lot Nine, fronting  Water Street on the north and Commerce – (a 60-foot wide “road” that became Main Street) - to the east, so apparently KU identifies the Enterprise’s first location.  Commerce St. was the demarcation between the “West Levee” and the “East Levee.” Thus, the Enterprise office was located west of  the fifty foot span of Block 1 on the West Levee, a further sixty feet across Commercial from the northern part of Lot 9 (the location of  J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods store that was to open in May 1856) and about sixty feet south of it, assuming Lot 9 was simply divided in two.  

Whitney was the first historian to make the statement about the Cole’s Saloon/Enterprise building being taken over by the Shannon Brothers.  She doesn’t give the date of the event; Van Horn wrote that the Enterprise moved from “Main at the Levee” to “Walnut and the Levee” in October 1855 upon his arrival in the city. Thus, The Enterprise was ostensibly on the second floor of Kit Cole’s saloon from it’s founding in 1854 until October 1855.  

Of the businesses shown as located at Block Two, Lot 9 from the period 1856-1870 identified by KU and compiled from advertisements and the 1859-1860 directory, no business operated by a “Cole” is shown and the several saloons listed are from later years. KU shows a John F. Coleman as a “saloon owner,” but the corresponding date is 1869, far past the Enterprise days at the location. I’ve been unable to find any evidence of a “Kit Cole” or anyone named Cole who operated a saloon in Kansas City at the time; no Coles are listed in the 1859-1860 directory (a search of The Enterprise 1854-1856 might be fruitful), and I believe other later references to him stem from Whitney’s mention in 1908. Whitney headed the Kansas City Public Library from 1881 to1911, so somewhere, presumably, is a newspaper article or some evidence of “Kit Cole,” that Whitney relied on, but I haven’t yet located it.    

There was a John H. Cole who, on February 13, 1856  purchased  lot No. 217 on the levee “particularly being described as “part of portion of said Lot fronts (20) feet on Front Street and  running back one hundred and Forty feet (140) more or less.” Lot 217 was added in the 1846 plat and represents the area facing the river between Walnut and Market (Grand). The Enterprise was never located in this area. On February 9th 1857, Cole sold Lots No. 58 and Lot No. 59 to Edward R. and Maria Threlkeld; he sold the same lots a few months later to “Josiah Cole of New Orleans.” These lots were located in the vicinity of 1st to 2nd, Walnut to Grand, but the Enterprise was never located there either.

Shannon’s Hotel and Saloon

The earliest known record of Patrick Shannon in America appears in a loan agreement dated October 12, 1855, here abridged for clarity and length:

Know all men by these presents that I, Patrick Shannon of the city of Kansas, and Charles Dougherty of Independence, Missouri  for and in consideration of the sum of one dollar as well as other considerations hereinafter mentioned, I Patrick Shannon, by these presents do sell, transfer, deliver and mortgage unto the said Dougherty the following personal property, situate in the tavern house kept by me in the City of Kansas aforesaid: all the furniture of every kind in and about said tavern house, consisting of tables, chairs, twelve beds including bedsteads and bedding, all the liquor about and in the bar room, bottles, glasses & c, as well as provisions on hand,  subject to the following condition: Whereas, I stand indebted to the said Dougherty in the sum of two thousand dollars, for which he holds my note of even date herewith, and due one month after date. If I shall pay said debt according to the tenor and effect thereof, then this mortgage to be null and void. As witness, my hand and seal this 12th day of October, A.D. 1855.  (signed) Patrick Shannon. $2000. One month after date, I promise to pay Charles Dougherty two thousand dollars for value received 12th Oct. 1855. (signed) Patrick Shannon.

The document raises several questions. It refers to “the tavern house kept by me,” inferring that Patrick had charge of a saloon. Whether or not it was “Kit” Cole’s saloon, I haven’t established. But barely three months in Kansas City, it places Patrick as the operator of a tavern house, perhaps a trade he had picked up somewhere in his journeys. At some point, Kit Cole – or Saloon Operator X - defaulted on a chattel mortgage held by Dougherty and he offered  the tavern inventory for sale. Unfortunately, the agreement doesn’t state the name or location of the “tavern house” and the agreement doesn’t involve real property. There are numerous records of  Charles Dougherty (an Irish immigrant who settled in Independence in 1852) extending loans for various security in the 1850’s and 1860’s. He dealt variously in livestock, hotels, drugstores and general store stock.  

Significant are the amount and terms of the note.  $2,000 would be the equivalent of about $54, 800 today, an amount well beyond the reach of a typical Irish immigrant. Moreover, it’s highly doubtful that the contents of a 12-bed tavern and saloon would have been worth anything near the amount loaned by Dougherty. Nor could a tavern house hope to net $2,000 in thirty days to pay such a loan. Even though Dougherty was a speculator in merchandise and his only loss on the deal with Patrick would have been a month’s worth of wear and tear on his collateral, the amount and  short term of the note strongly suggest that the deal was made on the strength of some sort of guaranty of payment at maturity.

Patrick repaid the loan in full with the proceeds of a loan from his brother Philip, to whom he pledged the same collateral:

October 29th 1855:  Know all men by these presents that I, Patrick Shannon, in consideration of the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars paid  by Philip Shannon of Kansas City, do grant & convey unto the said Philip Shannon  his entire stock of liquors, house-hold furniture also all furniture of Bar room and other material belonging to the house and saloon now together with the license granted for retailing the said Patrick Shannon by the city of Kansas occupied by P. Shannon.  In witness whereof I have set hereunto my hand and seal this 29th day of October A.D. 1855. (signed) Patrick Shannon. Witness: R. T. Van Horn, W. A. Strong. (Abridged)

Since Van Horn and Strong of The Enterprise are witnesses, this agreement could well have been written downstairs from their offices, on the premises of Kit Cole’s – or Saloon Operator X’s – tavern at the southeast corner of Main and the Levee.  So, presumably, following the facts and written statements so far, it appears that that the Shannon’s first venture was Shannon’s Hotel and Saloon, previously operated by Kit Cole or Saloon Operator X - and perhaps that at some point they began to trade in dry goods from that location; that in October 1855 or at some point thereafter  taking over the entire building after the Enterprise vacated the building. If  Whitney knew about Shannon’s Hotel,  she doesn’t mention it in her book.  Patrick’s “license for retailing” would surely provide valuable information, and issues of The Enterprise spanning October 1855 to May 1856 should likewise reveal more information.

The first public notice of Shannon’s Hotel I have is an advertisement in The Enterprise October 27, 1855.  

 SHANNON’S HOTEL. OPPOSITE ENTERPRISE OFFICE. The undersigned would embrace this method of communicating to the citizens of Kansas and the travelling public that he has fitted up his establishment with every facility necessary to the most perfect comfort, and now prepared to receive boarders at the very lowest customary rates. He promises that no pains should be spared to contribute to the comfort of those who shall be so kind as to bestow upon him the favor of their patronage and good will. He also has in connection with his tavern a fine saloon, always provided with the most superior quality of liquors of every description, also the very best (illeg.) The liberality and generous disposition manifested towards him in this community in the short period he has been a resident here, induces him to hope that those who have shown him their kindness will not hereafter forget him. P. Shannon

The phrase “Opposite the Enterprise Office” infers that The Enterprise had already moved to their second location a block east to Walnut Street, because if the Shannon had taken over the saloon underneath the paper at its first location, they wouldn’t be “opposite” the Enterprise, but “underneath it.” Thus, “opposite” would mean the 60-foot distance west across Commerce (Main) Street.  

November 17, 1855, in The Enterprise:

ALE. Our friend Shannon has just received by the steamboat Genoa a lot of superior Buckeye, Dayton, Kennett and Pittsburg Ale. We take pleasure in inviting our friends to call and see Mr. Shannon.

February 16, 1856, in The Enterprise:

Our friend Shannon advertises a choice lot of Liquors, Brandies, etc., of the most approved brands. The reputation of Mr. Shannon’s liquors is known everywhere. His connections of New Orleans insures the purest articles imported. His Whiskies are of the finest brands in the West, and always command the readiest sale. Call and see him.

March 15, 1856, in The Enterprise:

Our friend Shannon has received per the steamboat Arabia a magnificent lot of Havana cigars, the flavor of which perfumes our offices, though a wide street separates us. His liquors not withstanding the protracted and uninterrupted draw of the winter, are yet inexhaustible. A look at his spacious wareroom will satisfy the most incredulous. Give him a call, as he does things up brown. (The Arabia was to play another part in the family history twenty-one-years later when Henry Tobener and a partner  attempted to raise the sunken riverboat.  Tobener was the grandfather and Patrick Shannon the great-grandfather of Rita Harriet Koogle.)

The reference to the “wide street that separates us” again refers to the 60-foot distance west across Commerce St.

March 29, 1856, in The Enterprise:

Our friend Shannon over the way, has presented us with a lot of the finest Cigars we have smoked for a long time – they are ultimately suggestive of the fair clime of Senoritas. Fifty thousand were received by the New Lucy. Those fond of the weed cannot find their superior – give them a puff. But we must not forget his unrivalled and far-famed Dayton Ale. It is as fine, pure, and nutty to the taste as can be found anywhere. Those fond of a prime article of Ale, have it now at their doors. We have the greatest admiration for Shannon’s inexhaustible supply of whiskey.

(The New Lucy was “a marvel of beauty, a dazzling white palace floating on the water.  She was built in St. Louis in 1852 and had the reputation of being the fastest boat on the Missouri. She could go from Jefferson City to Kansas City between daybreak and dark. ”)  
 
May 3, 1856, in The Enterprise:

  P. Shannon – Provisions, opposite the Enterprise office.

  This brief notice signals the entrance of the Shannons into retail merchandising, and that the Shannon “provisions” were located in the same building as Shannon’s Hotel and Saloon. P. Shannon could mean Philip or Patrick – my guess is Philip, who had perhaps begun offering “provisions” from the now-vacated second floor of the building.

June 7, 1856, in The Enterprise:

Shannon’s Hotel – we take pleasure in calling attention to this well-known house. Pat Shannon is deservingly popular as a host and we bespeak for him continuance of the liberal patronage heretofore extended to him.

The Shannons found time to dabble in the wholesale leather trade, the only such reference I’ve found:

November 17, 1856, in The Enterprise:

 DRY HIDES. The undersigned will give the highest market prices for dry hides. Persons having the same for sale would do well to call at my establishment, opposite the Enterprise office. P. Shannon.”

Shannon’s Hotel and Saloon isn’t mentioned by name in any of the histories of Kansas City I’ve seen.  It doesn’t appear in the 1859-1860 city directory, which would have likely been canvassed in 1858. The Journal of Commerce, Van Horn’s successor to The Enterprise, is digitised for the years 1865-1871, but a search of those issues doesn’t find an advertisement or a mention of it. For these reasons, and the known opening of J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods in May of 1856, I had assumed that the brothers sold the “tavern house” around that time in order to concentrate on operating the new dry goods store. But on March 25, 1866, a full ten years after Shannon’s Hotel opened “opposite the Enterprise,” The Journal of Commerce carried this report:

Mayor Shannon was the recipient (victim) of a surprise party on Friday night last. The visitors consisted of a dozen or more citizens, and the members of the Opera Troupe, who discoursed most excellent music until Mr. Shannon summoned the visitors to his saloon, where he regaled them with choice viands, choice liquors, and most hospitable and courteous treatment. In return, the members of the troupe again “gave breath to melody,” another “Peach Liqueur,” and the Mayor was left to his repose. We have to thank the troupe for a like compliment in front of our office. They are most excellent vocalists.

Was Shannon’s Hotel & Saloon in continuous operation from 1855 until at least 1866? Or was the “tavern house” closed at some point, only for Patrick to re-open it after the war?   If so, I’ve been unable to find any other reference to it other than what I’ve transcribed here.  (Patrick was actually the “ex-Mayor" of two months when this article was written.  Most accounts after 1864 refer to him as “Major Shannon.”)  

Interestingly, Charles Dougherty was associated 1852-1857 with a property described as Lot 70, at Market (Grand) Street 2nd and 3rd, with a 30-foor frontage on Market. On July 23, 1857 he sold it to Michael Smith.  The property was subject of a lien held by William J. Jarboe, Patrick’s brother-in-law-to-be, who foreclosed on February 24, 1857. In June 1858, Dougherty reappears to sell the property to Patrick Green and by 1860 it was in the hands of Reuben Johnson; W.J. Jarboe held a note on Johnson and foreclosed the property August 7, 1860.  The 1859-1860 city directory shows Michael Smith (no occupation) at “Grand Avenue between Second and Third.” Reuben Johnson isn’t listed, and Patrick Green is a “laborer” living at a different address. There are six businesses on or proximate to  Lot 70, variously “Market, corner of Third,” “Market between Second and Commercial,” “Third, between Walnut and Market.” They are a saloon, a grocer, “groceries and provisions,” boarding house, and “groceries and liquors.” Any of these businesses on Lot 70 could well have been a saloon, but the Enterprise was never located in the area, and Jarboe’s first identified deal with Dougherty was in 1857, nearly a year and a half after Patrick signed the saloon agreement.    


J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods

A description of the city in 1857 was “a shantytown of damp, smelly buildings dug into the clay bluffs with raw sewage in the streets.” Photographs show a prototypical wild-west frontier town: unpaved streets congested by horses and wagons, plank sidewalks, saloons and wooden business establishments lining Main Street. Nonetheless, that year some three hundred Kansas City merchants and freighters engaged in commerce:  9,884 wagons loaded at the levee for the territories, and hides, pelts, and furs worth half a million dollars were exported. The saddle and harness business generated over  $81,000. Freight charges and commissions paid at the warehouses were close to $500,000. 14,711 horses, mules, and oxen were sold, and 52,000 stock cattle from Missouri, Texas, Arkansas and the Cherokee country changed hands. The city had become a rendezvous for cattle dealers from far and wide, with cattle from the West going east, and from the East going west.  $5,000,000 in specie was distributed by the government, emigrants and freighters: $1,100,000 in annuities went to the Indians; the army spent $2,000,000 for stock and forage. Mail contractors were paid $200,000  and the Santa Fe traders paid out some $1,500,000 annually to merchants, blacksmiths, producers of livestock, and bullwhackers

Frank M. Stahl’s One-Way Ticket to Kansas (University of Kansas Press, 1959)  contains a first-hand account of a visitor debarking at Kansas City from the New Lucy in 1857:

“Holman and I made our way along the levee past boxes, cartons, and all kinds of merchandise piled wherever space could be found. Slaves were everywhere. There was a moving mass of wagons, animals, and men. The cracking of ox whips, cries of drivers, and braying of mules all added to the confusion. Facing the wharf were a few brick buildings that served as warehouses and outfitting stations for emigrants. Behind these rose high precipitous bluffs, seamed by hollows where blackjacks (small oak trees) had taken root. Backing into the bluff was a boarding-house or hotel where we engaged a room for the night. This place, kept by H.W. Chiles, was known then as the Western Hotel, and later as the Gillis House. During the years 1856 and 1857 it is said to have had 27,000 customers.”

The town thrived as a result of the business enterprises established on the levee for the purpose of outfitting settlers, fur-traders, and emigrants en route west on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Patrick Shannon is said to have “seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” and the three Shannon brothers established the J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods store in May of 1856. Called the “first real department store west of St. Louis,” the brothers “imported goods from Europe, New Orleans and Boston and prospered with the sale of clothing, hats, fabric, shoes, carpets and other goods necessary to survival and sophisticated bearing on the edge of the great prairie.”

The KU Field Archaeology Project of the Town of Kansas was conducted in March 1992.
 The original site of  J. &. P. Shannon Dry Goods Company was identified and excavated as part of this project.  A four block section of the levee was defined and compared to the earliest plats and the precise location of the some of the first structures was identified. Shannon’s was located on the “east levee” and was the first structure east of Main Street, at the far western end of the its designated block. The address would have been 1 Levee, for next door to the west was George Sweeny, grocer, at 2 Levee, the Jarboes two more doors down. The northeast corner of Shannon’s Dry Goods store was uncovered to the interior brick walls in the basement of the building. The establishments located in the area identified as Block Two, Lot Nine were described by the KU  project as “the main participants” and beneficiaries of the explosion of trade and population that Kansas City experienced in the years 1855-1861. From KU’s report (abridged):

  “The area is located along what was originally referred to as the Levee, (later named Water Street and still later Front Street) and is recognized as the location of the original development of the Town of Kansas in the late 1830's and early 1840's. The property includes all or portions of Blocks 1, 2, 12 and 13 of the 1846 plat of the Town of Kansas, known today as Old Town. Block 1 fronts along the riverfront and is bounded on the west and east by Delaware and Main Streets and on the south by the abandoned Commercial Street. The block contains six lots, each measuring 50 feet across by 132 feet deep, which are identified as Lot 1 through Lot 6 running numerically from east to west. Block 2 is located immediately east of Block 1, across Main Street, and also consists of six lots measuring 50 feet by 132 feet identified as Lot 9 through Lot 14 running numerically from west to east.

 “Located on the east side of Main Street between the levee on the north, and Commercial Street (sometimes called “Commercial Alley”) on the south, Lot Nine was home to at least twenty-four businesses in the years 1850-1870. The best known of these establishments belonged to Patrick, John and Philip Shannon. Other notable business owners were George Sweeney, a grocer who became City Treasurer, Dennis O’Brien, a saloon owner who held the office of City Auditor, and William J. and David M. Jarboe. Other businesses included F. Langsenkamp & Company, boot and shoe makers, and Henry R. Seeger, a jeweler. The lots consisted of a 50-foot frontages and a depth of 132 feet. Specific addresses such as ‘2 East Levee’ were used sporadically.”

May 3, 1856 in The Enterprise:

Mr. Philip Shannon has just opened one of the finest stocks of Dry Goods we have seen as yet in Kansas City. He has everything desirable, and has already accrued the reputation of being one of the best and most obliging salesmen in the City. Ladies will find everything suited to their tastes at this house. We are pleased to see that our friend Arthur Harrison is one of the salesmen in this establishment, as he is au fait in every department of the business, and will prove a valuable acquisition to this concern. May the house have a large run.

Presumably the store was still located in the old Enterprise/Kit Cole saloon building, where it operated for the next year. The following document reveals the genesis of  the new building where the brothers were to conduct business for the next ten years:

March 1 1857
Kansas Town of K1/44, LT 9-9, W ½ see inst.
Lease.  Nathan Scarritt and J. & P. Shannon. For the term of eight years from date the following lot or parcel of ground situate and lying in the city of Kansas, Jackson County,  To wit: A part of the west half of Lot No. 9 on the corner of Front and Main Streets fronting about twenty-five feet from Front Street and about Sixty feet on Main Street. N. Scarritt agrees on his part to  guarantee to the said J. & P. Shannon the undisturbed use and possession of said lot for  Eight years provided the terms of agreement are faithfully complied with.  J & P Shannon  agree to pay for rent  Six hundred Dollars ($600.00*) annually to be paid in equal quarter annual payments, that is to say One hundred and fifty-dollars on the first day of March A.D. 1857,  the date of this instrument; Then one hundred and fifty-dollars at the expiration of every three months from this date until the Eight years are expired. J & P Shannon further agree  to pay all taxes of every kind which may be assessed on Said Lot including State and county tax and all city taxes both ordinary and special so that the said N. Scarritt is to be a no expense at all from any assessment on Said Lot during the said period of Eight years.

That said J & P Shannon are to erect upon said lot a good and substantial building of such form as may best suit their business. At the expiration of this lease a committee of appraisement shall be selected by the mutual choice of the two parties, which Committee shall value the building which may then be standing upon said Lot according to the value it may have at the time. Said valuation shall be made provided the committee shall deduct from the value of the whole house one half of the value of the entire South brick wall which separates said house being erected and now owned by Revd. E. J. Peery (Peery was a Methodist missionary to the Delaware Indians.)  N. Scarritt is to pay to  J. & P. Shannon the amount of said valuation after said deduction  has been made. (Signed) Nathan Scarritt, John Shannon, Philip Shannon.

Given the known dimensions of the lot, the total square footage of a three-story brick structure would have been around 4,500 square feet – a narrow storefront on the levee running half of the way down to Commercial Alley. It would make sense that the store’s obviously large shipping and receiving functions were located at the rear of the store, with access from Commercial. The annual rent for the lot (exclusive of the cost to erect a new building) would equate today to $ 163,000, payable in quarterly installments of about $4,100.

Upon the store’s one-year anniversary and completion of the new building, The Enterprise of May 2, 1857 wrote:

Kansas City has long been known for its immense grocery and outfitting trade, but now we have to add another important business to our city – we allude to the Dry Goods trade. One year ago the exclusively dry goods house was established by J. & P. Shannon, and we well recollect the ominous shakes of the head by certain old fogies that “such a store would not suit this country.” But the Shannons kept on and their rooms were continually crowded and their stock fell short of the demand. They were compelled to triplicate a stock in six months that they expected to last the season when purchased. The present season they have purchased an immense stock, and although (it has been) but three weeks, one of the firm has gone east to duplicate their orders, so heavy have been the sales.” They have “an eye for business, realizing that the citizens of the Town of Kansas had a strong desire and need for articles typically stocked in a dry goods store.

The Shannon brothers knew that “to attract the most customers, they had to have the most complete stock of any store in town,” and the store was “packed full with goods of all descriptions, and anything you needed, you went to Shannon.” The following Enterprise advertisement, from August 1, 1857, demonstrated not just the large-scale vision of the Shannons, but also their emphasis on “quality” goods for the ladies:

Arrival of New Goods
At
Shannon’s. Corner of Main and Water sts.
We have great pleasure in announcing to our lady friends that we are this day in receipt of a large and elegant lot of Foreign Dress Goods, consisting of
French Organdy Flounced Robes,
Barege do do,
Wh’t and Col’d Tarlatons for ball dress,
Wh’t do do Crape for do,
Wh’t do do Crepe de Paris for do,
Pl’n Wh’t and dolled Ind. Swiss muslin
Rich Emb’d Cambrick Underskirter
Rich Emb’d Victoria Lawn do
Rich Emb’d Vandyke do
A new and beautiful article in hoop do, the Sylph White Guipured Lace Mantillas
Colored and Black do
A large lot of real Canton Crepe Shawls. Also a complete stock of
Staple Goods.
As our stock is unusually large at this advanced
autumn, we will on, and after Monday next, offer our
entire stock at reduced prices. Our customers and
cash buyers are respectfully solicited to an examination
of our goods, as they will find decided inducements offered.
J. & P. Shannon
Corner Main and Water streets
*

On October 12, 1857 the Irish and French Catholics of Kansas City were united when Patrick Shannon married Mary Eleanor Jarboe, “a beautiful and interesting brunette,” the ninth  of Joseph Jarboe Jr. and Lydia Clements’ children. The marriage took place at Father Donnelley’s newly-completed brick church and was the second wedding ceremony performed there. On September 10, 1858, the couple (the 1860 census lists Mary Eleanor as “Mollie,” a common nickname for Mary) were blessed with the birth of their first child, Mary “Mamie” Lydia Anne Shannon.

*

J. &.P. Shannon Dry Goods believed in advertising:  throughout its fifteen-year existence, large and full-column ads regularly appeared in The Enterprise, the Journal of Commerce, and the Westport paper Border Star.  Women were informed that “the hat styles in the store would change just as soon as New York styles changed” and that “we will keep some medium-price clothing, but slop-shop clothing will occupy no place in our establishment.” The brothers  advertised fancy dress goods, piece goods, clothing for men, women and children, hats, boots and shoes, oil cloths, trunks, carpets, house-furnishing goods, linens,  all of the very highest quality - “beyond the possibility of competition” - and begged “examination of our stock and prices before making purchases elsewhere in town or travelling to St. Louis;” that they “stocked goods in sufficient quantities suitable for stocking hotels and steamboats,” and that the store engaged in the “wholesaling and jobbing of merchandise.”

  November 1857 advertisements in The Journal of Commerce and the Border Star boasted the store’s “retail trade extends to Westport, Independence, Leavenworth, Weston, Lawrence, Lecompton, Liberty, and St. Joseph.”
 
The brothers’ venture proved a “fortunate one in a financial way, the trade of the house… being of immense proportions, notably larger than any other house in the southwest at that time.” J. F. Spaulding, son of E.E. Spaulding, founder of Spaulding's Commercial college at Second and Main Streets (at which a young Harry Truman studied accounting) wrote in his memoirs: “… Patrick Shannon’s general store, then the finest in the West, which stood at First and Main streets on the Levee. I remember my mother telling of going into Shannon's big general store shortly after she was married.  When I was born, Mr. Shannon presented my mother with a beautiful baby robe for me."

In 1857, William J. and David (D.M.) Jarboe opened a “forwarding and commercial merchandise” business in their building on the levee in the other half of W.J. Jarboe’s fifty-foot wide building.* It was listed in the city directory as a purveyor of ‘dry goods, clothing, groceries, liquors &c.’ and located on the Levee between Walnut and Main.  Jarboe’s building was the first brick store in Kansas City, and stood for many years after the area was abandoned. The Jarboes operated a ‘general merchandise emporium’ until the spring of 1861, when they shuttered it due to the war; they re-opened in in the fall of 1863 on the corner of Main and Commercial Streets and continued until 1868.
* The History of Jackson County’s initial date appears to be a couple years premature. From The Journal of Commerce of August 19, 1859: “Masonry nearly completed, an ornament to the Levee, much due to the credit of W. J. Jarboe. Three stories high above the basement, 70 feet deep, 50 feet wide, front of white granite, cost estimated to be $12,000 and the grading through Commercial Street costing $1,200 to $1,500 additional. Jarboe is to occupy half of the building, the other half to be rented.”
 
The 1860-1861 Kansas City Directory commented on the Jarboe buildings: “The style of the buildings is good, being chiefly brick, beautifully designed and substantially built.” That same directory, the first published in the city,  lists 1,052 residents; John and Philip are identified  simply “J. & P. Shannon,” while Patrick is listed as “bookkeeper” for the store. However the brothers configured the ownership of the business – it’s known that John had primary responsibility for merchandising and buying - Patrick was the store’s public “face” and he seemed to maintain throughout his lifetime a higher profile than either of the two brothers, due in part to his political offices and activities. But it is his name that is mainly associated with the store, although evidence suggests that “J. &. P.” were John and Philip. By 1860, the store was large enough to employ, in addition to the three brothers, five full-time employees: clerks William Canfield and Joseph Jackson; salesmen Arthur Harrison, Paul Harney and, I believe a Shannon cousin, Pat Connell. Pat clerked at the store into the 1970’s.  

The same city directory contains a small advertisement for Patrick as an agent for the State Mutual Insurance Company of St. Louis, “located at the J. & P. Shannon store.” Patrick remained in the insurance sales business throughout his time in Kansas City, later advertising in the 1860’s in the  Border Star as agent for the Mississippi Valley Insurance Company.
 
Patrick Shannon’s first reported Kansas City residence is described in an article titled  “The Hill the City Left Behind -  Only Jessamine Remains to Mark Sites on Pearl Street where Pioneers Built Mansions Seventy-five Years Ago” in the Kansas City Star of September 17, 1922:

“The home of Madame Berenice Chouteau was at the southwest corner of Pearl Street and Market (Grand Avenue) and the grounds occupied the entire west side of the bluff to Second Street. The next place on the south side of Pearl Street was the home of W.L. Luck. It was not built until 1878, and is the only residence standing on the block at the present time. In the early days, west of the site of the Luck house, was a cottage, the first home of Patrick Shannon. The next house on the south side of Pearl Street was a brick cottage built in 1868 by the Rev. Thompson Peery.”

Patrick’s next home is reported as on “Charlotte Street, between 4th and 5th Streets.” On May 26, 1860 John Campbell and several of his relatives sold for $500.00 to John and Philip Shannon the property described as “Block 61, Lot 2-3, described Peycke Estate (Ernest and Julius Peycke operated a branch of their Omaha wholesale grocery concern in Kansas City and owned property at the southwest corner of Main and Second Streets),  the south half  of, commencing at a point in the east line of Charlotte Street sixty (60) feet south of the south  line of Fourth (4) Street” etc. The property measured 90 feet wide and 142 feet deep. On November 16, 1863, the Shannons bough, for $250.00, from the Estate of Frances A. Rice, the property “Block No. 53, Fourth Street, 60-foot front on Charlotte Street, and in depth 142 feet to the alley.” A few months later, on January 3, 1864 William Gambrel sold his property “on Charlotte Street south of Fourth Street” to the three Shannon brothers for $2000.00.  None of the deeds reveal if the properties were improved with houses, but the family  partnership evidently held on the Charlotte Street property for many years: from the Journal of Commerce January 1, 1869: FOR SALE OR RENT. A charming residence, ten minutes walk from the Post office, on Charlotte Street, between Fourth and Fifth. Peaches, grapes and other fruits, fine cisterns and everything complete. Apply to J. & P. Shannon, Main Street.”

On April 2 1858, John and Felicite Shannon’s third child, John Felix Shannon, was born and baptized by Father Donnelly. (John F. was to become prominent in Kansas City politics and served as Comptroller for the city for many years.) On January 3, 1860, the couple’s fourth child, James Jacob Vincent Shannon, was born. The baby lived only seven months and died, perhaps of cholera, on July 10, 1861.

February 26, 1860 in the Border Star:

J. & P. Shannon. One of our contemporaries has this notice of the leading dry goods house of Kansas city – a house that has had the shrewdness to advertise extensively in the Border Star. We take pleasure in recommending this truly mammoth house, established in Kansas city five years ago, on a small scale, by industry, close attention to business, and superior business talent, their progress has been the admiration of all lovers of enterprise, they have now one of the most extensive stocks and best arranged house on the Missouri River. In winding up their business for 1859, and comparing books and figures with 1858 they find a difference of forty-seven percent, in favor of 1859. This is an indication of a healthy state of affairs, and shows at once the superior advantages Kansas City enjoys as a commercial point over any other on the river. We are satisfied there is not another town in the State of Missouri that can boast of similar results for the past year. The Shannons have established a large branch in St. Joseph*, established last September, which is doing a satisfactory business. We learn that John Shannon, the senior partner of this firm, is about leaving for the eastern markets for their spring and summer stock of merchandise. He informs us he goes prepared to greatly enlarge their business by largely increasing their stock, help, etc. A few such houses as this goes far to build up a town by commanding the attention of the surrounding country.”
*No other evidence of the St. Joseph store has yet surfaced.

Sutherland and McEvoy’s 1859-1860 Kansas City Directory and Business Mirror:
J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods, NE Main and Front Streets. Importers and wholesale dealers in French, British and American dry goods. Carpets, oil cloths, rugs, mats, Indian and Mexican goods, clothing and outfitting goods. Boots, shoes, hats, caps and furs. Straw goods and millinery. Corner Main and Front Kansas City, Mo.

The 1860 census finds Patrick, “merchant,” age 36 with “Mollie” 23, baby Mary, age one, and 17-year old servant Ann Gallagher. Patrick claimed $9,000 in assets - significant wealth equating to over $180,000 at that time.  Their residence was shown in the city directory as “Pearl Street,” ostensibly the  “cottage built by W. C. Luck on the south side of Pearl Street in 1858.”  (Curiously, if Patrick’s age at death was 52, as reported in his obituary, his actual age in 1860 would have been about  41, not 36. “Mollie’s” age is correct.) The census reveals his closest neighbors to be wholesale grocer William H. Chick,  Dr. Joseph Chew, and banker Jesse Riddlesbarger.

The 1860 census shows the household of John Shannon (near the present-day 5th and Grand) age 35, Felicite, age 24, with Felicite 5, Marie 3, John 2, and baby James. Marie Padron 16, Felicite’s sister from New Orleans, lived with them. Bridget Connell, likely a Shannon cousin from Ireland, 50, was their housekeeper. The following census entry (property closest to John and Felicite) was D.M. Jarboe 29, wife Emily, 22, and their two children; next  to David and Emily were David’s brother Frederick. H. Jarboe, merchant, 31, Elizabeth 26; children Joseph 2 and Elizabeth, 6 months, and two Irish maids, Elizabeth, 16, and Margaret Gagan, 18.

  Philip Shannon, 30, “the youngest and handsomest of the three Shannon brothers, the best dressed man of his day in Kansas City and a favorite beau of the twittering buds of Pearl Street Society” is shown in the city directory as boarding at the Eldridge Hotel.  Cousins and store employees Patrick Connell, 18, and his 16 year old brother William are also shown at the Eldridge.

The property known as the Eldridge Hotel in1860 was built by Benoist Troost in 1848, constructed against the back of the bluffs on the West Levee between Delaware and Wyandotte Streets. Variously known as the Gilliss House Hotel or the Union Hotel (operated by William Gillis in 1851) and later the American Hotel, on September 15, 1854, Gillis sold it to Charles Robison and Samuel C. Pomroy, business and political associates of Shalor Eldridge of Lawrence, Kansas, who operated the  Free State Hotel in that city. (The primary reason Lawrence was founded was to populate the new Kansas territory with anti-slavery advocates, and the Free-State Hotel became a symbol of defiance against pro-slavery legislation.)  Eldridge was  involved with the  New England Emigrant Aid Company, an organization that recruited anti-slavery advocates from the East and moved them to Kansas in order to swell the population in order to influence the “slavery question” and vote in Kansas. The Free State Hotel was burned down by in 1856 by “Border Ruffians.” In January of that year, Eldridge purchased the Kansas City property, then known as the American Hotel, for $15,000 and renamed it the Eldridge Hotel  - it became a refuge for anti-slavery proponents visiting or staying in Kansas City.  Eldridge rebuilt the Lawrence property, but it was again destroyed on August 21 1863 during William Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence. At some point, probably early in 1862, Eldridge negotiated a deal with Gillis to have the New England Emigrant Aid Company take over the property, which it purchased in March of 1862; it was a curious series of deals for Gillis, a long-time slave owner. Whether Philip’s residing at the Eldridge was a statement of his political views or just a convenient place to live – the J. & P. Shannon store was three “blocks” east – isn’t known.

From the Journal of Commerce, June 15, 1858:

J & P Shannon, dry goods importers, corner Main and Front Streets.
French and English. Jaconets, French challis, lace mantillas, parasols, fans, kid and filet gloves, cotton and silk hosiery. Special attention is called to Ladies Bonnet and Millinery Department, latest Paris styles. Orders from France delivered in thirty days.

Virginia Koogle: “I fell heir to one of Grandma’s darling bonnets that she wore in the early days and I have thought sometimes I would send it to the Historical Society. Grandma used to wear exquisite clothes. I also have her beautiful paisley shawl, it is falling apart in spots but the colors are still bright and beautiful. Grandpa brought it from New York to her on one of his trips when they were so fashionable.”

On September 2, 1860, Patrick and Mary Eleanor’s second child, Patrick Joseph Shannon, was born. He lived just a few days past seven months and died on April 3, 1861. He was interred at St. John Francis Regis Cemetery with Father Donnelly presiding over the burial service.  On November 16, 1861, John and Felicite’s third child, Alfred Edward Shannon, was born; Alfred lived only three years; Father Donnelly recorded his burial on September 2, 1864.

Liberty Tribune. April 26, 1861:

We call the attention of the citizens of Liberty and Clay County, to the advertisement of  Messrs. J. & P. Shannon, of Kansas city. The have received a Mammoth stock of Dry Goods of all kinds, and particularly in the ladies department, which they pledge themselves to sell 25 per cent under any houses in upper Missouri. We ask our friends when they visit Kansas City to give them a call, and examine their stock.

J. & P. SHANNON,
KANSAS CITY, Mo.
Respectfully inform the ladies and citizens of Liberty and vicinity, that their
Mammoth
Spring Importation of
European Dry Goods,
Present very new and
ATTRACTIVE FEATURES,
Particularly in the following Departments, viz:
SILKS, BAREGES, ORGANDIES,
LAWNS, GRENADINES
TRAVELLING GAVELLAS,
LACE GOODS
HOISIERY AND PARASOLS
The above goods are unrivalled in extent, richness and elegance. Our stock of
CARPETS,
House Furnishing Dry Goods,

Is the most extensive and complete in Missouri.
Our stock of
AMERICAN COTTON AND WOOLENS
Adapted for family consumption is immense, and complete in all its branches. As
INSPECTION OF OUR GOODS
Is asked from the citizens of Liberty, and a full
SAVING OF 25 PER CENT.
Guaranteed to all Cash Buyers.
J. & P. SHANNON
Importers, Jobbers and Retailers of Dry Goods,
KANSAS CITY, MO.


War

In early 1819 Congress was contemplating legislation that would authorize Missouri’s admission to the Union as the 24th state. When early abolitionists in Congress attempted to add an antislavery amendment to that legislation, a contentious debate over slavery and states rights ensued. The amendment passed the House of Representatives but failed to get two-thirds of the vote in the Senate, which was equally divided between free and slave states. Ultimately Henry Clay engineered the “Missouri Compromise” which prohibited slavery west of the Mississippi. The 41 delegates to the state’s first Constitutional Convention included this clause in the first Missouri Constitution: “To prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to, and settling in, this state, under any pretext whatsoever.” The clause drew the ire of northern congressmen, and Clay negotiated another compromise, stipulating that Missouri could not interpret the clause in such a way as to “abridge the privileges and immunities of U.S. citizens.” On March 3, 1820, two new states were admitted to the Union – Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state.

The new availability of expansive and inexpensive government land in Missouri, ideally suited for crops and in a Midwestern slave state, presented an attractive prospect to southern farmers. The result was  an intensive fifteen-year migration of hundreds of tobacco and hemp-farming families from Kentucky and Virginia to the virgin terrain of central and northwest Missouri. When they came they brought their cultural, social, agricultural and political practices – and their slaves.  First settling in Boone County, the settlers sprawled westward into Monroe, Ralls and adjacent counties, where planters grew millions of pounds of tobacco and hemp on plantations averaging twenty slaves each. The area came to be called “Little Dixie,” as the settlers replicated the architecture, practices, and bucolic traditions of home on a smaller scale. Over the years the original area expanded westward in a contiguous line of counties nearly two hundred miles into Jackson, Clay and Platte counties. The 1850 census enumerated about 2,700 slaves in “Kaw Township,”  mostly owned by farmers, but citizens such as John McCoy,  John Campbell, Benoist Troost, William Gregory, Alexander Majors (freighter and founder of the Pony Express) Abraham Comingo of Independence, William Chrisman, George Threlkeld, Bereniece Choteau, Charles Kearney, Jesse Riddlesbarger and William Gillis all owned slaves, primarily domestics, although Gillis used them on his farm. Many residents owned just one or two slaves for household purposes.  Clay County to the north counted 3,400 slaves.

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act created those two new states to the west and opened the west for settlement; the Act provided that citizens of the two states could determine for themselves whether they would exist as “free-states” or “slave states” –  in effect nullifying Henry’s Clay’s Missouri Compromise of 1820. It set the stage for Kansas to become involved in a violent proxy war between the North and the South over the issues of slavery and states rights.  In the 1860 Presidential election, the Republican party opposed the expansion of slavery, which it condemned as a “relic of barbarism." The party’s standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln, received only one vote out of every 19 cast in Jackson County.

Violence erupted along the Missouri-Kansas border as soon as Kansas became a state.  In 1856 the abolitionist John Brown arrived. He believed that armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery. In May, in an event that came to known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown's followers executed five Southern pro-slavery supporters with broadswords at Pottawatomie Creek.  On June 2, he led a group of volunteers in attacks on pro-slavery advocates at the Battle of Black Jack, near Baldwin City 45 miles west of Kansas City. Two months later, on August 30, 1856,  an armed force of 250-300 men led by pro-slaver John W. Reid looted and burned the abolitionist stronghold of Osawatomie, fifty miles west

Abolitionists conducted raids and looted slave-owning farmers, often taking the
slaves with them. The countryside was plagued by banditry in the name of allegiance. Rag-tag bands of southern sympathizers, intent on disrupting the abolitionists, sprung up all over the area. “Bushwhackers” such as “Bloody Bill” Anderson and William Quantrill organized large groups of followers and wreaked havoc across a wide swath, attacking abolitionist facilities and disrupting Union troop movements. A series of violent skirmishes extended into the heavy slave-owning  Clay and Platte counties, pitting the abolitionist “Jayhawkers” and “Redlegs” (so named because of a red stripe on their trousers) and “slave stealers”  against the pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" between 1854 and 1861. The conflict came to be called “Bleeding Kansas.” At its core was the question of whether Kansas would be a free state or slave state.

Kansas City, the country’s embarkation point for all points west,  was the de facto center of the conflict. The border separating Jackson County in Missouri and Johnson County in Kansas was scarcely a mile away from the heart of town. Hordes of abolitionists from the east, on their way to Kansas, unloaded at the levee. Soldiers and militias of all stripes congregated uneasily.  There are ample reports of conflicts, fights, raids, ambushes, shootings and murders between opposing sides, sometimes occurring at night in the countryside, other times in one of the twenty or so local saloons of Kansas City. (To meet the drinking appetites of the public and visitors, there were at least three breweries in town, all of them operated by first, second and third generation German immigrants.)  But of more urgent significance to the merchants of Kansas City was the curtailment of Santa Fe travel brought on by the unsettled, perilous conditions surrounding the area. Freighters were finding it unsafe to haul merchandise across the plains because of the highwaymen who “may have had political pretexts but in practicality were murderous bandits.”

The Civil War erupted in Missouri on August 10, 1861 at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, between Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon’s Army of the West and Confederate  troops  under the command of Brig. Gen. Benjamin McCulloch. McCulloch’s victory emboldened pro-Southern activists throughout the state. The Kansas City area became a powder keg of Union soldiers, Southern sympathizers and militias, and armed bands of radicals, zealots and thieves on both sides.

Politically, there was a middle ground, espoused by “War Democrats” – those who helped elect Lincoln in 1860 and supported the Union, but had become disenchanted. War Democrats felt that slavery should be decided on a state-by-state basis, a concept known as “Popular Sovereignty.” The War Democrats were pragmatic: they expressed wholehearted support for the Union, including the willingness to fight for it, while in the next breath maintaining that the matter of slavery was no business for the federal government. This position was intended to  mollify the two opposing sides and allow the War Democrats to gain traction in Congress. Most of the controlling interests of Kansas City, including Patrick Shannon and Robert Van Horn, favored the policies of the War Democrats. Making his feelings perfectly clear, Van Horn wrote in the Enterprise: “Frankly and decidedly pro-slavery, we desire to be effectively and intelligently so.” Compromise, however, was anathema to most of the participants in the border war. The Missouri Constitutional Convention, held in several sessions 1861-1863, determined the state's official position to be "neutral,” and each side sent representatives to both the United States Congress and the Confederate Congress.

In 1861 Van Horn was elected Mayor in a close election against the incumbent, secessionist candidate Dr. George “Mordecai” Maughs of Virginia. Van Horn adopted a moderate platform balancing both pro-slavery views and loyalty to the Union. In the same election, Patrick Shannon won his first political office, being elected 2nd Ward councilman on Van Horn’s Democrat ticket. Maughs, a physician, was the incumbent Mayor and when he lost the election to Van Horn he left the area and returned to Virginia. On January 31,1863 he was appointed surgeon to the Army of the Confederacy by the War Department in Richmond.

In  Kansas City the pro-Southern contingent denounced Van Horn's authority as mayor due to his pro-Union stance. On April 30,1861 a Confederate flag was raised at Second and Main streets opposite The Journal of Commerce and Van Horn’s home, a block south of J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods.  Van Horn demanded Union troops from Fort Leavenworth. Five companies of U.S. troops entered the city, constructed a stockade on the foundation of the under-construction Coates House Hotel on Ninth Street embarked on a campaign to flush out Confederate sympathizers. By the end of June, Kansas City was back and forever in the hands of the Union.

Van Horn wrote:  “From the 1st day of April to the 11th day of June, 1861, was in
Kansas City a period of terror. It was truly the time which tried men’s souls, dark uncertainty brooding over the future – treason triumphant in our streets; loyalty was the exception; rebellion was the true test of public spirit and respectability. The genuine loyal men had to hide from the fury of the mob, and with sealed lips or evasive answer elude the vigilance of the faction of the hour. The bringing of U.S. troops to this city on the 11th day of June, 1861, was to the Union men of this part of Missouri the dawn of a new dispensation which has now ripened into the glorious fruit of peace and security. Our people were divided into several classes at the time.”

On orders from General Lyon, Van Horn was commissioned Lieutenant Colonel of the 25th Regiment, Missouri Volunteer Infantry, mustered into service at Kansas City on May 24, 1861 in order to assist regular army troops in repelling Confederate General Sterling Price’s movement across Missouri.  George Caleb Bingham enlisted as a private in Van Horn’s unit and was appointed Captain of the Irish Company of Van Horn's Battalion. The unit saw action at Cass County July 18-25 and Harrisonville on July 19 and 20th.  They marched 50 miles northeast in September where they engaged Price’s forces  at the Battle of Lexington. Outnumbered and  outfought, Union soldiers surrendered on September 21.  Van Horn was exchanged for secessionists held in St. Louis.

In July 1861 Missouri convention delegates, persuaded by the arguments of the War Democrats, voted to remain in the Union while making it clear that they wanted no federal interference with slavery “where it already existed.”

On October 30, General John C. Fremont declared Martial Law in Missouri, an act that resulted in the confiscation of secessionist property, imprisonment of Confederate sympathizers and emancipation of their slaves. Union Provost Marshalls (those in charge of a particular area) had the power to conduct searches, seizures, arrests and “trials.” They had the power to suppress gambling or other vices, including prostitution and saloons or anything not conducive to “good order and discipline.” The conduct of Union forces occupying Kansas City was roundly criticized. Politics, states-rights, slavery, outsiders, and war-mongering had turned the citizens of Kansas City against one other, forced to take sides in a conflict none of them wanted.

In December1861 the Provost Marshall compiled “A List of Rebels and Rebel Sympathizers who are Prominent Citizens of Jackson County.” All were slave owners. It included William H. Chick, Charles Kearney ( a wholesale dealer of “groceries, provisions, wines, liquors, tobacco and cigars” on the Levee. He had operated a trading post and outfitting store  in Westport since 1852, coming to Kansas City in 1856 where became wealthy in land speculation), Milton J. Payne (a 32-year old Kentuckian who became wealthy dealing in Kansas City real estate and was elected to five consecutive terms as Mayor, beginning in 1855), E. E. Spaulding (founder of Spaulding’s Commercial College), William Gillis, Jesse Riddlesbarger, John Campbell, Nathan Scarritt and James H. McGee.  

The Provost Marshall also compiled various lists titled a “List of Democrats (Union Supporters) of Jackson County.” Those named included Charles Kearney, Michael Diveley, E. M. McGee, M. J. Payne, Patrick Shannon, W. H. Chick, John Campbell, J. Lykins and eight others. Kearney, Payne and Campbell’s appearance on lists of both “supporters of the rebellion” and Union supporters demonstrates the volatility of the times – where one’s views on slavery could result in his being classed a “sympathizer” even though he may have been a Union supporter.

 Michael Diveley was born in Pennsylvania in 1828, grandson of a German immigrant. He became the city’s leading “Direct importer of and wholesale and retail dealer, of Queensware (a hard, cream-colored earthenware, perfected ca. 1765 by Wedgwood), China and glassware, Tea Trays, Table cutlery, window glass, looking glasses, water coolers, vases, castors, chandeliers, fluid and coal oil lamps and coal oil. Main Street between Second and Third.” He was the first president of the First National Bank and conducted various other enterprises. He served with Patrick in the 77th E.M.M, (during which time the Provost Marshall granted him a license to sell liquor) held various city offices, and was a political ally, friend and neighbor of Patrick’s.

Virginia Koogle: “The Shannon store was burned down during the war by Confederate soldiers. The house where grandma (Mary Eleanor) was carrying mama (Carrie) at the time was surrounded with guards. The store was rebuilt.”

On April 7, 1862  Colonel Kersey Coates, on orders from B. G. Farrar, the Provost Marshal General of the District of Missouri, compiled another “ List of Rebels and Rebel Sympathizers who are Prominent Members of Jackson County.”  The list named William Gillis, Jesse Riddlesbarger, R. H. Nelson, Nathaniel Scarritt and James McGee: all were neighbors, friends, customers and business associates of the Shannons.

Col. R. H. Nelson (he received the title in the Black Hawk war of 1832) was a ship builder and President of the Kansas City Ferry Company. His son, George R. Nelson, was a Confederate soldier who had been captured in Saline County; he was imprisoned at the Gratiot State Prison in St. Louis, the federal facility that housed Confederate prisoners of war, spies, guerillas, and civilians suspected of disloyalty. In 1864, Maj. H.H. Williams of the Union army seized Nelson’s home in Kansas City

Nathan Scarritt (1821-1890) came to Missouri in 1842 as a schoolteacher and Methodist preacher. He amassed a great fortune in real estate, and in March 1957 had become landlord to J. & P. Shannon.  He wrote: “In the fall of 1863… the country became so full of robbers and desperadoes we thought it not safe to remain so far from military protection. Hence, we moved (three miles into) into Kansas City.  While I sympathized with the Southern people, I did not sympathize with their policy of secession. But I see now that  God used it as a means of ridding our country of the accursed evil of slavery." Scarritt claimed that he had served in the “Home Guards” in Kansas City, but I was unable to find a record of such service.  He was married to the daughter of William Chick, one of the first landowners in the city. (Scarritt’s son, also named Nathan Scarritt, held a patronage position for many years in the Recorder of Deeds office in the Jackson County Courthouse, where he employed Patrick Shannon’s grandson, Harry J. Koogle, for about thirty-five years. John Felix Shannon, John Shannon’s son and Patrick Shannon’s nephew, was at that time Assistant Recorder of Deeds.)
 
On July 22, 1862, General John Schofield’s General Order No. 19 created the Enrolled Missouri Militia (E.M.M.).  Able-bodied Missouri men between the ages of 18-45 not already in the military were required to report to the nearest Union post and enroll for military service in the local area.  An annual $10.00 exemption fee could be paid by men not wishing to serve. The E.M.M. was to be a part-time citizen-soldier force called into service only as needed and paid by the state only for the days actually “called up.” Their primary responsibility was the protection of life and property and they were expected to fight rebel guerillas operating in the local area. Initially, they furnished their own horses, guns and ammunition but were eventually allocated government arms and surplus uniforms. They could be called out for up to 30 days active duty at a time. At its height in 1863, the E.M.M. consisted of 89 regiments, 16 battalions, and 42 independent companies before it was disbanded in March 1865. Service in a unit of the E.M.M. did not specifically qualify a man to receive a postwar federal military pension.

On July 22 Governor Hamilton Gamble issued an order directing Brigadier General John Schofield to organize this militia. Acting with haste, that same day General Schofield issued his own order directing every able bodied man in the state to report immediately to the nearest military outpost to enroll and be sworn into the E.M.M. The net effect was that tens of thousands of fence-sitting men of military age were brought into the military fold. At the same time, thousands of others who supported the South were forced to make a decision whether to serve in a Federal unit, or to flee the state and enlist in the Confederate Army. While many men did pursue the latter course of action, over 52,000 others remained behind to form the militia force.
On average, most men in the E.M.M. served only a few weeks of active duty over the course of the next two and a half years. Given the nature of the organization—which naturally included disloyal men, men that would not otherwise have been qualified for service, and men that had little desire to serve—the E.M.M. was destined for controversy.  Nonetheless, it filled a  need by freeing up the various regular Missouri State Militia for field duty while it conducted local patrols and garrisoned towns.

Patrick Shannon entered service as Captain of Company C of the 77th Regiment of the E.M.M. on August 26, 1862.  The 77th consisted of about 1,300 men, drawn from the Kansas City area and allocated among several companies. All of them shared the enlistment date of August 26.
 
Co. C., 77th Missouri E.M.M., formed August 26, 1862:

Patrick Shannon, Captain
Daniel Cahill,1st Lieutenant
G.G. Crandall,  2nd Lieutenant, 26,
Thomas Green, 2nd Lieutenant, 26
W. Allen, Sergeant
John Donnelly, 19, Sergeant
H. H. Vagus (?), Sergeant, 37
Jeremiah Dowd,  Corporal; served in 1864 as  Captain of 77th,
George Dougherty, Corporal, 28
Thomas Tackett, Corporal,24
William Reilly, Corporal, 21

Privates: (74 count) David K. Abeel, William Adams, John Bales 28, Walter Bales, 20.
William Bales, 27, P.D. Beerman, Nathan Bennison, J.W. Bradney, Oliver Burns, Nat Cassidy, James S. Chick, W. H. Chick, James N. Clark 31, N.C. Clark, William Coleman 28,
James Conner, J.W. Cook 40, James Cooper, Jim Coutlin, Patrick Cronan 27, William Crute  25, (discharged, being foreign subject),  Dennis Cummins 30, Charles Daugherty, Thomas Fanning, John Fitzmorris 28, M.J. Friedsom 30, Phillip Gaibor, William Gantz (discharged being foreign subject) William Gill (28, dismissed for disability), Denis Gleason  28, J.J. Goodwill 32, R.S. Hale 38, Robert Hall 35, Joseph Harris 32, John Heald 35, Albert Julien 44, Thomas Keeler 36, Thomas Kelly 27, Samuel Killgore 22, James Mansfield 45,
Edward Masuch, Isaac Mathews, James Mathews, James McCalb 36, Daniel McCarty 26,
Florence McCarty, James McCra, 36, John McDonald 32, Patrick McGaffin  30, Martin McKenna , Michael McMahan 30, J.H. Mentzing, Henry Miller 25, Martin Mooney 31, discharged for disability) C.H. Moor 32, James Mulcaher 24, Thomas Mulverhil 35, Isaac Mumford, David Mussin, C.M. Noland  28, Walker V. Pulliam 40, William Reed 25,  E.F.  Russell 38, Michael Ryan, James Saunders 28, Thomas Sheehy 30, Jeremiah Shinn 29, Patrick Soden 26, Edward Threlkeld (31,  removed to St. Louis November 11 1862 by permission) Jesse Trewett 33, John Wall 20, Michael Wheelan 27, William White 38
B. R. Whitney 30, Charles Wilsdorff, D. Winterburn  28, George Wright 40.

Many of these men were never heard from again.

On December 5, John Shannon wrote a letter to Patrick, in his capacity as Captain of the 77th E.M.M., which Patrick handed to the Provost Marshall. John reported that Union Col. Charles R. Jennison had “got up a document detailing that all loyal citizens should deed all of their real and personal property to the government, including their store stock, or it would be confiscated.” A few months earlier, Patrick had reported similar harassment of his brother;  the Provost Marshall’s files contain a letter from Patrick stating that his “brother John was a British subject and liable to the same rules applying to loyal citizens as his older brother, Patrick, an American.” (There is an old biographical reference to Patrick having been made a naturalized citizen in St. Louis in 1853, but a search of those records show only two Patrick Shannons from Ireland – one naturalization record in 1858, and a “declaration of intention” filed in U. S. Circuit Court in October, 1856. I haven’t seen those records, but Patrick relocated to Kansas City mid-1855. I suspect Patrick’s naturalization occurred elsewhere.

 Jennison (1834-1884) was considered the most brutal and unscrupulous of the Jayhawkers and had the reputation for plundering citizens’ property for personal gain. The 7th Kansas Cavalry, “Jennison’s Jayhawkers," patrolled the Kansas-Missouri border, stealing from and destroying the properties of suspected slave owners, while its ostensible mission was to prevent the advance of General Sterling Price’s troops. Jennison was court-martialed at Leavenworth in April 1862 and turned to banditry as a “Redleg.”

On November 15 Patrick reported that the J & P Shannon store had been broken into and ransacked by Union soldiers; he asks for  “the protection guaranteed all loyal citizens.” On January 28, 1862 William. J. Jarboe filed a similar complaint, listing goods stolen by Union troops from his store next to Shannon’s.  

Patrick served from August 1862 until May 1, 1864. On January 16, 1864, the Kansas City Journal reported:  “We are pleased to see that Captain Patrick Shannon has been appointed Major of the 77th regiment by his Excellency the Governor.” I have not yet seen the Gubernatorial appointment, likely contained in Gamble’s papers held by the Missouri State Historical Society. At the end of the war, Co. C. returned its government arms to the Provost Marshall:  8 Austrian muskets (.58 caliber), 49 U.S. muskets (.69 caliber), 1 Sharp’s rifle (.52 caliber), 316 Garibaldi rifles and 194 Garibaldi sabre bayonets.

In September, Patrick travelled to St. Louis to meet with Edward M. Samuel of Clay County and others in order to sign a petition to Abraham Lincoln. Samuel was a  War Democrat, a rich, enterprising merchant who sold supplies to wagon trains bound for Oregon and California. He was a staunch Union man, but he came under scrutiny when he pled with the Provost Marshall for the release from prison of his secessionist neighbors. Others attending the meeting were   Milton .J. Payne; Col. Francis (Frank) Foster, Captain, Co. A. 77th E.M.M.; Edward R. Threlkeld, a wholesale grocer and commission merchant who operated the house of Threlkeld & Co. at 310 Delaware Street;  Joseph O. Boggs M.D., of Independence, who operated a drugstore in Westport and was brother to Utah Governor  Lilburn W. Boggs. In the petition, Samuel set forth his complaint against Union Brigadier General Jim Lane. Lane, without authorization from Washington, had taken to organizing freed slaves into militia units around the border 1856-57. During the autumn, with a brigade of 1500 men, he conducted a  recruitment campaign on the Missouri-Kansas border.

Wednesday, September. 8, 1862.
Last night a detachment of Gen. Jim Lane’s Negro Brigade attempted to cross the river from Wyandotte, Kansas, it is thought to make a raid upon the citizens of Clay County, Missouri, when they were met on the Missouri bank by a company of Missouri State Militia and driven back. Several shots were fired, but little damage was done to either party. About 15 days ago some 15 persons from the state of Kansas – white men – under the command of a man calling himself “Jeff Davis,” but whose real name is said to be Swain, came into the county of Clay to, as he said, “recruit negroes for General Lane’s negro Brigade.” They took forcible possession of some 25 negro men, and about 40 horses from persons, indiscriminately, and started to cross the Missouri River with them over into Kansas, Capt. Johnson of the M.S.M., then in command at Liberty, sent out about 50 men to capture or shoot the men and retake the negroes and horses. They succeeded in capturing 8 of the “Jayhawkers” and recovered all the negroes and horses. I am sure that good feelings and peace between the two states would soon be universal if it were not for these “raids” by unauthorized bands upon the persons and property of the citizens of Missouri, and especially if the Govt. of the U.S. would put an effectual stop to the career of “negro stealers,” and those who threaten to arm them and come into Missouri to steal other negroes, and to lay waste our property and take our lives.” (Signed) Edward M. Clay.

September 8, 1862
  His Excellency ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States: Sir: There is on the border of our State an armed band of negroes threatening an invasion of the State, and particularly the counties of Clay and Jackson....We are loyal Union men...and can assure you that were it not for the threats… to invade us, to despoil us of our property, to burn our towns and dwellings, murder our citizens, and run off our negroes, we would be comparatively at peace. We greatly fear, Mr. President, that unless these negro brigades and regiments are disbanded and disarmed, and those men who have been instrumental in organizing them are severely dealt with by the Government, the most serious difficulties will take place between Missouri and Kansas---two loyal States--the end of which no man can see. We are aware that it is contrary to your orders to arm Negroes and have them clothed in the uniform of soldiers, and we beg to assure you that whilst our people are fast returning to their loyalty such irritating causes as we have alluded to are a terrible burden upon the loyal men.  (signed) Edward M. Samuel, Patrick Shannon, Jackson County, Capt. Mo. S.M. and the others.  

The 77th was ordered into active service on September 27 1862 for an unknown period, and again October 22, 1862 – December 2, 1862, in response to William Quantrill’s activities in the area. “On October 17 they sacked Shawnee, ten miles from Westport, burning thirteen buildings and killing three men. Six miles south of there they overtook two teams, loaded with goods, going to Paola. They killed one of the drivers and dangerously wounded the other.” (Daily Missouri Republican October 23, 1862.) Capt. Patrick Shannon’s Company C. logged 40 days “in actual service -” meaning the time for which the federal government would pay them – and afterwards resumed their duties protecting the citizens and property of Kansas City. The unit was reactivated under  Capt. Jeremiah O’Dowd in 1864.

David. M. Jarboe enrolled as Captain and Quartermaster in the 77th  on August 10 1862; he was  ordered into active service October 22, 1862 by Major Dunhill; on February 2, 1863 he was transferred to the  5th Regiment, Provisional E.M.M., serving as  Captain and Quartermaster. As part of that unit, he was ordered into regular active service June 17 1863 at Lexington, under Gen. Vaughan. He served until November 27, 1864. His younger brother Samuel Jarboe, 17, served as Private under  Captain Frank Foster’s Co. A. in the 77th E.M.M.

Greenbacks for Military Service. Yesterday a paymaster of the army distributed at Turner’s Hall about $25,000 to members of the 77th Regiment E.M.M. who served in the companies of Captains Dowd, Thomas and Kumpf. The sum was paid to settle accounts long due. Some of the men received $100, others $10.00. All were of course well pleased to receive the greenback favors of uncle Sam. The above regiment was raised in Jackson County. Among its officers were Kersey Coates, Colonel; Frank Foster, Lt. Col. Patrick Shannon, Major; Dan Geary, Adjutant’ D.M. Jarboe, Quartermaster, and Dr. Chalfant, Surgeon. Journal, June 17, 1870)

*

The Border Ruffians depended on the Missouri River Valley’s wild terrain and dense thickets for safety and shelter. The hostility of the locals throughout Kaw, Blue and Washington townships and Clay County against the abolitionists enabled them sanctuary. Many Missourians viewed the Border Ruffians as their defenders against the Jayhawkers and often had relatives operating with the various guerrilla bands. In secret, they provided food, shelter, and intelligence to support the guerrillas as they moved through the area. The conditions under which Patrick’s unit  served are  captured in a notice the 77th E.M.M. placed in The St. Joseph Morning Herald of March 10, 1863 :

To the Citizens of Jackson County: Whereas, the cropping season is fast approaching, and if anything shall be raised for the support of your families and ours the ensuing year, it is high time the farmer should prepare for labor in his field. And whereas, the cultivation of the soil is essential to avoid famine and starvation, or the entire depopulation of the county; and inasmuch as the Enrolled Militia of the county are desirous to return to their homes and resume their honest labors, if they can do so with safety.  Now, therefore, let it be distinctly understood, that if Union men shall be in the least molested or hindered, in their agricultural pursuits by the Bushwhacker or his aider or sympathizer, that secessionists and their sympathizers will not be permitted to cultivate an acre of soil of Jackson County; and should the Enrolled Militia return to their homes in accordance with their desire, and again be required to shoulder their muskets, to suppress these outrages, then no rebel or rebel sympathizer will be permitted to longer remain in the county. Self preservation is the first law of nature, and we cannot permit our wives and little ones to be left to starve. The Union men of Jackson County expect to live here, peaceably if they can, but live here they will, and in perfect security, although it may become necessary to expel from the county one half its population. Believing a word to the wise is sufficient, we confidently expect the influential portion of our secessionist neighbors will perceive the propriety of promptly repressing every attempt by the more reckless and irresponsible rebels among them to imperil a community that otherwise might live and prosper in peace. (Signed):

K. Coates, Col. 76th Reg’t., E.M.M.
D.M. Jarboe, Capt. & A.Q.M. 77th Reg’t, E.M.M.
Wm. S. Smith, Capt. Co F, E.M.M.
Henry Wagner, Capt. Co. B., E.M.M.
D.J. Burns, Capt. Co. G, 77th Reg’t E.M.M.
Patrick Shannon, Capt. Co. B. (sic) E.M.M.
S.B. Elkins, Capt. Co. H, 77th Reg’t E.M.M.
Capt. H.W. Jones, Co. E, E.M.M.

Jesse Riddlesbarger (1800-1883) was born in Maryland and raised in Botetourt County, Virginia. He arrived in Fayette,  in Howard County, Missouri, east of Kansas City in 1830 and was that city’s first gunsmith. From there he went to St. Louis, then to Kansas City where he built one of the first warehouses on the Levee and made his fortune outfitting and equipping caravans for the Santa Fe Trail. He was President of Merchant’s Bank, heavily involved with  real estate and was one of the city’s wealthiest citizens. He had nine children by his first wife, and in 1853, in Kansas City, he remarried at age 55, in a “lavish ceremony” to Susan Lavinia Norton, 16, the daughter of a Kansas City physician who operated the first drug store in Kansas City. “Mr. Riddlesbarger was a rich man. For those days, his wealth was considered extraordinary. It was said that a scheming stepmother brought about the marriage of young Susan Lavinia, the adored only daughter of Dr. Norton, to the wealthy widower who was more than three times her age, and with sons and daughters twice the years of the young bride.” With Susan he had two daughters and a son, Jesse F., who was born in 1856 and lived but six months.
 
Riddlesbarger was “proud of his wife – of her youth and beauty. Her complexion was dazzling, her cheeks crimson, her hair jet black. He gave her everything she desired – beautiful dresses, a velvet mantle, and bonnet with the finest of French roses that wreathed her face as she wore it, a set of corals that set off her black hair, a set of agates.” (Kansas City Star June 9 1929)
 It was for “Miss Sue” that Jesse built a mansion high on the crest of Pearl Street, home of the city’s wealthiest citizens. “Pearl Street Hill” was the highest habited vantage point in “Old Town,” with a commanding view of the river a few  hundred feet to the north.

Riddlesbarger was an unapologetic Confederate who  was hot-headed and spoke his mind unreservedly, seizing every opportunity to criticize and taunt the Union  troops which occupied the city. He spoke loudly against the “thieving northern army.” Personal enmities led to feuds with Federal soldiers, “mostly Kansas City men.” In 1861, his mansion on Pearl Street was raided by federal soldiers who threatened to burn it. Jesse and Patrick’s mutual friend Col. Frank Foster of the 77th E.M.M. convinced the soldiers to disburse.  It’s not known how Patrick Shannon, a Captain in the E.M.M., and his neighbor and friend Jesse Riddlesbarger got along, but it appears Riddlesbarger’s beef was with Ewing’s Federal troops, not the Kansas City Home Guards; even so, Patrick would have had to maintain a certain distance from him, as even socializing with Confederate sympathizers could draw the attention of the Provost Marshal.

“Among the slaves Riddlesbarger owned was Hulda, his cook.  It was she who baked the home-cured hams and the toothsome pound cake, fried the chickens, made the gingerbread and cookies, and saw that the Riddlesbarger cellar was stocked with preserves and pickles and home-made wines. Miss Sue and Hulda cooked constantly for the southern troops. They filled great clothes baskets with baked chickens, boiled hams, home-made bread, gingerbread, and cake for the Confederate soldiers.”  (Kansas City Star June 9, 1929.)

In June 1863, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr. took command of the District of the Border. He realized the importance of sanctuary provided by the civilian populace: “…About two-thirds of the families on the occupied farms of the region are of kin to the guerrillas, and are actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing, and sustaining them. I can see no prospect of an early and complete end to the war on the border, without a great increase of troops, so long as the families remain here.” He issued General Order No. 10, which authorized the arrest and banishment of  female civilians providing aid to the “bushwhackers.”

The following month, Ewing’s  troops began to arrest women who were said to be spying and gathering food and information for Confederate soldiers and guerillas. About a dozen women were incarcerated in The Longhorn Store and Tavern, a three-story building at the cite of today’s 14th and Grand. The Longhorn was owned by George Caleb Bingham, who had his studio on the third floor.  On August 13, 1863, the   building suddenly collapsed (conspiracy theories abound), killing four women including Josephine Anderson,  William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson’s 14 year old sister. His other sister Mary suffered two broken legs, and severe injuries were sustained by women relatives of the Younger Brothers and others of William Quantrill’s guerilla band. While the conflict in the region had been ruthlessly violent, physical harm to women was rare and the combatants generally adopted a chivalric code of sorts. The tragedy of the jail collapse was laid at  the hands of Gen. Ewing, and one week later, on August 21, 400 of Quantrill’s men crossed over from Missouri into Kansas where in retaliation for the jail collapse they killed more than 150 Union men and destroyed much of the town of Lawrence.

On August 25, in response to this attack, from his headquarters at the Pacific House Hotel at 4th and Delaware,  Ewing issued “General Order Number 11,” which mandated the evacuation of four Missouri Counties:

“All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, Missouri, and in that part of Vernon included in this district, except those living within one mile of the limits of Independence, Hickman's Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, and except those in that part of Kaw Township, Jackson County, north of Brush Creek and west of Big Blue, are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days from the date hereof. Those who within that time establish their loyalty to the satisfaction of the commanding officer of the military station near their present place of residence will receive from him a certificate stating the fact of their loyalty.” Under forced evacuation by Union cavalry, hordes of refugees, carrying what possessions they could salvage from their looted and burned houses, lined the roads leading out of the area. George Caleb Bingham:  

“…barefooted and bareheaded women and children, stripped of every article of clothing except a scant covering for their bodies, exposed to the heat of an August sun and compelled to struggle through the dust on foot… men were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers. Union soldiers and Red Legs burned dwellings and sent long wagon trains of plunder into Kansas. Refugees crowded by hundreds upon the banks of the Missouri River… Large trains of wagons, extending over the prairies for miles in length were freighted with every description of household furniture and wearing apparel belonging to the exiled inhabitants. Dense columns of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagrations of dwellings, the evidences of which are to be seen in the remains of blackened chimneys, standing as melancholy monuments of a ruthless military despotism which spared neither age, sex, character, nor condition…an act of purely arbitrary power, directed against a disarmed and defenseless population in violation of every principle of justice and inspired by vengeance.”

In just two weeks, the population of Cass County dropped from 10,000 inhabitants to just 600 and the four-county area was known as the "Burnt District” for years to come. Order No. 11 has been called “the most drastic and repressive military measure directed against civilians by the Union Army during the Civil War, and stands as the harshest treatment ever imposed on United States citizens under the plea of military necessity in our nation's history.” It was denounced as ‘inhuman, unmanly, and barbarous.”

William Gillis was rightfully suspected of being a Southern sympathizer. In 1863 the Union Provost Marshall ordered him to sell his stake in the outfitting firm he operated with Kersey Coates, Gillis and Coates.( The purchaser of his share was Thomas Bullene, an early competitor of J. &  P. Shannon, who turned his store in to the newest “largest dry goods store west of the Mississippi,” Emery, Bird & Thayer.)

 On October 8, Gillis wrote to General Schofield, Ewing’s commander: “…not only was I banished, but I also received a life threat to leave immediately. I have lived in Kansas City for 33 years and always obeyed all the laws…”

To combat his “fiercest antagonist in the Town of Kansas,” four days later Ewing issued another edict: Special Order No. 64: “District of the Border, Kansas City, Mo., August 29, 1863.  Jesse Riddlesbarger and family, residents of Kansas City, Mo., are ordered to remove from this district within ten days from the date hereof. They will not go to the Counties of Platte, Clay, Ray or Carroll, Missouri, to reside, nor return to this district during the rebellion, without previous express permission from competent military authority. By Order of Brigadier General Ewing, Major and Provost Marshal.”

Riddlesbarger, “stunned and helpless at this direct attack, furiously attended to placing his numerous business affairs in order while his wife directed the packing of such furniture and clothes as the family could take with them on the boat to St. Louis. On the walls of the mansion were large engravings of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson which Sue wrapped in Belgian carpets for transport. Union soldiers entered the mansion as soon as it was vacated by the owners. Later it was sold to the Shannon Family.” (Kansas City Star, June 9, 1929)

  Ewing also confiscated Riddlesbarger’s bank accounts and much of his property including “thirty-seven lots on Main Street.” It’s long been assumed and written that Riddlesbarger sold the mansion on Pearl Street after Special Order No. 64 ordered him to leave Kansas City within fifteen days, but a Deed of Trust between Riddlesbarger and John and Philip Shannon on April 3, 1863 proves that he sold the mansion about six months before he was expelled from the county.    Perhaps Riddlesbarger, rather than being “stunned” at Order No. 64, in fact anticipated it and disposed of his most valuable property to his neighbors, the Shannons. At any rate, Riddlesbarger and his family must have vacated the mansion prior to April 13, 1864, according to Special Order No.5 issued by Assistant Provost Marshall Capt. J.C.W. Hall. That order gave “permission to Sarah J. Long to occupy the house on Main and 2nd Streets known as the Riddlesbarger House.” Hall was involved in numerous enforcement actions during 1863-1864, including incarceration of southern sympathizers and confiscation of their property.  I haven’t identified Sarah H. Long, but it may be that the Shannons installed her there to guard the property against looting before John and Felicite and their children moved in.

Riddlesbarger “failed at a grocery business in St. Louis and eventually returned to Kansas City, a broken man.” From his obituary: “Jesse Riddlesbarger died last Monday in the Howard County poorhouse, 84 years of age.  He came to Fayette in 1830 and for years carried on the business of a gunsmith, afterward went into the mercantile business with John D. Perry and met with great success, then went to Kansas City where he became involved and broken up. He came back to Fayette a few years ago and lived with old friends a few months where he was cared for until his death. (Howard County Advertiser, May 24 1883)

Five months after Order No. 11 was carried out, Theodore S. Case, Chief Quartermaster of the border under General Ewing, wrote: “The experience of the past three years has shown that the plan adopted in constructing the ‘Division of the border’ from the territory on both sides of the boundary line of Kansas and Missouri, is the only one which has succeeded in giving anything like peace to this vexed region. It must not be forgotten that less than six months ago the border was alive with bush-whackers and guerillas one  side and with ‘red-legs’ on the other, the first of whom executed the atrocities of the savages in their horrible deeds of blood, while the latter excel in dexterity in horse stealing. Now neither party is known on the border. Not a bush-whacker has been heard of in any part of the District of the Border for months and the term ‘red-leg’ is rapidly becoming obsolete. Stage coaches, solitary horsemen and footmen can and do travel unmolested from this city.”

TO SANTA FE TRADERS. March 3 1864 The undersigned, a committee appointed by the Chamber of Commerce of this city, to refute certain falsehoods, circulated by interested parties...for the purpose of diverting the Santa Fe, as well as the Southern Kansas, trade from their legitimate channel, take this opportunity of giving such rumors our most unqualified contradiction, and do hereby most positively deny all rumors setting forth that there are organized bands of thieves or guerillas in this county of  vicinity nor is there any interruption of the trade of this city, or any danger to it from such parties. We furthermore state that the great Santa Fe road, leading west from this city, we never more safe and unmolested, and that we apprehend no danger to it, unless it be from the very parties who make and set afloat such reports. And, furthermore, we are satisfied that such effectual arrangements have been made by the military commanders of this and adjoining districts as will prevent the possibility of any interference with or interruption to traders or citizens within the compass of their military jurisdiction in future. Chas. E. Kearney, W.H. Chick, Patrick Shannon, Committee. The above statement is concurred in by W. R. Bernard & Co, J. Bernard, J.W. Thompson, Northrup & Co, Epiphania Aguire, B.T. Jewett, J.S. Chick & Co, J.Q. Watkins, J. & P. Shannon. Kansas City Mo

In March 1864, Robert Van Horn was elected to Congress, and Patrick Shannon was either elected in a special election or appointed by the City Council to fill out his term as Mayor. City Hall was then a “one-room storefront.”  Seven months into his term, on October 23, 1864, one of the largest Civil War battles west of the Mississippi River was fought about eight miles south of the Kansas City town site.  Union forces under Major General Samuel R. Curtis defeated an outnumbered Confederate force under Major General Sterling Price in the Battle of Westport. This engagement, involving some 30,000 soldiers and 1,500 fatalities, forced Price’s army to retreat from Missouri and ended the last significant Confederate operation west of the Mississippi River.

As in all Civil War battles, the wounded and dying were attended to by the citizens. The 77th E.M.M., now under Captain (and Town Marshall) Jeremiah Dowd, was on duty in town, directing the movements of the wounded, preserving order, protecting the city from renegades and stragglers and dealing with the aftermath of the Battle. “250 wounded soldiers from both sides were placed in Lockridge Hall upon cots, attended to by both Union and Confederate surgeons. Among the women still living in Kansas City who acted as nurses are Mrs. (Aimee) Guinotte, Mrs. (Adelia) R. T. Van Horn, Mrs. (Emily) D. M. Jarboe…blood wet the streets from Westport to the hall as it dripped from the wounded men.”

As the war raged literally outside her home on Pearl Street, Mary Eleanor, probably guarded by Patrick and members of the 77th, tended to 8-year old Mamie, 2-year old Carrie, and 3-month old Rose.

On May 13, 1864 a “Sanitary Ball” was held at Long's Hall, a two-story brick building at 509 Main Street. The Journal reported the organizers to be Colonel J. H. Ford, Colonel Kersey Coates, Mayor Milton. J. Payne, Major Patrick Shannon and others. (The United States Sanitary Commission was authorized by Abraham Lincoln in order to “cut the disease rate of the Union Army in half” and to raise money for the effort through the efforts of volunteer women, who canvassed for donations, worked as nurses, knitted socks and gloves, sewed blankets and uniforms, baked food, and organized Sanitary Fairs and Balls that raised millions of dollars worth of goods and funds for the Federal army.

In June, as Vice-President of the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, Patrick signed a letter to Brigadier General E. B. Brown at Warrensburg asking that troops be sent to the city because local businessmen were having to perform Home Guard duties which was “negatively affecting the operation of their businesses.”

By the end of the Civil War in May 1865, Missouri had supplied nearly 110,000 troops for the Union Army and about 40,000 troops for the Confederate Army. There were battles and skirmishes in all areas of the state. Missouri saw over 1,200 distinct fights. Only Virginia and Tennessee exceeded Missouri in the number of clashes within the state boundaries.

*

Pearl Street

Kansas City throughout the 1860’s to 1880’s was a mass of limestone hills and cliffs. The  main arteries were at first nothing more than crude ravines winding through the stone, leading  a Fort Leavenworth newspaper to label the place “Gullytown.” The northwestern part of the block bordered by Main, Walnut, 1st and 2nd Streets was a meandering bluff with a long slope descending down north to the Levee. (These streets are not to be confused with their counterparts in “Old Town.” After the railroads built tracks across the Levee, just south of Old Town, the city reconfigured the streets and “moved” them south and west to their present locations. For instance, Main (Commerce) Street in Old Town does not correspond with the “later and permanent” Main Street, now south and west of the original.)

The bluff then ranges to the south, occupying nearly the entire southwest portion of Walnut, 1st to 2nd Streets. It  narrows and then spans the entire southeastern portion of the “block,” extending east before it veers sharply north at the west edge of Walnut. It is this approximately 142-foot range, peaking at about 60 feet, on which Pearl Street was built, thus “Pearl Street Hill.” The location provided a commanding view of the river to the north and the city to the south.

From “The Hill the City Left Behind. Only Jessamine Remains to Mark Sites on Pearl Street where Pioneers Built Mansions Seventy-five Years Ago“(Kansas City Star, September 17, 1922, excerpted and abridged)

“History is entwined all over that old bluff, linking the past and the present. The following reminiscent links will stir up memories and present venerable names – many still household words in Kansas City today. For the most part they are goodly names – names of the city’s forefathers – names such as Choteau, Prudhomme, Chick, McCoy, Riddlesbarger, McGee, Guinotte, Lykins, Jarboe, Diveley, Ransom, Foster, Campbell, Troost and Gregory. A mighty story is written in the lives of these pioneer men and women. Pearl Street contained a social life with the atmosphere and hospitality of the Old South, mingled with the esprit  and polite deportment of the early French settlers and the spirit and activity of the New West – all atop a great bluff beneath which steamboats continually puffed and unloaded great cargoes for the West, Southwest, and Old Mexico.

“For thirty years Pearl Street was the fashionable point from which to view the river.. The ascent of Walnut Street from Third to Second was of easy grade (this grade became known as Shannon’s Hill) while the descent of Pearl Street from Walnut to Grand was somewhat steep. Before Second Street was graded in 1869 carriages were driven up Walnut and down Pearl to Market – now Grand. Pearl Street  once connected Grand Avenue and Walnut Street. The carriages were turned around between the Chick house and the John Campbell house for a view of the river; then south on Walnut and turned around in front of the Riddlesbarger-Shannon house for a view of the growth of the city to the south and east.

“Jessamine bushes, whose flowers are the symbol of amiability, grace and elegance were the favorite shrub of Kansas City’s pioneer women who planted them on Pearl Street hill seventy-five years ago. Had they the gift of speech, they would tell many a romantic story of the time they adorned the dooryards of Kansas City’s first fashionable residence district. The Pearl Street houses were considered the finest in the city and were all built by well-to-do businessmen.”

Col. William Miles Chick built the first house on Pearl Street in 1844, a “big, double-log house” with oak floors and walnut stairways known as the “Chick Mansion,” near the west corner of Pearl and Walnut. Nathan Scarritt had married into the Chick family, and during the chaos and aftermath of Order No. 11 he and his wife lived there for several years. Sixty feet above the river, the Chick estate on Pearl Street was the “trysting place of young lovers.”

In 1847 Mrs. Isaac McCoy, widow of the Indian missionary and mother of John C. McCoy, founder of West Port, constructed a large 2-story brick house at  Pearl and Grand. In the rear of the house were the cabins of her slaves, “Aunt Rachel, Aunt Cynthia, and America.” The house was surrounded with locust and fruit trees. In 1856 the property was sold to Capt. John A. Boarman, who later served in the Confederate Army under Gen. Sterling Price and was treasurer of Kansas City 1859-1860.

 A circa-1850’s drawing show five residences on the south side of Pearl and six or seven houses on the north. Mme. Berenice Choteau’s home, a large, two-story white frame in Colonial style,  was the first house on the southwest side of Pearl at Market (Grand.)  Her grounds occupied the entire west side of the bluff to Second Street. Mrs. Odille Burnett, her granddaughter,  “remembers the long verandas of the house and the French windows opening on the veranda that extended the length of it. Negro cabins dotted the rear yard.”

At the southeast corner of Pearl and Walnut stood the large 1-story house, originally built of logs, of Amanda Carolina Smart, the daughter of Thomas Smart, who opened the first trading house on the levee. “In the rear were Negro cabins.” Along the east bluffs on Pearl stood the handsome home of John Campbell, a two-story brick with balconies facing the river, and the homes of Fred and William J. Jarboe. William’s 2-story frame house was immediately west of the Chick mansion. Later it was the home of wholesale grocer, liquor and tobacco dealer (at the corner of Third and Main) John Gilday.

 Dr. Joseph Chew,  A.S. Lyons, M.B. Hedges, Dr. Johnston Lykins, E.R. Hickman, Mme. Prudhomme, McGee, Guinotte, Michael Diveley (in a brick cottage on the south side of Pearl) Thomas Ransom, Capt. Frank Foster, Benoist Troost and William Gregory (he owned the old McCoy house and sold it in 1856 to Lewis Sharp, a steamboat captain. John Campbell lived in the house for a few years before he built his Campbell House at 2nd and Charlotte)  and Jesse Riddlesbarger “all owned magnificent houses on Pearl Street at one time or another during its short life. Among the well-known Kansas Citians who lived on the hill, Phillip Shannon of J. & P. Shannon, once the largest dry goods firm west of St. Louis and his brother, ex-Mayor Patrick Shannon.”

Berenice Choteau reminisced: “Singing was the great pastime of the young folk. Long before the piano came, we gathered often to sing the old and new songs. Young men formed singing quartets and went around serenading the young ladies. Singing in the moonlight in rustic seats under the trees of the old Pearl Street homes, watching the lights of the steamboats reflected in the splashing waves of the river and listening to the deck hands who sang southern melodies.  I can hear the darkies now, singing ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ ‘Rock My Julie Low and Easy’ and ‘Do You Belong to Gideon’s Band?’

“The steamboats, too, brought spices and tea and many toothsome tid-bits that would tickle the most fastidious palate today. The first limes and preserved ginger received into the Town of Kansas came by steamboat from relatives in Alexandria, Virginia to Mrs. William M. Chick, he first chatelaine of Pearl Street hill.  The first piano in Kansas City was delivered to John McCoy, Chick’s son-in-law, on Pearl Street for his daughters Nellie and Juliette.” Laura Lyons Eberle, who was raised in the Chick household:

“Waiting for the steamboats to come around the bend was great excitement for the children of Pearl Street. We knew the different boats by the shape of their smokestacks before they came near enough for us to spell the letters of their names. We were always on the lookout for the circus steamboat, which carried a minstrel show and a monkey show. When it came out parents would take us to the levee, and we indulged in more thrills over those steamboat shows than children do nowadays over the biggest circus. When a circus came to town the tent was usually pitched on a hill south of the Riddlesbarger House.  I first saw Tom Thumb at one of those shows.”

“The interest of some of their fair ones who lived on the hill centered in the boxes packed with silks and satins, hoop skirts, quaint hats and bonnets that came mostly from Baltimore and Philadelphia, sometimes from New York. The hats and furbelows were made after the styles pictured in Godey’s Lady Book and one or two other fashion journals of the early Victorian age and the Third Empire of France.

“To the belles of Pearl Street there was a greater interest in steamboat arrivals than the arrival of furbelows. Every steamboat brought a squad of fine young men who came from the East and South. Hence, at dances ‘wallflower girls’ were unknown for the men outnumbered the girls ten to one and most of them were “good catches” according to the memories of the few surviving belles. In the earliest days of the hill the women did not wear hoop skirts but later they wore the biggest hoops the fashion makers sent out. “We never had our skirts too short in those days but sometimes our bodices were a trifle low,” said Mrs. N. M. Harris (Nellie McCoy.)
Among the belles and beaux of the first set were Mary Eleanor and Caroline Jarboe, William Jarboe, W. M. Diveley.”  

For his young bride Susan, Jesse Riddlesbarger built “the finest house in the city” in 1858 at the northwest corner of Second and Walnut. “Mr. Riddlesbarger had a beautiful house valued at $12,000 ($345,000 in 2013 dollars) on the high bluff on Pearl street overlooking the river. His house was sixty feet above the street. The mansion was the showplace of Kansas City elite. The brick had been brought from St. Louis, the woodwork and elaborately carved stairway and newel made of walnut. Walls of white enamel and the large marble mantels were imported from Italy. The mansion had carved rosewood furniture in the drawing room and mahogany in the bedrooms. On its floors were velvet carpets brought to Kansas City from Brussels. It was the first home in Kansas City to have French papers on its walls. The young bride Sue reigned like a queen.”  They occupied it for less than six years.

Ewing’s Order No. 64, ordering Riddlesbarger and his family out of Jackson and surrounding counties, was to bring an end to their life on Pearl Street and in Kansas City. He sold the mansion to John and Phillip Shannon on April 4, 1863, for $3,250, the equivalent of   $49,000 in 2013.

April 4 1863 $3250
This Deed of Trust by and between John Shannon and Philip Shannon of the first part and D. L. Shouse (of Merchant’s Bank) of the Secured Part and Jesse Riddlesbarger of the Third part.  The Parties of the first part in Consideration of their Debt and hand hereinafter mentioned sell following described tract of land situate in this County of Jackson:  Lots Twenty-five (25) Twenty Eight (28) and Twenty Nine (29)   in Block Three (3) as Shown in the Recorded Plat of the City of Kansas.  

Kansas City Mo. April 3rd 1863. $3250. Twelve months after date We promise to pay to the order of J. Riddlesbarger Thirty Two Hundred and Fifty dollars for value received with interest  at the rate of 8 per cent per annum. (Signed) J. & P. Shannon (abridged for clarity and length.)

Phillip and Lizzie lived in the mansion  until Philip’s death in 1866. She “sold” the house to Patrick – although I can find no record of that transaction - and he, Mary Eleanor and their four daughters lived in the house from about 1867 until, ten years after Patrick’s death in 1871, she sold it.

When Patrick bought the mansion from Elizabeth, “…it lost none of its social prestige. Nor did it lose the French atmosphere which the young bride had brought to it, for Mrs. Patrick Shannon was assisted in entertaining by Mrs. John Shannon, a very accomplished and handsome French woman who had been Miss Felicitee Padron in New Orleans. The big house became the social center for the young people. Several of the surviving belles say that Mrs. (John) Shannon dressed like a queen. She died in 1871, at 25 years old. The fame of Mrs. Patrick Shannon, a beautiful and interesting brunette and daughter of Joseph Jarboe, as a hostess of the big mansion lingered long after the first families of the other Pearl Street hill homes were forgotten, as she lived there until 1881.”

“In the early years, Madame Berenice Choteau entertained all the Catholic dignitaries who came to Kansas City, and Mrs. Shannon succeeded her in these social duties. Father Donnelly was her guest every Christmas, as he had been of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Shannon. Patrick Shannon died in 1871 and Bernard Corrigan courted their oldest daughter, Miss Mamie Shannon in the big house, and their marriage, May 16 1876, was one of them most brilliant ceremonies at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church.”

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Kansas City’s growth doomed Pearl Street. The new generation of Kansas City’s movers and shakers built finer, more up-to-date mansions on Quality Hill and along grand new boulevards to the northeast. George Kessler’s Hyde Park was laid out in 1888. Nestled within its boundaries is Janssen Place, a close-gated, two block long enclave lined with magnificent estates, built up in 1897; a successor to the symbolic monuments of success that were once showcased on Pearl Street.  

New thoroughfares and construction projects downtown from the 1870’s through the 1890’s eventually sealed off ingress to Pearl Hill, and what houses had been left standing were finally abandoned and left to rot. There was valuable real estate under the bluffs in the 100 block of Main Street and its tributary to the east, Pearl Hill, and each new project tore away another piece of the hill. I believe Pearl Street itself was gone by the early 1890’s and what remained of  Pearl Hill was  a fraction of what it had been. Railroad activity on the Levee – tracks led to the Union Depot in the West Bottoms and beyond – ultimately led to the area being known as “Hobo Hill.” A 1922 picture published along with “The Hill the City Left Behind,”  portrays a rugged, irregular limestone bluff, perhaps a hundred feet long and fifty or sixty feet high. It was finally graded away in 1928.

“Under the repeated attacks of steam shovels it is now really a small plateau, falling away precipitously on three sides in unscalable clay banks. From Main Street on its north, the top may still be reached by a path through ragweed and sunflowers more than shoulder high and the view will explain why it was chosen for the home sites of early-day Kansas Citians. From Pearl Hill the Missouri is a sparkling river instead of a muddy stream and the full majesty of its sweeping curve at the mouth of the Kaw cannot be realized. Nor have the great bridges and the elevators and factories that have risen in the bottoms north of the river destroyed the charm of the commanding view from that vantage point. The deep booming note of the steamboat whistles rarely is heard there now, but hundreds of freight trains jolt by the base of the hill daily and warehouses immediately to the south had to be built up five stories to overtop it. Glimpsed beyond them in the tumble of roofs, towers, windows and chimneys that is the throbbing heart of Kansas City’s business district, where was pasture land when Pearl Street hill was a place of homes.

“Only a few traces of foundation walls are left to indicate the proud houses that once stood there – these and the Jessamine bushes that have over-run the entire top and south side of the hill.  All the pioneer homes, all the beautiful women who lived in them and most of the hill itself have vanished; only the Jessamine bushes keep vigil now. They have spread despite the neglect of a city unmindful of its historic sites, to keep green the memory of the fair hands that once cherished them.”
*

Philip Shannon married Elizabeth “Lizzie” Josephine Rogers on October 12, 1862 at the home of her parents, Michael and Catherine Foley Rodgers. Rodgers (b. Ireland 1808) was a wealthy overland freighter and one of the first settlers of St. Joseph. He served as Colonel in the 44th E.M.M.

“We publish this morning the marriage notice of Miss Lizzie Rodgers of St. Joseph, and Mr. Philip Shannon of Kansas city. The notice was accompanied with a piece of beautiful wedding cake and a bottle of sparkling - ? –no, you don’t. That unalloyed pleasure may be the portion of this happy couple down through the vista of years before them, is the sincere prayer of the Editor. To the bride, we can only say ‘Though each fair rose a thorn conceals, and each proud heart a sigh, they fairy presence but reveals pure joys that ne’er can die.’ Lizzie was educated at Montreal Sacred Heart convent and speaks French fluently.  She has brown hair and blue eyes and is a gracious and beautiful young woman with a loveable disposition.”

Post-war Kansas City

Kansas City suffered tremendous damage during the war years and faced a changed landscape. “Bleeding Kansas” had stemmed the tide of visitors going west, and Order No. 11 in 1863 essentially decimated rural Jackson, Clay and Platte counties. Many left the area never to return, businesses struggled to survive or went bust, and the population dwindled to 3,500.  But after the city was firmly in Union hands and the guerillas had been eliminated, much of the city’s business went on as usual, and Kansas City emerged from the war strong and poised to assert its importance. In 1866, 600 new houses were built, and by 1867 the population had grown to 15,061. In the next three years it would double to over 32,000. Both the Shannons and the Jarboes, as well as the Tobener brothers, invested heavily in the future:

“Returning Prosperity – W. J. Jarboe & brother are fixing up the former Union Bank Building, corner of Main and Commercial Streets, to deal in dry goods, grocery, boots and shoes etc.” (Western Journal of Commerce, March 31, 1864) and: “A new tobacco manufactory, Bachman, Tobener & Company, on Main between Second and Third has 20 employees and is processing 2500-3500 pounds of manufactured tobacco each week.”  (Western Journal of Commerce, June 8, 1864.)

It became clear that time had come to relocate J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods to the newer commercial district to the south. Crime had begun to creep into the levee area, and there are numerous newspaper reports of card sharps, crooked gamblers, prostitution, drunkenness, fights and rowdy behavior. The brothers had occupied the building for nearly ten years and its location – one of the first sights disembarking riverboat passengers would have seen would have been the J. & P. Shannon store sign – was no longer an asset. City leaders had their eye on a location in the west bottoms for a railroad depot, and tracks would cut a swath between the river and the levee buildings, most of which were no older than fifteen years. The coming of the railroad spelled the end of the steamboating era and the hundreds of thousands of yearly visitors to the levee, a captive audience for the Shannons.

As early as 1863, during very difficult economic times in Kansas City, they bought a lot on the southeast corner of Third and Main Streets for construction of a new building. Sale and deed documents show the Union Bank of Missouri owned part of the land and two investors owned the remainder, which the brothers needed to extend the new building the entire width of the block. It took them over a year to put the deal together and they wouldn’t move into the new building until 1867.

Warranty Deed. November 12, 1863 Union Bank of Missouri to John, Philip and Patrick Shannon. In consideration of the sum of four thousand, six hundred and eighty-five dollars and nine cents, Lots numbered eighty-five (85) and eighty-six (86) in Block number eight (8). Beginning at a point on the west end of lot number 86 and twenty five (25) feet northward from the South west; east side of Main Street seventy-three (73) to a point on the west…”(Signed) John Shannon, Philip Shannon, Patrick Shannon.

December 31, 1864 (Abridged)
Know all these men by their presents, that we Lucien H. Pollard and Chancy H. Fairman, in consideration of the sum of Six Thousand Dollars paid by John Shannon, Philip Shannon and Patrick Shannon…the following described property: Parts of lots numbered Eighty-Five (85) and Eighty-Six (86) in Block Number 8 in the old part of Kansas City, it being the corner of Main and Third Streets and running thence eastward into the north line of Third Street ninety(90) feet; thence northward Twenty-five (25) feet; 42 feet to the alley (etc.)

January 9, 1865 (Abridged)
Whereas, John Shannon and Felicite his wife, Philip Shannon and Elizabeth his wife and Patrick Shannon and Mollie E. his wife by their deed bearing date this Ninth day of January, 1865…22 feet front on the east side of Main running back in depth One Hundred and forty two feet (142) to the alley being part of Lot number Eighty-Five (85) in Block Number Eight (8)…and whereas the said John Shannon, Philip Shannon and Patrick Shannon for a valuable consideration this day mutually agreed between them to close and abolish forever said alleys and right of way for alley through said lots as herein before described.  

The brother’s investment on the property, exclusive of building costs, totaled $10, 685, or $202,000 in 2013 dollars.  

The Journal, March 29 1864:

The Emilie delivered an immense stock of goods to the mammoth dry goods establishment of J & P Shannon.

Caroline Bridget “Carrie” Shannon, Patrick and Mary’s third child, was born January (?) 1862. Father Donnelly baptized her on February 2.    Philip and Elizabeth’s first child Michael was born July 1, 1863; John and Felicite’s son Ferdinand was born on August 2, 1863; Catherine Louise Shannon was born to Philip and Elizabeth on August 25, 1864; she lived only ten months and twenty-one days. The grieving parents placed this memorial in the Journal:

Rest there, sweet baby Kate! Thy tiny smile, with all its purity and grace
No more shall bless the hearts that loved thee; Thou wert too tender for this vale of tears
And to the Great Beyond thy infant soul now revels in the sunshine of Eternal Day
May we meet thee there! Where no rude wind, bows down the oak or blasts the budding flower
Our only darling! The waves of grief Almost o’erwhelm us in their bitter might
Bloom, blossom, in celestial loveliness And at the jeweled gates of Paradise
Await our joyful coming

Patrick and Mary Eleanor’s third daughter, Susan Rose, was born on September 15, 1864, baptized by Father Donnelly on September 25; John and Felicite’s daughter Rose Teresa was born on September 8, 1865.

The Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, July 15, 1865:

J. & P. SHANNON
DRY GOODS
IMPORTERS
Package and Piece Jobbers,
And
General Retailers,
At the old and well established house
COR. OF MAIN ST. AND LEVEE
KANSAS CITY, MO.

We are now prepared to offer to our Customers,
The Public, and to the Trade in general, the
Best and choicest stock of goods ever shipped to the
Western trade, at prices too, that will astonish the
Whole community

We are no offering beautiful lines of mixed
SAXONY DRESS GOODS AT 12 /2 cts. PER YARD
GOOD BLEACHED COTTONS at 12 ½ cts. PER YARD
FINE BROWN SEA ISLAND COTTON, 12 ½ cents
PER YARD

To give a catalogue of prices of our stock would be
superfluous, as it would occupy too much space
in the columns of a newspaper.
We respectfully invite the public and the trade to
an examination of our stock and Prices, knowing
that an intelligent people will appreciate such un-
paralleled inducements as we are now prepared to offer them.

OUR SHOW ROOMS AND SALES ROOMS FOR
IMPORTED DRESS GOODS
Will present attractions this year matchless West of
 the great Eastern cities.

OUR SALES AND SHOW ROOMS FOR
SHAWLS,
CLOAKS,
LACE GOODS,
Embroideries,
Parasols, White Goods, Hosiery and Yankee Notions,
Will stand unrivalled.

OUR SALES ROOM FOR
Carpetings, Mattings, Floor and Table Oil Cloths,
Embroidered Necklaces and Muslin Window Curtain,
French, Satin, Brocated, and English Wool and
Linen Curtain Drapery, Table Linens, Cloths, Tow-
ellings, Napkins, Marseilles Bed Spreads, Rich Gilt
Window Shades, all grades of Linen and Cotton Shirt-
ings and Pillow Linens is the most complete west of
the seabound cities, and embraces a complete, rich
and attractive stock of
Elegant Housefurnishing Goods
Not minus a single article to complete a first-class
outfit for the finest residence. Ample supplies of
goods especially adapted to Hotels and Steam Boats.

OUR CLOTH ROOMS
Are perhaps the most extensive in the country and receive
Much care and attention, thereby placing it beyond
the possibility of competition. We can exhibit
at a glance many hundred different and choice styles
of real French, Belgium, English, Scotch, and American
Cloths, Cassimeres, Doeskins, Tweeds, Shepherd’s
Plaids. A full line of Military Cloths and Cassimeres,
from superfine to medium. A fine assortment
of Vestings, Tailor’s findings and trimmings.

OUR BASEMENTS & SUB-CELLARS
Well lighted, will be found to contain very large packages and piece Domestics, Cottons, Cotton and Woolen Dry Goods,
ALL BOUGHT AT A
GOLD STANDARD PRICE,
At such an unprecedented decline as has never been known in American Commerce.

Having now a house permanently located in New York,
Where our Mr. John Shannon will most likely
permanently remain, as by his presence in the market
this Spring watching the course of events, we have reaped a rich harvest and can offer
unparalleled inducements to all buyers.

J. & P. SHANNNON
IMPORTERS JOBBERS
RETAILERS
Foreign and Domestic Dry Goods,
At the Old Corner, Main and Levee,
ESTABLISHED BY US TEN YEARS AGO

The competition the brothers faced after the war from carpetbaggers was intense and immense and their ten-year position as Kansas City’s leading dry goods merchants was under siege. Louis Hammerslough, a 23-year old immigrant from Hanover, Germany, had come over with his three brothers in 1854, where they established themselves as clothing manufacturers and merchants in New York and Baltimore. Louis set up a large store first at Third and Main and later at Fifth  and Main in direct competition with J. & P. Shannon. In full column advertisements, often on the same page as the Shannons’ large ads, he offered a large line of dry goods  - “same goods at low prices.” Hammerslough employed a staff of coat makers and tailors, a service not offered by the Shannons. He was an aggressive competitor and his New York connections ensured “the lowest prices you will ever see.” Hammerslough’s store was a fixture in Kansas City for many years after the Shannons were gone.  

Two brothers from New York, Lathrop and Thomas B. Bullene, provided more competition at the corner of 6th and Main when they bought the retailing interests of William Gillis and Kersey Coates and established L. BULLENE.  On October 11, 1865 they advertised “an immense stock of DRY GOODS; All Wool Plaids, Poplins, Mohair Dress Goods, Worsted Dress Goods, Flannels, Cassimeres, Domestic Cotton; Sheeting and Shirtings, hats and caps, boots and shoes etc. Bullene aimed for the precise “market segment” the Shannons had dominated for ten years, at prices “Cheaper than you can expect to find them.”

David M. Jarboe opened a wholesale boot and shoe business with S.K. Green, importing merchandise from the east and shipping to the south and west. He lived in a stately, beautiful home on Pennsylvania Street. His last business venture was the operation of the Keystone Iron Works Company (where he employed James Pendergast, Tom’s brother.)

John Shannon, the merchandising genius who “brought sophistication to the edge of the great prairie,” died in New York at on July 24, 1865, at the age of 39.  Kansas City Journal, July 30, 1865:

“Although not unprepared for the announcement, our citizens will learn with profound sorrow of the death of Mr. John Shannon, of the house of J. & P. Shannon, of this city, which occurred in New York on Monday, July 24. Mr. Shannon left home early in the spring in ill health, and shortly after his arrival was taken sick, and although everything that medical skill and family affection could do for him, he is dead.

“It is not only a loss to his family and friends, but his death is a serious one to the city and the commercial community of the West. He was in the very highest sense of the term, a merchant - uniting qualifications rarely found in his pursuit. He came to this city in 1856, and commenced the dry good business with his brothers, in the place now occupied by their house.

“Trained from boyhood in the mercantile profession, he at once took the lead in the branch of business to which he was educated, and by a singular energy, tact and business ability, had built up a trade and fortune unexampled to the far West. He was the embodiment of commercial enterprise and integrity - in all respects a model merchant. In all the long years of his residence in this city, and with all the complication of his vast business, there is not an individual but will say he was a friend of John Shannon's. Of rare suavity of manner, he was a citizen without reproach and without an enemy. His disease was the result of close application to business, which undermined a naturally vigorous constitution, and ended a life of usefulness at the early age of thirty-eight years.

“Mr. Shannon was born in the parish of Drumlane, county Cavan, Ireland, and at twelve years old was apprenticed to the dry goods business in Belturbet, in the same county, and completed his term in Carrickmacross, county Monaghan. He left there in 1848 and came to this country, first to New York, and subsequently to New Orleans, where he married. From the latter city he removed to Kansas City. His death is a severe blow to our people, and it will be long before his place will be filled. He leaves a wife and interesting family of young children, with whom, in their sorrow, our entire community must deeply sympathize. His brother, Mayor Shannon, and his bereaved wife were with him for several weeks prior to his death, and the last hours of his life were calm and peaceful, consoled by the ministrations of the Church and the kindness of relatives and friends.”
 
From the Daily Journal:  Wednesday morning, Aug. 2nd, 1865.  “The funeral of John Shannon, Esq., deceased was largely attended yesterday. To lose a good citizen from a community small in itself is no light infliction. That a man so good, true, tried, trusted and respected as John Shannon, should, in the prime of life, be forever removed from us, is saddening. Mr. Shannon, Sr., left his native land and came to this country when a young man, and was for some years connected with a retail dry goods house in New York City. Subsequently he went to New Orleans, where he became acquainted with and wedded his wife. He came to Kansas City before the outbreak of the late civil war. His business capacity was great, and led by a commendable ambition his aspirations were for success in mercantile transactions.  His prospects were indeed bright for a prosperous future, and all was too soon cut off by his premature death, which occurred in the city of New York, in 1865, while there purchasing goods. His remains lie buried in Kansas City. “

Journal of Commerce, October 11, 1865

THE HOUSE OF J. & P. SHANNON. Prominent among the business houses of this city is that of the immense establishment of J. & P. Shannon. These liberal and enterprising merchants, ever up to the demands of the time, are now receiving the largest stock of dry goods ever shipped to this city, and are prepared to supply the country trade, at St. Louis prices, with everything required in the line of dress goods, hosiery, ribbons, carpets, clothing, hats and caps, boots and shoes etc., etc. Their goods are the amount of fully half a million dollars, were purchased before the late advance, and will be sold correspondingly. To the credit of the Messrs. Shannon we can state that no one establishment in St.  Louis or Chicago have a larger or better selected stock than they.
They are determined that Southern Kansas and New Mexico merchants shall find no inducement to go further than Kansas city for their stocks, and will not be undersold. The immense and exhaustless variety of their goods will enable them to fill any order required.
This house is so long and favorably shown as to need no guaranty for honorable dealing. We regret that we have not more houses of the same capacity and enterprise. Every department of the wholesale trade ought to rival the energy of this standard jobbing firm. They have $300,000 invested in stock.

WANTED, immediately, two first-class salesmen. To such good salaries will be paid. None others need apply. J. & P. SHANNON.

On December 17, 1865, six months after John’s death, Felicite gave birth to Johanna “Jennie” Aloysia Shannon.  Father Donnelly baptized her on January 21, 1866. Patrick and Mary Eleanor’s second son, Felix, was born November 26, 1866, but died on December 2nd. There would be no male heirs of Patrick Shannon.

On September 11, 1866, Philip Shannon, the youngest of the brothers and the one who had financed Shannon’s Hotel and Saloon eleven years earlier, passed away at age 38 from cholera. He was interred at the St. Francis Regis cemetery with Bernard Donnelly officiating.
“Philip Shannon died in Kansas City the other day. He was a prominent citizen.” (Liberty Tribune September14, 1866)

Despite the loss of his two brothers, Patrick and J. &.P. Shannon Dry Goods soldiered on:

J. &. P. Shannon Importers Jobbers and Retailers of Foreign and Domestic Dry Goods
At the Old Corner, Main and Levee. Established By Us Ten Years Ago. We respectfully invite the public and the trade to an examination of our Stock and Prices, knowing that intelligent people will appreciate such unparalleled inducements we are now prepared to offer them.

Our Sales and Show Rooms For Imported Dress Goods will present attractions this year matchless West of the great Eastern cities. Our Sales and Show Rooms for Shawls, Cloaks, Lace Goods, Embroideries, Parasols, White Goods, Hosiery and Yankee Notions, will stand unrivalled.

Our Sales Room For Carpetings, Mattings, Floor and Table Oil Cloths, Embroidered Necklaces and Muslin Window Curtains, French, Satin, Brocutel, and English Wool and Linen Curtain Drapery, Table Linens, Cloths, Towellings, Napkins, Marseilles Bed Spreads, Rich Gilt Window Shades, all grades of Linen and Cotton Shirtings and Pillow Linens is the most complete west of the sea-bound cities, and embraces a complete, rich and attractive stock of Elegant House furnishing Goods.

Not minus a single article to complete a first-class outfit for the finest residence. Ample supplies of goods especially adapted to Hotels and Steam Boats.

Our Cloth Room Is perhaps the most extensive in the country and receives such care and attention thereby placing it beyond the possibility of competition. We can exhibit at a glance many hundred different and choice styles of real French, Belgium English, Scotch, and American Cloths, Cassimeres, Doeskins, Tweeds, Shepherd’s Plaids. A full line of Military Cloths and Cassimeres from superfine to medium. A fine Assortment of Vestings, Tailor’s findings and trimmings

Our Basements & Sub-Cellars, Well-lighted, will be found to contain very large packages and piece Domestics, Cottons, Cotton and Woolen Dry Goods All Bought at a Gold Standard Price At such an unprecedented decline has never been known to exist in American Commerce.

Our Clothing Department for Men and Boy’s outfits will be stocked with such variety and at such prices TO DEMAND the attention of buyers. Our Boot and Shoe Rooms For Classes of Superior City-made to ordinary good, adapted to all ages and sex have received very careful attention, We are therefore prepared to offer a first-class article at extremely low figures.

Our Hat Cap and Straw Goods Room Is amply stocked with all the latest productions of the Eastern cities, at extremely low prices. We keep a limited stock of rich Dress Hats for Ladies, which we will receive from time to time immediately upon a change in style in New York. Having now a house permanently located in New York, where our Mr. John Shannon will most likely permanently remain, as by his presence in the market this spring watching the course of events, we have reaped a rich harvest and can offer unparalleled inducements to all buyers.

We shall devote, as always, our best efforts and talents in promoting the commercial interests of the City of Kansas, and shall not in this connection forget the wants of our New Mexican trade for which we are amply prepared.

Virginia Koogle wrote: “. Mother said he (Patrick) used to take trips to New York and bring back such lovely presents to grandma and the children. She remembers the shoes he used to bring back for Grandma and the children and they were the envy of the neighborhood! He had Grandma’s shoes made for her as she wore a 6 AAAA and hard to fit.”

ATTENTION
is called to the notice of Messrs. J. & P. Shannon who are offering their immense stock at prices to suit the times. The Messrs. Shannons are liberal dealers, and will do just what they advertise.” (Journal, February 25, 1866)

A  report of City Council proceedings on October 27, 1866, brings to light a piece of property owned by Patrick a block north of the store. This is the only reference to it I can find:  “The application of P. Shannon was presented, asking the Council to release his property on the corner of Third and Grand Avenue from tax, on account of part of the same being condemned by the city. On motion, the application was referred to a committee of Salisbury, Burke and Bauerlein.”

DRY GOODS!
Boots and Shoes Hats & Caps
Clothing &c.
Mexican and Indian Outfitting Goods
Corner Levee and Main Streets
Kansas City, Mo,
Capital Invested in Stock $300,000
Out stock comprises
Domestics
From all the prominent Factories in the united States,
 purchased at the lowest decline in the Cotton Goods markets in the East.
Our
Dress Goods Department
Is full to overflowing with all the novelties of the
Seaboard cities, to which we solicit an examination
by our Lady Friends before making their purchases,
as we feel assured they will be attracted by the Variety, Styles, and Prices
We are opening a most magnificent
STOCK OF SILKS
Rich Pompadour Dress Patterns
Gros se Rhein
Glaci Taffeta & c. Also, a large stock of black
Italian Silks and French Poulto de Sol for mourning,
with wrappings to correspond.
We invite the public to an examination of our
HOSIERY STOCK
Which was selected with the greatest care, and comprises
The choicest Nottingham Manufacturer
Hosiery down to the lowest grades.
We have everything in the
WHITE GOODS DEPARTMENT
Bought from the Agents of the Exporters, which we will sell lower than any house in the west. Also, a splendid Stock of Embroideries, Real Thread Valencian, Gimpure, Limerick, German and Scotch laces.
Our MANTILLA, CLOAK & SHAWL
Department is elaborately beautiful, and for design and novelty cannot be surpassed by any Retail Establishment in the City of New York.
We have on had a most elegant stock of
CARPETING
From all the prominent manufactories of the United States and Europe.
Brussels, French velvets, Crosby & Sons’ Three and Single Ply, Hartford, Lowell, Poughkeepsie &c. which we will cut as low as any New York House. The styles are beautiful. Cocoa and Straw mattings, White and Colored Oil Cloths, Rugs, Mats, and everything pertaining to a First Class Carpet House.
We ask dealers in
Boots and Shoes
To a thorough examination of our Stock before purchasing, as we are satisfied we can sell from twelve to fifteen percent lower than any house in the market, as we buy from the Manufacturers, and thereby save the jobbers’ profits. We have also a fine assorted stock of Ladies and Gents Work, manufactured in Philadelphia expressly for our trade. Our Stock of Clothing
Is very select. Everything got up to order by the most fashionable Clothing Houses in the United States. Also everything in the Gents’ Furnishing Line.
Blankets, Rubber Goods, Carpet Sacks, Trunks, & c.
Cloths and Cassimeres
Which we offer to Merchant Tailors and our trade generally at very small advance on Eastern prices. Also, TAILOR’s TRIMMINGS
J. & P. SHANNON
Corner Main Street and Levee
KANSAS CITY, MO
Established in the Year 1854*

*This date conflicts with Van Horn’s account of arriving in Kansas city with Patrick in July 1855. The earliest known documentation of Patrick in Kansas City is October 1855.

Faced with overwhelming competition from not just Hammerslough and the Bullenes, but a proliferation of specialty stores, Patrick engaged in some crafty advertising of his own:

CHANGE IN THE DAY. GOODS HOUSE OF J. & P. SHANNON – Desirous of confining ourselves henceforward to the dry goods trade exclusively, we will sell our large and well assorted stock of boots and shoes, hats, caps and clothing, regardless of cost."
(Journal October 27 1866)

Yet six months later:

1867 – Spring – Dry Goods – 1867. Go to Shannon’s for new spring cloaks and mantillas – a fresh arrival at Eastern prices. Go to Shannon’s for every article in the dry goods line. Carpets of every known brand at prices to suit all purchasers. Go to Shannon’s for Thompson’s French Elastic Spring Skirts. Gentlemen’s fine cassimere suits, furnishing goods, hats, caps, boots and shoes, all at prices that will defy competition. J. & P. SHANNON, Corner Main street and Levee. (Journal, April 30, 1867)

Finally, the move that began with the brothers’ purchase of the lot at the southwest corner of Third and Main Streets in 1863 took place:

The Journal, June 4 1867:

New Goods. The Messrs. J.& P. Shannon have just received, at their new store, corner main and Third Streets, a superb line of Carpets which they will sell cheap; also an elegant variety of Silks and Dress Goods.”

J. &. P. Shannon the oldest and most reliable Dry Goods House! In our city have removed their stock from the long and well established stand on the corner of Main St. and the Levee to the large three story brick building on the southwest corner of Main and Third Streets, the most convenient location in the city where they will continue to keep the largest and most elegant stock of goods to be found in the market, and at prices that will please all!  When you call on Major Shannon at his “new quarters” you may rest assured that he will be found not only prepared but pleased to serve you.

Three Story Brick Store to Rent. J. &. P. Shannon having removed their entire stock of Dry Goods, Boots, Shoes, &c. from their old established stand on the Levee to the corner of Main and Third Streets, offer the old stand for rent.”

Perhaps part of the delay in occupying the new building is revealed in a citation Patrick received from the Board of Health on June 19, 1866:  “On motion the clerk was instructed to issue an order on Patrick Shannon to abate the nuisance on his premises on Main Street, near Third, be either filling or draining the pond on said premises.”

New Goods. The Messrs J. & P. Shannon have just received, at their new store, corner of Main and Third streets, a superb line of Carpets which they will sell cheap; also an elegant variety of Silks and Dry Goods. (Journal June 23, 1867)
 
Old Times Have Come Again” J. & P. Shannon have reduced their Merrimac Spragues and all best brands of Prints to 12 ½ cents. Bleached Sheetings and Shirtings, 10 to 20 cents. Printed De Laines, 20 cents. Domestic Ginghams, 15 to 20 cents. Flannels, 25 to 60 cents. All other goods proportionately low, to correspond with Eastern markets.” (Journal November 7 1867)

February 1 1868 – “Still they Come. J & P Shannon have this day received full lines of dress goods, including black and colored alpacas, French merinos, all-wool and figured delaines. Etc.”

A legal notice in the Journal concerns the property of a Mary J. Fortune, whom I’ve been unable to identify.  “June 3 1869. Sale of valuable real estate. By order of the Circuit Court of Jackson county, I will sell, without reserve, at public or private sale, at the Court House in Kansas City on Saturday the 5th of June, instant, one lot of ground on Delaware Street, 23 feet front by 66 feet deep. Title perfect. Patrick Shannon, Att’y in Fact for Mrs. Mary J. Fortune.”

After his mansion was looted by Jayhawkers during the Civil War, William Gillis moved to a home at 4th and Locust, where he “cut the figure of a wealthy pioneer bachelor—often seen about town wearing a formal black coat, regardless of heat or cold, and carrying a cane made of Missouri hickory.” At his death in 1869, he left nominal amounts to two granddaughters and the bulk of an estimated $2 million fortune ($35 million today) to Mary (nee Kennerly or Kenerly) Troost, his niece, who had cared for him in his later years. I’ve been unable to discover the familial relationship between she and Gillis.

But a daughter, Nancy Gillis, born to a “Piankeshaw (Delaware) Indian Maiden” named Ka-ke-toquah, daughter of the Piankeshaw chief Laharse, contested  Gillis’ will which had excluded her and her own children as rightful heirs.  The ten-year legal battle reached the Supreme Court of Missouri, in a fascinating case that included Indian witnesses from Kaskaskia. The court ultimately decided that Nancy Gillis and her daughters were legitimate heirs and they were awarded some property of the estate. With the remainder of her inheritance Mary Troost (who died in 1873) had the Gillis Opera House built at the southwest corner of 5th and Walnut; through a provision in her will, she stipulated that the profits of the theater would perpetually go to support the Gillis Home for Orphans. The four-story building opened on September 10, 1883. Much of the interior was finished in polished walnut, and the chandeliers were of dazzling polished glass. It was the showplace of Kansas City.

On July 25, 1869, Patrick and Mary Eleanor’s last child, Anna Virginia, was born and baptized by Father Donnelly.
 
The 1870 Kansas City Directory and Reference Book notes: “The oldest dry goods house in the city is that of J. &. P. Shannon, corner of Main and Third Streets.  This house sold during the year ending 31st August 1869, goods amounting to $276,000.00 ($4,842,000 in 2012 dollars.)

The 1870 census for the First Ward in Kansas City shows Patrick, a “wholesaler and retailer of dry goods,” Mollie E., age 33, housekeeper, and  Mamie, 12,  Carrie, 8, Rosy, 6 and Annie 1.  Patrick claimed the value of real estate owned at $60,000, and a personal estate of $50,000, a fortune of over $2 million today.

 MAJOR SHANNON. – We are pleased to see that our old friend Maj. Shannon is prospering. He has recently enlarged his fine store, on the corner of Third and Main Streets, until it is now 114 feet deep, giving him greatly enlarged facilities for showing goods and doing business with ease and dispatch. The entire second floor will be used as a carpet room. The Major is the oldest dry goods man in the city, and his long experience will enable him to suit his many customers. He has a large and well selected stock, and it will be of interest to all to call upon him. (Journal, April 10, 1870)

Journal, November 5, 1870:

 Prize taken for The Cheapest Dry Goods in Kansas City.  J. & P. Shannon

Journal, November 12, 1870: Yesterday afternoon a woman named Lonie Tine, who lives on Ninth Street near Broadway, was out on the street “sloshing” about as drunk as ‘tis possible for one to be and at the same time keep her gravity. During her oscillating peregrinations, she walked into Egelhoff’s store, corner Sixth and Main Streets, and appropriated a pair of shoes for her own use and benefit without depositing the usual pecuniary stipend customary therefor. She afterward went into Shannon’s store, on the corner of Third and Main, and was proceeding to indulge in a similar freak of excentricity when she was suddenly detected by one of the clerks in her self-donating and enterprising business. Officer Dowd, that ubiquitous guardian of the city’s peace, was close at hand and he proceeded to lead the peculating female to the calaboose.

Journal, November 16, 1870:

Now is the time to secure bargains. We would advise our friends and the rest of mankind to visit the dry goods establishment of J. & P. Shannon, corner of Main and Third Streets. The tide of trade there on yesterday shows that the people know where to find bargains.

Furs, Furs, Furs. Just received, a large lot of new furs at extremely low prices, commencing at $3.50 a set and upward, at Shannon’s. (Journal, December 4, 1870)

“A suspicious looking character called at the house of Major Shannon yesterday afternoon, and requested permission to enter and look through the house. There was no one at the house but a girl of about fourteen years old, and she refused him admittance. He was no doubt a prowler after plunder.” (Journal, August 2, 1871)

On December 16, 1871, Patrick died at home at the age of 52. Abridged from Robert Van Horn’s eulogy from the Journal of December 17:

“Patrick Shannon was one of our best and oldest citizens, and a member of several Irish societies, died at his late residence on Walnut (Pearl) Street yesterday. Liberal in heart, just in principle, friendly and kind to all, he had the good will of all men. The news of the death of this old citizen took the city by surprise, coming so sudden and without warning. Major Shannon came to Kansas City in 1855, and has been actively connected with its affairs since that time. He was one of the firm of J & P Shannon, for many years the leading merchants of the city, besides holding other positions of honor and trust. The writer of this and Major Shannon came to the city on the same day, and were fellow-passengers on the same steamer, then forming an acquaintance and friendship which has remained without interruption until his death. A marked fatality has followed the Shannon brothers - all men in the meridian of life, active and energetic men, and rapidly rising to fortune – Patrick, John and Philip – now all dead within a brief period. Truly life is uncertain. at this late residence on Walnut Street in the fifty-second year of his age. Funeral will take place today, Sunday, at 2:00.

Liberty Tribune of December 22, 1871:

“Patrick Shannon has been called away from this earth to meet his God. Mr. Shannon was one of our best and oldest citizens, and leaves thousands of friends who will regret his demise. Patrick Shannon is one of three brothers, Patrick John and Philip, They came to Kansas City before Main Street was cut through from the levee. The opened out the first large dry goods store in Kansas City and for many years carried on an extensive trade at their stand at the corner of Main and Levee.  Their name is familiar to all of the first settlers of Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico and Colorado. Their trade with the territories was very large up to the breaking out of the war. All of the three brothers are now dead. All died beloved and respected.”

A handwritten remembrance from Patrick’s 14 year old daughter Mary “Mamie” Shannon, kept and passed down by her sister Carrie to her son, Harry Joseph Koogle:

“In Memoriam of Patrick Shannon December 16, 1872
One year ago today the grave closed upon all that was mortal of Mayor Patrick Shannon. Perhaps of all the early settlers of Kansas City, there was not one more endeared to his fellow men. Gifted in mind and person with a heart large as it was warm, he was for many years a grand national beacon light in this city; holding offices of trust and dignity, with honor to himself and the land that gave him birth. One of nature’s gentlemen, he was ever ready to assist the needy and oppressed. First in acts of charity and benevolence. It was never known that the widow or orphans appealed to him in vain. He was surrounded by a lovely family and amicable and affectionate wife and four beautiful little daughters. What a happy life his could have been had not God in his wise Providence ordained otherwise, yet so the good must pass away, though they cannot be forgotten, for good deeds keep the memory green, and many a fervent prayer will be offered to-day for the spiritual happiness of him who was once known and loved as Mayor Patrick Shannon. Mamie December 16, 1872.”

Oddly enough, I haven’t been able to locate a standard obituary for Patrick which would possibly have answered some questions about his life that aren’t presently known, including information on his birth, life and education in Ireland, immigration and naturalization information, and life in New York and/or St. Louis prior to July 1855 when he arrived in Kansas City. The early deaths of all three Shannon brothers at 38, 40 and 52 are another mystery. John’s cause of death, reported in his obituary, is perplexing: “His disease was the result of close application to business, which undermined a naturally vigorous constitution.” Philip is reported to have died of cholera – not a normal disease for a wealthy 38 year old man. Since I haven’t located an obituary for Patrick, his cause of death isn’t known, except that it appears to have been unexpected and sudden. The History of Jackson County reports: “In 1870 there were several cases of  ‘Rothlene,’ a form of scarlet fever. In the spring, some case of intermittent fevers in the fall. During the years 1871 and 1872 there was some pneumonia in the spring, with mild cases of fever in the fall of 1871. There were very few deaths.”

J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods had taken three hard-working men to grow it from a second-floor outlet over a saloon to the dominant force in Kansas City retailing during the years before the war; after the war, and with the loss of his two brothers, Patrick, the entire burden or buying, merchandising and operating the store having fallen upon him, may have simply worked himself to death.

“Anna Virginia Shannon remembers Patrick very well though she was about only 8 years old when he died suddenly.  She says Grandma told her they were promoting him for Governor of Missouri at the time of his death.”

“The Irish Benevolent Society will meet at their hall (Ray’s) to-day, at 12:30 o’clock sharp, in regalia, to attend the funeral of their deceased brother Major Patrick Shannon. By order. M. Flynn, Pres. J.Enright, Sec’y.
*

Patrick Shannon’s Pubic Service

The “Friends of the Platte Country Railroad” convened at the Court House on May 15, 1858. The subject was the location of a proposed road to serve the expansion of the Platte County Railroad. The committee proposed that the city would pay for the road provided it was constructed to go through Parkville and Platte City, while the railroad’s plan was to build alongside the Missouri, bypassing Kansas City in favor of Leavenworth.  Those who attended a meeting with the railroad on June 7, 1858 were H. M. Northrup, Joseph Lykins. Robert Van Horn, Kersey Coates, Patrick Shannon and Mayor M. J. Payne. Their successful bid (and guarantee of money) “established Kansas City into the next century as the primary transportation center of mid-America.” By 1858, just three years in town, Patrick had assimilated himself into the leadership circles of Kansas City. Northrup, Lykins, Coates and now Patrick Shannon were among the richest men in Jackson County. Politics was soon to follow.

Important Railway Meeting – The Bonner Bill endorsed, Captain T.S. Case chair; committee Colonel Coates, Dr. Thorne, Mr. Deardorf, Patrick Shannon, and T.D. Thatcher.” A long article concerning efforts to bring the Union Pacific Railroad to Kansas City. Daily Missouri Republican, December 25, 1863)

In 1861 Patrick was elected to his first public office, City Councilman for the 2nd Ward, on Robert Van Horn’s Democrat ticket, which had adopted a moderate platform balancing pro-slavery views with loyalty to the Union. Van Horn was elected to three terms as mayor, 1861, 1863 and 1864.

On July 16, 1863, Patrick was elected Vice-President of the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

On November 8, 1864 Van Horn was elected to Congress, and sometime between then and March 4, 1865 when he took his seat in Washington, Patrick was either elected in a special election or appointed by the city council to succeed him as Mayor. The dates of Patrick’s tenure as Mayor have been consistently gotten wrong in Kansas City histories.  Patrick served out Van Horn’s one-year term and was re-elected in his own right in November 1865, at the age of 46. He served as the city’s eighth Mayor up to November 1866.

“The election of Mayor Shannon as Mayor of our city is an event upon which we may well congratulate ourselves as a people. A man of great business capacity, of enlarged views and public spirit, he will bring to the discharge of his duties an earnest desire and determination to do everything possible for the advancement of the interest of the city. At the present time in our history we need such a man for mayor” (Journal January 10, 1865)

Patrick “pumped optimism and activity into the business community,” and according to the Kansas City business directory of 1867-68, “The citizens of Kansas City unanimously offered Patrick Shannon the mayor’s job again in 1866, but he declined.”

During Patrick’s time in office, the first street gas lights were installed and the city’s first volunteer fire department – nothing much more than a bucket brigade – was formed.  “Patrick Shannon maintained the duties of his office with dignity and credit.”

John G. Hayden came to Kansas City from Kentucky in 1857, working as a wagon master. He was elected Marshal of Kaw Township in 1860, then sheriff of Jackson County, serving two years before he was appointed deputy U.S. Marshall for the western district of Missouri. Although a known Democrat and “Unionist,” Hayden’s appeal to the Governor demonstrates the paranoia the end of the war, which would end officially the following month:

 John G. Hayden, Sheriff of Jackson County, deposes and says that he is fifty-five years of age. That since the time I arrived at years of discretion I have been fondly attached to the Government of the Unites States, that I have now and ever have had without cessation of even a moment, not the least feeling of enmity or hostility to my Government. I have been the ranks of my country’s army in the Indian wars of Black Hawk celebrities, in the Mexican War and also in the present war. At the time of the breaking out of the present rebellion I was a resident of the City of Kansas, where I still reside, that I occupied the position of Marshall of Kansas City Court of Common Pleas, that I urged all the men of my acquaintance with all the feeling of my heart to desist from such a mad scheme as that of rebelling against a government which gave such great rights and protection as this one of ours. That I really endangered my life by the course I took in the commencement of the war in my opposing our wild and mad citizens in attempting to carry our state into of the Union. I do most solemnly and sincerely swear that any charges of disloyalty against me is false. Also this charge that a rebel flag was seen displayed from my house – I used all my influence against my neighbors doing any such act and distinctly declared that no such flag should ever pollute my premises. (Signed)  John G. Hayden, April 13, 1865

Patrick’s affidavit in support of his friend Hayden:

Patrick Shannon deposes and says that I have for several years been acquainted with John E. Hayden; that during the present rebellion I have had almost daily intercourse with him; that I have ever found him loyal to the Federal Government both in word and act. That I have served with him in military matters when it tried men’s souls to be loyal in this city and county. (Signed) Patrick Shannon, Mayor of the City of Kansas April 13th 1865.

The following day, Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot.

Thomas Clement Fletcher of the National Union Party was Governor of Missouri at the end of the war. Although he had been raised in a slave-owning family, he was an ardent abolitionist.  He served as Colonel in several Missouri Union militia units and was present at the battles at Chattanooga and Vicksburg.  He served as Governor from 1865-1869 and issued the proclamation abolishing slavery in the state. His administration, at the forefront of Reconstruction, was confronted with many problems and organized resistance, expressed in great part by the following report from The Daily Missouri Republican of October 23, 1865. (Abridged)

Mass Meeting at Kansas City. Quite a large number of the most respectable citizens of the county met in the Court House yesterday evening. The meeting was called to order by Gen. Lucas, who moved that Capt. George C. Bingham be elected President of the meeting…

“Resolved, that in view of the present revolutionary State Government of Missouri, its Radical misrule and strong tendency to anarchy and despotism, we fully concur in the propriety and absolute necessity of immediate and determined action on the part of the people, and therefore disregarding all party lines and organizations…we invite all good and true men throughout the State to assist in devising and carrying out measures for the restoration of law and order, and for the preservation of the liberties of the people.

“…in denying the  right to preach the Gospel, in degrading the Church to the level of a Radical political caucus and ignoring the right of conscience by imposing abominable test oaths as pre-requisites to the discharge of the sacred office of the Christian Ministry; in passing laws of Amnesty while disgracing the uniform of  our honorable and noble country; a spirit of fanaticism, lawlessness, bigotry and intolerance in violation of constitutional law and deserves the severest censure of an outraged people.

“That we deprecate and condemn the lawless, unauthorized and arbitrary acts of Thos. C. Fletcher… united action to rescue the state from such mal-administration, and to  hurl from position and power such wretched despots as Thomas C. Fletcher... the smallest and most contemptible man that ever crawled into power by the accidents of times.

“That the Constitution and Government of the United States were ordained and established by white men for the benefit of themselves and their posterity, and we are in favor of so maintaining such Constitution and Government, and are therefore opposed to negro suffrage, negro equality, Miscegenation, and all the kindred negrosims of the Radical party.

“That we tender our heartfelt thanks to our citizen-soldiery for so proudly vindicating the honor of our national arms in quelling the rebellion, and restoring the Union of the States to its more than original purity, and that we fully endorse the wise, humane and statesman-like policy of President Johnson for the restoration of the States recently in rebellion, and against the combined hosts of Radicalism and traitors to constitutional law, we offer him our cordial, earnest and united support.”

“The following were appointed delegates… (to the State “Mass Meeting” to be held in St. Louis.)  December 26, 1865: (Signed)  Thomas A. Smart, Dr. J. Lykins, Col. K. Coates, John B. Wornall, M. J. Payne, A.L. Harris, John Campbell, John C. Gage, Rufus Montgall, William Holmes, Mike Diveley, D. T. Shouse, E.W. McGee, S.D. Vaughan, James W. McGee, Jeremiah Dowd, George Sweeney, W. J. Jarboe, William M. Diveley, Joseph Guinotte, and Patrick Shannon.”

RAILROAD CONVENTION AT PAOLA – LIST OF DELEGATES. The Chamber of Commerce has appointed the following delegates to the Railroad Convention, to be held at Paola Friday, August 11, 1865. Maj. P. Shannon, R.T. Van Horn (and about 30 others0

On November 29, 1865 The Journal carried Governor Fletcher’s Thanksgiving Proclamation:

The coming month will close a year memorable in the annals of our country, and full of rich blessings, for which we should appropriately acknowledge our indebtedness to the Providence of God. The nation has triumphed in a struggle for its existence. The oppressed have been given liberty. The hallowed scenes of peace have succeeded the horrors of civil war, and while we mourn over our dead heroes, the living ones are returned to us. Abundant harvests have crowned the husbandman’s labors – the privilege of education and the benign influences of Christianity have been continued; we have been exempt from mortal plagues; prosperity has blessed the  marts of commerce; we are at peace with all the world; and the future is replete with promises as the present with blessings. Desiring to perpetuate the good customs of our fathers, I hereby designate Thursday the 7th day of December to be observed in the State of Missouri as a day of public thanksgiving and devout remembrance. I recommend that the people abandon for the day their usual avocations, and assembling in their places of worship, engage in such religious solemnities as to them shall seem expressive of the feelings of grateful hearts; and while we thus recognize and acknowledge the goodness of God, and render thanks and praise, let us not forget to share our abundance with the widow and orphans, and him who bears decrepitude for the nation’s sake.” Respectfully recommend that the foregoing proclamation of
Governor Fletcher be fully complied with by the citizens of Kansas City. Patrick Shannon, Mayor November 28, 1865.

For a school board election: Mayor’s Proclamation. Notice is hereby given that all placed within the city of Kansas where liquor or intoxicating drinks are disposed of by retail must be closed on this day (April 3rd) and remain closed from six o’clock in the morning, until after the polls are closed at night. Patrick Shannon, Mayor. April 3, 1866.

The Daily Missouri Republican of St. Louis reported on July 25, 1868, that the “delegates to the Sixth Congressional Convention, to be held August 19 1868, were:  S.D. Vaughn, C.H. Vincent, George W. Bryant, John Mayer, Patrick Shannon, S.S. Neeley, C.B.L.Boothe, G.W. Gates, J.P. Alexander, J.W. Tate.”

In Washington, Van Horn engineered the passage of a bill providing federal authorization of a Kansas City bridge. Opened in 1869, it came to be called the Hannibal Bridge. It “linked the cattle of the west with stockyards of Chicago” and led to a second population boom for the city.
Virginia Koogle:

“…While Mayor he (Patrick) secured a loan from some Eastern capitalists to open the streets of K.C.  He was also instrumental in securing the finances from a New York group (in competition with a group from Leavenworth) to build the Hannibal Bridge which brought the first train into K.C. from the East. It is said that Grandpa was a brilliant speaker of much charm and they gave him much credit for convincing the Easterners that K.C.  was the city in which to invest.”

THE TICKET. We present to the voters without distinction of party, a People’s Ticket for members of the School Board. Mr. Donnelly has private and good reasons why he should not serve. Mr. Donnelly is a Democrat and a Catholic. In supplying (their replacements) the committee have selected men of the same politics and religious beliefs, so as to avoid any charge of political or religious favoritism or bias. Maj. Shannon takes the place of Mr. Donnelly.” (Journal, December 24, 1869)

I’m not sure of the nature of Patrick’s political dispute with the School Board:  “Whereas, Patrick Shannon has signified to this Board his desire to cease any longer to act as one of its members, by sending his written resignation addressed Kansas City Board of Public Schools; The following is the resignation in question: Gentlemen: I hereby tender my resignation as a member of your Board, believing that said Board has ceased to have a legal existence. Respectfully, Patrick Shannon.”  (Daily Journal of Commerce, December 29, 1869.)  Henry Tobener was elected to fill the vacancy.

Patrick Shannon, the great merchant of Kansas City, announces himself a candidate for Sheriff of Jackson County. (Liberty Tribune, July 22, 1870) Patrick’s candidacy was short-lived; the election was held in November and he is not shown among the three vote-getters.

Workingmen – Their Meeting Last Night. The Court House was filled last night pursuant to a call for the rally of working men. The object of the meeting was the appointment of a committee of thirteen, representing different trades, which shall report a platform and nominations to a ticket to be run at the next election. Major Shannon being repeatedly called for, made a brief speech, his remarks being received with applause.” (Journal, October 21, 1870)

*

Patrick Shannon: The Irish and the Church

By early 1857, the parishioners of Father Roux’s small old log church felt the need for a new location – the existing church was “atop a high bluff and women complained of the fatigue of climbing the hill.” But it was money rather than chivalry that led Father Donnelly to act – his ten-acre patch had become a prime piece of real estate. A few months earlier, On October 9, 1856, Bernice Choteau had sold the eighty acres surrounding the church to Kersey Coates for $7,000, and it was to eventually become a high-class residential district called “Quality Hill,” by the early 1900’s the most fashionable and expensive neighborhood in Kansas City. Biographical accounts report that Donnelly sold the ten-acres on Quality Hill and used the proceeds “to raise money to build St. Teresa's Academy and the St. Joseph's Orphan Home.” The sale also reportedly provided the funds to purchase land at 22nd and Cleveland for Mt. St. Mary's Cemetery. Patrick Shannon was elected chairman of the fundraising committee for building a new church, and later that year the new brick Church of the Immaculate Conception (on the same ground and predecessor to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at 11th and Broadway, was completed. From Mary Eleanor’s 1902 obituary: (Patrick) was one of the founders of St. Theresa’s Academy (opened October 1866) and of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Their marriage in 1857 was the second celebrated in the Catholic Church. Mrs. Shannon was one of the founders of the church.

In December of that year Kansas City’s Irish held a Christmas Eve celebration. “Among the speakers was dry goods merchant Patrick Shannon who, it was noted, paid tribute to the Emerald Isle and the part her sons would play in the city.”

Any history of the early Irish Catholic community in Kansas City is incomplete if it doesn’t name Patrick Shannon as the city’s oldest and most prominent Irish Catholic citizen.  In the late 1850’s Patrick and Father Donnelly formed the Shamrock Benevolent Society, an outgrowth of the Shamrock Society, with Patrick installed as President and Donnelly as Secretary. Like many such organizations, the Society assisted immigrants in establishing roots in the city and provided a social outlet for them by sponsoring dances and other entertainments. (Such organizations collected minimal dues from their members, and when one of them died, the funds of the organization would be used to pay burial expenses.) The Society held numerous charitable functions activities over the years, all dutifully reported in the Journal, and Patrick was an active member up to the day he died.

His Honor, Mayor Shannon, yesterday received a single subscription of $50, from New York, for the furtherance of the erection of the proposed new convent in this city. Let the good work go on. (Journal June 14, 1865)

We learn that the work on the new convent has commenced. Father Donnelly is pressing the work with zeal and energy. Mayor Shannon, who is active and untiring in his efforts to provide for the educational facilities of this city, received quite a donation in money from New York yesterday to be applied in the building of a Convent. The Convent will be built. (Liberty Tribune, June 16, 1865)

A committee for the Fourth of July picnic benefitting Father Grosse’s new Catholic church was organized at Long’s Hall with Major Patrick Shannon being appointed President and Chief Marshall of the festivities. The committee included John Bauerlein, Capt. D.M. Jarboe, Mr. Grebe, Jos. J. Jarboe and several others. (Journal, June 30 1867)

FOURTH OF JULY. Grand Picnic for the Benefit of Father Grosse’s New Catholic Church. Order of Procession: The members of the Band will assemble at the Public Square at 8:30 o’clock, a.m. The pupils from the Convent and Catholic school and citizens will meet at the same time and placed to a2wait the arrival of visitors from Wyandotte and Independence. The committee appointed for that purpose will repair to the depot before the arrival of the trains at 9 o’clock, to receive and escort visitors to the Square, where a procession headed by His Honor, the Mayor of Kansas city, and other distinguished citizens, will be formed and move to the grove selected for the occasion. The line of March will be along Main street to Ottawa, thence west to Broadway, and thence south along Broadway to the grove. (etc.) By order, Patrick Shannon, President and General Marshall. (Journal, July 2 1867)

The Catholic picnic in Cook’s pasture was largely attended and heartily enjoyed. This grove is almost beautiful one, with green shade enough to keep off any amount of sunshine. Refreshment stands were plenty and the Kansas City Brass Band livened the festive scene with their best music. Eatables were in abundance and heartily relished. The rain in the afternoon prevented the Antelopes playing their match game of base ball. Every one seemed disposed to enjoy himself and let his neighbor do the same. (Journal, July 7 1867)

The imposing ceremony of laying the corner stone of the new German Catholic church, Sts. Peter and Paul, at 9th and McGee in this city took place on Sunday last, under the direction of Rev. B. Donnelly, assisted by Rev. Father Grosse, local German pastor of the city. The procession formed at the Catholic church at 4 p.n., and proceeded to the site of the new building, headed by the Kansas City Brass Band. This was one of the largest processions ever formed in this city, extending nearly from one church to the other, a distance of one mile. (Journal, August 13 1867)

The Catholic Festival. The Festival given by the Sisters of St. Joseph last night at Frank’s Hall, was well attended and the proceeds will be a handsome addition to their school fund. Mary Virginia Jarboe was “Post Mistress” of the Festival, and “we are also under obligations to Father Donnelly, Maj. Shannon, and Mrs. Charles M. Kendall for courtesies extended. The Sister’s school is one of the best in the city, and we are pleased to learn that it is in most flourishing condition.” (Journal, February 20 1868)

GRAND ROMAN CATHOLIC FAIR AND FESTIVAL. On the 29th, 30th and 31st of December, at Frank’s Hall for the benefit of Rev. Father Halpin’s new Catholic Church. TREASURERS: P. Shannon, John Gilday, John Brennan, Kansas City; COMMITTEE OF ARRANGEMENTS: D. Mullholland Jarboe, Hon. E.M. McGee, Hon. M.J. Payne, Hon. Charles E. Kearney, A.L. Harris, John Campbell, Kansas City; (Signed) Patrick Shannon, Treasurer. (Journal, December 29, 1868) This church was to be “Old St. Patrick’s,” the construction of which was liberally endowed by the Corrigan family.

ARCHBISHOP KENRICK’S VISIT TO KANSAS. The above distinguished and venerable prelate will be in out midst tomorrow. He will lay the cornerstone of Rev. Father Halpin’s new Church, corner of Court and McGee streets, on the afternoon of Sunday he will preach on the occasion. We understand that the Catholics of this city, regardless of nationality, intend to honor his visit by a grand procession on Sunday at 3:00 p.m. All should try and hear a man having a national reputation because of his talents, ability and sanctity of life. The following gentlemen have been appointed committee to arrange for the reception of Archbishop Kenrick: Messrs. Sweeney, Slater, Long, Bauerline, Shannon, Sage, Haire and Henn. A procession is expected to take place tomorrow, of which Major P. Shannon is Grand Marshal, with these gentlemen at his side: Messrs. Sweeney, Haire, Bauerline, Long, Henn, Tobin, Hillskemp, Slater, Dowd, Timmerman and English. (Journal, September 18, 1869)

Virginia Koogle: “Grandpa went often to New York often to greet the great Irish patriots who came over to America. He loved Ireland very much.” The following paragraph about the Young Ireland movement is excerpted from Irish Rebellions of the 1800s by Robert McNamara:

“A group of idealistic Irish nationalists formed the Young Ireland movement in the early 1840s. Members tended to be college educated. The political movement grew out of the intellectual atmosphere at Trinity College in Dublin (which at least one of the Shannon brothers attended). In 1848, Members of the Young Ireland movement began to consider an armed rebellion after one of its leaders, John Mitchel, was convicted of treason. Informers quickly tipped off the British authorities, and efforts to have Irish farmers assemble into a revolutionary armed force proved unsuccessful. Some leaders escaped to America, but most were convicted of treason and sentenced to transportation to penal colonies in Tasmania (from which some would later escape to America). The period following the uprising was marked by an increase in Irish nationalist fervor outside of Ireland itself. The many emigrants who had gone to America during the Great Famine harbored intense anti-British sentiment. A number of Irish leaders from the 1840s established themselves in the United States, and organizations such as the Fenian Brotherhood were created with Irish-American support. One veteran of the 1848 Rebellion, Thomas Francis Meagher, became the commander of the Irish Brigade during the American Civil War. Recruitment of Irish immigrants was often based on the idea that military experience could eventually be used against the British, whose government favored the Confederacy, back in Ireland. Following the war, the Fenians made several attempts to overthrow British rule, including an ill-considered raid by Irish-American veterans into Canada. A rebellion in Ireland in early 1867 was thwarted, and once again the leaders were rounded up and convicted of treason. Some of the Irish rebels were executed by the British, and the making of martyrs contributed greatly to Irish nationalist sentiment.” Donovan Rossa was an Irish Fenian leader and prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1865, he was put on trial for high treason and sentenced to penal servitude for life.

“The Committee on Arrangements for the reception of Mrs. O’Donovan Rossa and all desirous of ensuring success in her readings on next Tuesday evening are requested to meet at the Mayor’s office, Courthouse, this Tuesday evening, the 4th, at 7: o’clock. Mrs. O’Donovan Rossa is the wife of the proprietor of the Irish People’s newspaper, suppressed by the English government, and one of the most earnest and determined propagandists of revolutionary sentiments in his native land.  Let there be a full attendance. (Signed) Patrick Shannon, Chairman of Committee. (Journal, March 4, 1869)

“Mrs. O’Donovan Rossa. The lady is expected to arrive this morning, and will be the guest of Maj. Shannon. This afternoon, from two until five, those of our citizens who wish to pay their respects to the lady can do so at Maj. Shannon’s residence. (Journal, March 9, 1869)

“This gifted and beautiful Irish lady whose husband now languishes in a British prison, is becoming well known to our people.  The largest portion of the immense audience was composed of Irish citizens, and the “Wearing of the Green” was noticeable in many costumes.
Major Shannon and his wife, and Mayor Harris and daughter occupied the stage with her.”
(Journal, March 10, 1869)

“We, the undersigned, request the citizens of Kansas City, especially those of Irish birth or extraction, to assemble at the Court House on Tuesday evening, the 21st, for the purpose of selecting delegates to attend the Irish Immigration Convention to be held in the city of St., Louis on the 6th proximo. (24 signatures, including Patrick Shannon, B. Donnelly and Patrick Soden.) (Journal, September 16, 1869)

On July 1, 1871 the Irish Benevolent Society sponsored a 4th of July parade. Sheriff Jerry Dowd served as Grand Marshal, aided by Major Patrick Shannon and others.

“IRISH PATRIOTS. In pursuance of a resolution by a meeting of our Irish fellow citizens, held on yesterday, tending to the reception of the Irish patriots – Gen. Thomas Francis Bourke and Thomas Clark Luby – who are in a few days to visit our city, the following were unanimously appointed a special committee to wait on the above distinguished gentlemen upon their arrival: Thomas Haire, Capt. Michael Conlon, Maj. Patrick Shannon, Patrick Fay, Dennis O’Brien, John Ryan, Michael English, Patrick Reilly, John Donnelly, Thomas Burke, John Kelly, M. O’Dougherty, Capt. Jeremiah Dows. Pending the arrival of these two well known and tried patriots, committees have been appointed to select a suitable and fitting address of congratulations and welcome, all of which will appear in the columns of our press as soon as the arrival will be ascertained.“ (Journal, July 19, 1871)

Although Patrick isn’t mentioned in the following article, the Irish Benevolent Society conducted a grand St. Patrick’s Day parade, as reported by The Journal, March 18, 1871:

No brighter day ever was than yesterday, and the sunshine and pleasant breezes, and glorious weather were all propitious for the celebration of the birthday of the patron Saint or Ireland. At an early hour the streets were filled with the sons and daughters of Erin, and the three-leafed shamrock adorned many a manly bosom and loving warm-hearted woman. The members of the Irish Benevolent Society met at Ray’s Hall on Main Street, and were joined by the Washington Hose Company, and the Hook and Ladder Companies. The column was formed on Main Street, the right on Eighth, and preceded by Gifford’s Band, the procession moved up Main to Eighth; leaving Main, the column marched out Eighth to Grand avenue, North Grand Avenue to Seventh Street, East Seventh to Father Halpin’s Church, where an oration for the occasion was delivered by Rev. Father Walsh of St. Louis.(etc.)

In 1882 construction was begun on the new Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on the site of the old church.  The structure was completed by 1886 and the interior decoration completed by 1895. In 1912, German artisan James J. Wagner of the Kansas City Stained Glass Works Company was commissioned to create “sixteen new and elaborate pictorial windows, the first of their kind ever made in this city or in the West...these windows are called enamel glass which vary the color tones and create a more visually exciting image;” The first window on the west side, of St. Joseph with child, was dedicated in memory of Patrick Shannon (mistakenly identified as Patrick Corrigan in church records) by Bishop Thomas F. Lillis. The dedication of the window to Patrick signifies his importance as perhaps the most important lay Roman Catholic in Kansas City history.

Another of the windows was dedicated to Patrick Soden (Patrick was a fellow Cavanian to Patrick Shannon, born in 1830; after emigrating from Ireland he went to California in 1848 for the Gold Rush and then located to Kansas City around 1855, where with his brother Peter he amassed a huge fortune as a builder of streets, as real estate developers, and as building contractors for the Missouri Pacific Railway. Patrick served with Patrick Shannon in the 77th E.M.M.  (In 1956 Patrick Soden’s great-grandson, Jerome Francis Soden, married Patricia Marie Smith, the daughter of Marie Stewart Smith and great-granddaughter of Annie Virginia Shannon.) Another window was dedicated to Bernard Corrigan. Eleven bells in the church tower were the gift of Mrs. Thomas (Katie McGinley) Corrigan as a memorial to he late husband


Book of Shannon’s Dry Goods Co.

An artifact of the J & P Shannon store, handed down through the family, is a 116 page, 8 x 12” lined ledger and account book, titled “Book of Shannon’s Dry Goods Co.” Spanning the period September 20, 1870 to December 16, 1870, listed are about 800 credit transactions recorded in the ornate penmanship of the store’s clerks, Patrick Connell, John Connell, “Car” – likely Caroline Jarboe, Fred (probably Jarboe). Patrick’s ornamental initials appear in the journal twice. Each entry contains the name of the purchaser, items bought, individual prices, and totals.  The total amount of credit extended during the three-month period was $1,697.97, the equivalent of $17, 150 in 2012 dollars, which equates to over $333,000.00 today in purchasing power today.

Some of the Shannon’s customers:

Addison Snell – served with Patrick in the 77th E.M.M. and kept a saloon and billiard parlor on Main Street
Patrick Brady - policeman
James Brice – livery stable owner
Miss A.E. Brookins - schoolteacher
John P. Callahan – railroad engineer
Louis Hammerslough – retail rival of J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods
Crider – wholesale grocer at Main and Fourth Streets; took over Michael Dively’s store in 1868
Col. Crisp John T. Crisp – One of the leaders of the Missouri Confederate troops, fought at Wilson’s Creek
Mother de Pazzi – Operated a convent in St. Louis for 50 years and cared for indigent women and girls.
Mrs. William Diveley – Michael’s brother’s wife
John Gilday – Irish native who operated a wholesale and retail grocery at Third and Main
Madame Guinotte – Aimee Brichaut Guinotte from Brussels, married Joseph Guinotte
Rev. Mike Halpin – First pastor of “Old St. Patrick’s” but died before it was completed
A.L. Harris - mayor 1868, operated a saloon west side Main between Levee and Commerce
George Gaston –German caterer, served under McClellan in the Army of the Potomac
Mrs. R. Sachs - milliner at 540 Main Street
John Hayden – Town Marshall
Capt. A.T. Hoover - Wharfmaster
Jarboes – many transactions of the Jarboes are recorded
Mrs. John Johnson – David M. Jarboe’s mother in law, wife of the former Mayor
Mrs. Mahaffey – hotel operator
Edward Masuch – (pronounced “Ma-sook”) gunsmith at Main and Delaware
Col.. Edmund Pendleton Nicholson – lawyer, fought for the Confederacy in Hood’s Texas Brigade
Professor John Finis Phillips – Federal judge
E.W. Pierce – insurance broker at 2nd and Main
Thomas Ransom – one of KC’s earliest settlers and Justice of the Peace. In 1862, he was shot in an altercation with bushwhackers at 7th and Main.
Henry Seeger – jeweler, one of J. & P. Shannon’s first neighbors on the levee
Sisters of St. Joseph
Capt. J. H. Steger - Assistant Adjutant General of the Missouri State militia
David Street – cashier Watkins Bank
George Sweeney – wholesale grocer
Madame Troost – Mary Troost
Widows and Orphans – Home at 32nd and Locust founded in 1866.
Samuel Hughes Woodson – lawyer, judge and Congressman from Independence 1857-1861

Perhaps the most colorful customer shown in the J. & P. Shannon account book was “Belle Starr,” who visited the store several times with her father, Judge J.K. Shirley. On November 25, 1870, she purchased “1 Hoop Skirt” for $1.00; she returned on November 29th for “3/4 yard Blue Ribbon for 1 invisible Hair net.”  

“The Confederacy had many proficient spies. One of the best known was Myra Belle Shirley, the daughter of a Missouri judge, John Shirley. Because she went under the alias of Belle Starr, historians have often confused her with another Belle Starr, the murderous woman outlaw. Frank and Jesse James had gone to a private school with Myra Belle Shirley...A diehard Confederate, Jesse James vowed to fight on, but was wounded and imprisoned in Columbus, Mississippi. . . . Jesse said, 'Chief, God willing we'll go to Carthage, Missouri. To old Judge John Shirley's house where Myra Belle will nurse me back to health. She's done it before and she'll probably do it again.' Myra Belle put him to bed and he slept for two days. . . . Myra Belle was Jesse W. James' first and only true love. It would be nice to say they lived happily ever after, but this was not the case."  When in Kansas City, Jesse James stayed the Doggett House, a family hotel on West Sixth Street between Walnut Street and Grand Avenue.
 
The Shannon brother’s wives and children:

John Shannon married Felicite Padron in New Orleans. Their children were: Felicite (1855 in New Orleans, married George E Kinser); Mary Elizabeth (1856, married William Sutherland of Denver); John Felix (1858, married Sallie Strett in 1882); James Jacob Vincent (1860, died at age 3); Alfred Edward (1861), Ferdinand (1863) and Rose Teresa (1865). (Mary Eleanor Shannon was baptismal sponsor for Ferdinand and Rose Teresa.) On August 19 1867, Felicite remarried to Major Maximillian Rudolf William Grebe:

“… who had served in the Prussian Army in the King’s Hanoverian Guard Hussars. He was promoted to first lieutenant and was so serving when the American Civil War began. In 1862, he came to America, having been granted leave of absence with half pay to serve in the Union Army. This was common practice throughout the war. The Union Army attracted well-trained, professional officers who, in turn, gained valuable combat experience. Grebe went to St. Louis where he was appointed Second Lieutenant of Troop I, 4th Missouri Cavalry. On July 22 1864, when Union cavalry under General J. B. McPherson was attacked,  Grebe charged into the melee, his enthusiasm and aggressiveness inspiring the troops around him to the extent they not only rallied to regain lost ground but actually put the enemy in complete rout. Although wounded in both legs, Grebe captured the color bearer and colors of one of the Confederate regiments.  Ordered to the rear for medical treatment, Grebe remained on the field, carrying out his duties throughout the remainder of the action. The deed for which he later received the Medal of Honor occurred at Jonesboro, Georgia on August 31, 1864. Grebe, all the while exposed to the terrific fire of both sides, swam his horse across the Flint River to deliver orders to a Union regiment that was vitally needed to reinforce a threatened section of the main line of battle. After guiding the regiment into position, he took up the rifle of a casualty, assumed a place in the ranks and played a conspicuous part in repulsing the enemy’s attack.” Grebe was buried will full military honors at Mt. St. Mary’s.

Patrick and Mary Eleanor Jarboe Shannons children were: Mary “Mamie” Lydia Anne (September 10 1858, baptismal sponsors William Jarboe and Bridget Connell; she married Bernard Corrigan); Joseph Patrick (September 2 1860, died April 3, 1861.  Baptismal sponsors were Joseph Reilly and Bridget Reilly); Caroline Bridget Shannon (baptized February 2 1862. Baptismal sponsors were John Shannon and Susanna Machette); Susan Rose (September 15,1864, married Matthew Sheldon Porter on December 27 1886) Felix (born November 26, 1866, died in infancy, baptized December 2 1866, sponsors Patrick Connell and Mary Padron); Anna Virginia (July 15 1869, married Leo J. Stewart on April 20 1886).

Anna died April 20, 1896 at 27 years of age. Her daughter Marie Stewart Smith:

“I remember very little of my mother except that she and my father were sweethearts until the day she died. She was ill a great deal of the time as she had 6 pregnancies in 8 years, a premature boy, and she died about 5 months pregnant of uremic poisoning during the worst winter and the deepest snows ever I do believe in this area. I was in the midst of an appendix attack and the other three in various stages of Scarlet Fever. So the house was quarantined and I can remember what a time the hearse and the carriages had getting up to the curb.”

Philip Shannon and Elizabeth Rogers were married October 12 1862 in St. Joseph.  He died September 11 1866 ----.  Their children: Michael (1863) Catherine Louise (born August 25, 1864, died June 21st, 1865; Johanna Aloysia “Jennie” (December 17, 865); Philip (April 22 1867)

The old Catholic cemetery at Eleventh Street and Pennsylvania stood “twenty five feet above the graded site of beautiful homes.” Interments at John Francis Regis Cemetery were recorded by Fr. Bernard Donnelly:

Shannon, Mary Ellen October 1, 1857   Age two years
Jarboe, Emily Jane Febru6 18, 1859 Age one year
Shannon, Patrick Joseph April 3, 1861 Age 7 months, 3 days
Shannon, James July 11, 1863 Age 3 years, six months
Shannon, Alfred James J. September 2, 1864 Age 2 years
Jarboe, Frederick Louis September 10, 1864 Age 2 years, 4 months, 4 days
Jarboe, Mary Josephine September 10, 1864 Age 1 year, 3 months, 26 days
Shannon, Rose Teresa August 1, 1866 Age 10 months, 23 days

Patrick Shannon’s gravesite has not been found. Presumably, on his death in 1871 he was buried at the St. John Francis Regis Cemetery, which Father Donnelly closed in 1873; all the graves were supposedly disinterred and moved over the next several years to St. Mary’s at 22nd and Cleveland. Father Donnelly wrote: “The original graveyard was but a small one fenced by oak pickets, dressed by the axe, sharpened at the upper end and stuck close together uprightly in the ground and enclosing less than half an acre. About the year 1858 the property in the neighborhood was laid off in lots and streets extended. At this period I extended the cemetery on all sides so as to be bounded on the north by 11th Street and on the east by Pennsylvania Avenue, on the west by Jefferson Street, and on the South by 12th Street, making a square of 270 feet. I was obliged to put up new fences on all sides at this period. I sold a few family lots at $2.50 each a few more at $5.00 each, and more recently a few $10.00 lots. The sale of these secured me the means of putting up the new fences.” During excavation for new construction on Quality Hill in the 1980s, several graves, complete with rosary beads and casket fragments, were found.

Mt. St. Mary’s contains a Shannon family area of a dozen or more plots. There is a gravestone marked “Patrick Shannon,” but cemetery records document that it is the final resting place for Patrick and Mary Eleanor’s two young sons, removed from the church cemetery during its relocation. There is no official record confirming that Patrick Sr. is buried there.  The archivist at the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese suggested to me that flooding at some point had washed the old cemetery away, with “caskets floating away,” but the next major flooding after Patrick’s death was in 1903, thirty years after St. John Francis Regis had closed, and damage from that flood was confined to the lower ground of the West Bottoms.

In August 1963 Anna’s daughter wrote to a family member: “St. Mary’s cemetery…Grandpa Patrick Shannon who is buried in the part of the place set aside for those who served in the Civil War (the Home Guard) as Aunt Carrie said he was known as Major Shannon.” But, in another letter dated January 1965, she writes that she believed Patrick to have been buried at Union Cemetery, not Mt. St. Mary’s; “I remember so well, as a child, going with some older cousins to a particular spot on Decoration Day to put flowers on his grave and all the many in rows had small American flags on them.”

  In August, 1889, the Sexton's cottage at Union Cemetery caught fire, destroying all the cemetery records. This was “a major loss as many graves were identified by wooden or limestone markers which were destroyed by weather, leaving hundreds of unmarked and undocumented graves.” What has been reconstructed of the estimated 55,000 graves in the cemetery show no record of Patrick Shannon, although it is worth noting that several of Patrick’s associates are buried there: George Caleb Bingham, William Chick, Michael Diveley, Robert Van Horn, John Campbell and William Gillis. Jesse Riddlesbarger purchased a plot a Union Cemetery, but is buried elsewhere.

*

Although Patrick continued to operate the store (and even move to the new location at 3rd and Main, which he subsequently expanded) I haven’t found any advertisements after 1870. This notice appears in the Journal on October 11, 1869:
 
“Notice of final settlement. All creditors and others interested in the estate of the late firm of P.&.P. Shannon are notified that the undersigned surviving partner, and, as such, administrators of the partnership effects of said firm, intends to make a final settlement of said partnership estate at the next term of the Probate court of Jackson County, to be holden (sic) at Independence in said county, on the third Monday in November A.D. 1869. Patrick Shannon, Administrator as surviving partner. Kansas City, Mo Oct. 11, 1869”

John died in 1865, and Philip died in September of 1866; presumably, the “P. & P. Shannon” partnership refers to the surviving partners Patrick and Philip. My surmise is that the three brothers, throughout the life of the store, were equal partners in business; when John died, the ownership was formally amended. Since no advertisements or references for the store have surfaced past 1870, Patrick may have closed the store that year. With both his brothers dead and no sons to eventually take over the business, he just may well have decided to retire from the pressures of business.

From a later biography of John Felix Shannon:  “…At his father's (John Shannon’s) death, the financial situation of the family was easy, as the estate was quite large, but it was gradually absorbed by litigation and by the time John Felix was a man, the money was gone.”

Bernard Corrigan

Bernard, 29, married Patrick and Mary Eleanor’s oldest child, Mary Lydia “Mamie” Shannon, 16, on May 3, 1876.

In 1880, the Shannon household on Pearl Street consisted of Mary Eleanor, Carrie 18, Rose 15, Annie, 11, as well as daughter Mary (Mamie), 21, and her husband Bernard Corrigan, 31, and their children John and Edward. Shortly thereafter Corrigan built a large house at 1701 Summit, on Jarboe property.  

 From Bernard’s biography by Daniel Coleman:

“Once called “the biggest man that Kansas City ever knew,” Bernard Corrigan dominated the local construction industry, streetcar system, and city government during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earning millions as a building contractor. He was born into a prosperous Irish-Canadian farming family near Quebec, on August 15, 1847.  In 1868, he followed his eldest brother, John, to Kansas City.  Brothers Thomas, Edward, and Patrick joined them, and the brothers went to work cutting streets through the limestone bluffs on which the frontier town had been platted.  Soon the legendary physical strength of the “Corrigan boys” was matched by the political influence they wielded as contractors who could deliver the votes of their many employees.

“They purchased seven of the eight horse-drawn streetcar lines that traversed Kansas City in 1875.  With Bernard Corrigan serving as a police commissioner, the brothers’ influence spread to the ranks of the police department, which they peopled with Corrigan railway and construction veterans.  However, when they attempted to use political influence to protect their streetcar monopoly, they drew the ire of Kansas City newspaper publisher William Rockhill Nelson.  Nelson used his recently founded Kansas City Star as a platform to rally the public against what he called the “Shameless Eight,” city council members supporting a 30-year city railway franchise to the Corrigans.

“Over the next 15 years, Bernard Corrigan completed numerous construction projects throughout the South and West.  As a railroad builder, he completed the entire Kansas City Southern line and portions of the Denver & Rio Grande and three other railroads. He built a large viaduct in Dallas and a hydroelectric dam across the Colorado River near Austin.  He owned Kansas City’s largest hotel, Hotel Baltimore.  


Mary “Mamie” Lydia Shannon Corrigan, the first child of Patrick Shannon and Mary Eleanor Jarboe, died at age 36 on February 2, 1894 at her home at 1701 Summit of Bright’s Disease ( nephritis.) Mrs. Corrigan was “a woman of most lovable character who was attended by an unusually wide circle of friends.”

Kansas City Star, February 3 1894:

MRS. BERNARD CORRIGAN DEAD. DEATH CAME YESTERDAY AFTERNOON.
“After an Illness of five weeks. Mrs. Mamie Corrigan, wife of Bernard Corrigan, whose illness was announced in the Star yesterday, died at 3:30 o’clock in the afternoon. She had been unconscious since the forenoon. Mrs. Corrigan had been ill about five weeks but she had been about the house until Wednesday, and not until twenty-four hours before her death was her condition dangerous. The funeral will be held at 9 o’clock Monday morning at the cathedral on West Eleventh Street. The Rev. Father Glennon and other priests will conduct solemn requiem mass.
Mrs. Corrigan was Miss Mamie Shannon, daughter of Patrick Shannon, who was mayor of Kansas City in 1865. She married Mr. Corrigan about eighteen years ago when she was almost 17 years old. Her father was a dry goods merchant with a store on the levee. He died many years ago. Her mother was at her deathbed yesterday. Mrs. Corrigan had two married sisters – Mrs. Shell Porter of Michigan and Mrs. Cowgill (sic) wife of a stockman in Texas. A third sister was Miss Annie Shannon who was also with her when she died. John Shannon, Comptroller of Kansas City, was of the same family and was a cousin of Mrs. Corrigan.
Mr. and Mrs. Corrigan had nine children, the oldest John, being 16 years of age, and the youngest an infant. Edward was the second child and Bernard the third, and they, with John, have been attending St. Marys college at St. Mary’s Kansas. They did not reach the city yesterday until 5 o’clock, and twenty minutes later the three bright boys entered their home at 1701 Summit Street, not knowing that their mother had died an hour before. A black, somber looking wagon was standing in the street before the house, but the words “J.C. Duffy Undertaker” were painted upon the side in small letters and the boys had not noticed them, so they met their great misfortune in their own house. The fourth child was lost, the fifth Mamie, and then came Justine, Emmett, Rosie and the baby. Mrs. Corrigan had been seriously ill so short a time that the news of her death caused great surprise. Only the most intimate friends of the family learned of the illness early yesterday so there were few callers at the house until late in the day. Among the first who came after death were Hugh McGowan and Patrick O’Rourke, long friends of the family. They had been there earlier in the day and found Mr. Corrigan suffering the greatest sorrow. The family had been told early in the day that th end was not far. Mr. Corrigan was overcome with grief. His was a happy home. Those who knew the family best say happiness was there always. A kind mother, always first attentive to family duties, mingling little in society, Mrs. Corrigan was aided by a husband who loved his family greater than anything else. Sorrow is expressed everywhere and Mr. Corrigan has the deepest sympathy of all who know him.”

Bernard and Mamie had nine children: John T. (1877-1928; married Clara ?; they lived at 5315 Charlotte) Edward J. (1879-1948; married Maud Murray); Bernard Jr. (1887-1907; married Gladys Jones on June 22 1907 but  died five months later of typhoid fever) Rose Catherine (1882-1962) married William A. Murray of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Mamie (1885-1941) married Howard A. Austin on November 28 1906; they lived at 4556 Walnut in Kansas City;  Justina (1887) married Oliver Ward Clay on September 4 1907; Emmett (1888-?) operated the Kansas City-Midland Coal Company; for fifteen years he played for and sponsored a baseball team comprised of coal miners from Novinger, a small coal-mining town in Adair County, Missouri; he married Celia Polovich;    Elizabeth “Bessie” married Robert Salembier of New York and Helen (b. 1892) died of tuberculosis at the age of 22; she had lived with her sister Justina and her husband at 3520 Cherry.)

Four years after Mamie’s death, Corrigan remarried to Harriet Foute (1868-1914) the daughter of Green J. Fout and Fannie Jarboe of Maryland; she was a descendant of John Baptist Jarboe Jr, son of the emigrant ancestor Lt. Col. John Jarboe whom he married in 1898 and who survived him.” With her, he fathered an additional eleven children.
   
Marie Stewart Smith:

“Uncle Bernard always seemed delighted to welcome us, he was then owner and manager of the Metropolitan Street Railways. He also owned the Hotel Baltimore and the ground on which it stood at 11th & Baltimore, also part of Peck’s store and ground. He was one of the few millionaires in Kansas City. At the Corrigans, there were always swarms of children of all ages and sizes from college down to cradle, the 5 older girls were all graduates of Maryville in St. Louis. We always had a great time those Sundays at the Corrigans (1701 Summit), stayed for Sunday supper and the dining room table stretched from the dining room through the living room and then some.”

 Bernard was never able to enjoy what might have been his greatest construction project—the 20-room mansion Louis Curtiss designed for him at the northwest corner of 55th and Ward Parkway in Kansas City.  Although today a celebrated architectural landmark, the residence was not completed until after Corrigan’s death and never got to occupy it.”

Bernard’s funeral was reported in the Kansas City Star of January 9, 1914:

FUNERAL OF BERNARD CORRIGAN. A Crowd, Unable to Get in, Stood Outside in the Cold During the Service. Men and women who could not get into the cathedral to the funeral of Bernard Corrigan this morning stood on the steps and pavement in from all through the ser5vices, although a sharp wind was sweeping Eleventh Street. The cathedral had been packed nearly an hour before the services began. Lines of policemen kept a way clear for the cortege to enter and reserved seats in the center of the cathedral for the 124 members and relatives of the Corrigan family. The rocking chair in which Mr. Corrigan used to sit in his home, completely entwined and covered with flowers, was among the floral pieces. Another was a full-sized floral pattern of a broken car wheel. In this there were two thousand carnations and many orchids. It was sent by the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. There were so many flowers that they almost filled the wide space in front of the chancel rail. The solemn pontifical mass of requiem was celebrated by Bishop Thomas F. Lillis, with Father Francis Tieg as assistant; the Rev. J.T. Walsh and the Rev. John W. Keyes, deacons of honor; the Rev. John J, Downey, deacon of the mass; the Rev. William Roels, subdeacon; the Rev. William Keuenhof, master of ceremonies, and the following priests: (seventeen priests named). The chimes in the cathedral tower, a gift of Mrs. Thomas Corrigan, sister in law of Bernard Corrigan, pealed the Miserere and Ile Profundia before and after the services. The sermon was preached by Bishop Lillis. The bishop said the crowning glories of Mr. Corrigan’s life were his Christian walk and his abiding love for his family, his home and home life. It was refreshing in these times of disorder to see a man who made such a success in life stand out always for the virtues of the home. “He died in the faith of Christ,” the bishop said. “He loved his church as he loved his life and his family and home, and now the prayers and benedictions of the church go with him to the grave and beyond, and this highest act of man’s worship, the sacrifice of the mass, is offered for the repose of his soul.” The bishop asked all to pray for the soul of the departed. Burial was in the Corrigan family lot in Mr. St. Mary’s Cemetery.

January 10, 1914, Kansas City Star:

MR, CORRIGAN LEFT NO WILL. ESTATE VALUED AT 1 ½ MILLION. WIDOW TO TAKE CHILD’S SHARE.  The late Bernard Corrigan left an estate valued at a million and a half dollars, but apparently left no will. Members of the family were searching for such a document today, but believed none had been left. The remaining million will be divided among the fourteen living children equally, a share of $71,428 to each child. Mrs. Corrigan may pursue one of two courses in claiming a share of the estate. The dowry interest would entitle her to the income from one-third of the estate for life; a child’s part, in this case, would amount to one-fifteenth of the estate outright. It was said this morning that it was probable Mrs. Corrigan would elect to take a child’s share.  A meeting of those intimately concerned in the Corrigan estate is being held this afternoon at the home of the probate judge, J.E. Guinotte, who is ill at his home. Among Mr. Corrigan’s holdings were a half interest in the Baltimore Hotel. The other half is owned by the heirs of (his late brother) Thomas Corrigan. Mr. Corrigan also owned a new home in the Sunset Hill addition valued at about $125,000; the home at Seventeenth and Summit streets valued at $60,000 and a block of apartments at Thirteenth and Washington streets valued at $75,000. The Corrigan estate also owned the Baltimore Avenue frontage of fifty feet occupied by the George H. Peck Dry Goods Company. He had bank stocks, other holdings in Kansas city and property in San Antonio, Texas, worth $40,000.
*

The Later Years


David M. Jarboe and his wife, the former Emily Hoagland had been married in 1854 and had two children. Their younger son Charles, at age 22, married Ada Thomas, 18, on November 10, 1885. The couple had one female child stillborn (date unknown) and a daughter, Agnes.

 On February 21 1884, David made his will, leaving the bulk of his substantial estate to Emily and their son John F. Jarboe. Charles’ sad story is told in the will: (abridged)

“I give my son, John F. Jarboe, the remaining one undivided third of all my real estate in trust, and direct that out of the profits he shall purchase for Charles* A. Jarboe, my youngest son, two suits of suitable clothing a year and either pay to the said Charles A. Jarboe $25 a month in money, or use that amount per month in paying his board. I direct that whenever, in the opinion of my son John, that my son Charles A. has reformed and is capable of taking care of and using the same for proper purposes, he shall give to him, the said Charles A. Jarboe, $1,000. I direct that, at any time within one year after my said son Charles A. shall have received the $1,000, he shall by his attention to business or general conduct and behavior convince my son John Jarboe that he will not squander or waste the same, then he shall convey to him, Charles A. Jarboe, all the undivided one-third of my real estate and all real estate, if any, which may have been purchased by moneys arising either from the sale or growing out of the rents and profits of said real estate, and also turn over to him all moneys or securities in his hands arising from the same.”

David died in 1886 and the provisions of his will were carried out. Charles Jarboe died March 21, 1891 at age 27. His cause of death was listed as locomotor ataxia, the “inability to precisely control one's own bodily movements.” Persons so afflicted may walk in a jerky, nonfluid manner.  The disease is most often a symptom of tabes dorsalis, which is a key finding in tertiary syphilis.  Ada subsequently contested David’s will. The court concluded said Charles, in the opinion of the trustee, never reformed, and never became capable of taking care of, or using for proper purposes, any of the property conditionally left him by his father.  The Court denied Ada’s petition for a share of the estate.

*

The 1889 Kansas City directory shows Mary E. Shannon, widow of Patrick, living at 1347 E. 10th Street. The 1900 census enumerates Mary Shannon 62, head of household, with two of her daughters and their children: Carrie B. Koogle 37, and Mary, Anna V., and Harry J.; Rose S. Porter 35, Mable R Porter, 9, Marguerite M Porter, 6, and Justine Porter, 3. Carrie and her husband, William Carleton “Bill” Koogle, a buffalo hunter from a distinguished family in Maryland and owner of a large cattle ranch in Texas (and still later a miner in Utah) had separated about 1889, and Carrie had returned with her three children from Clarendon, Texas to stay with Mary Eleanor. Carrie and Bill’s third and last child, Harry Joseph, was born April 22, 1889 at 1347 E. 10th Street. Carrie appears in the Kansas City directory in 1899, living with Mary Eleanor at 3117 Holmes Street.  She was then 36 years old and was listed in the directory as the “widow of Wm. C.” Bill Koogle, however, was alive and mining in Utah in 1899; he returned to Texas died in Clarendon in 1915. Carrie and her children were to live at 3117 Holmes for the next seven years. Rose had married Matthew Sheldon “Shel” Porter, a druggist, miner and player/manager for one of Kansas City’s first professional baseball teams, the Unions. The couple had separated at some point as well, and Porter went on the make a substantial amount of money mining zinc in the Carthage, Missouri area. He was back in Kansas City in the 1890’s, but then all traces of him disappear and he may have died in Mexico, according the family records.

On April 21, 1902, Mary Eleanor “Mollie” Shannon, aged 66, daughter of Joseph and Lydia Clements Jarboe Jr. and wife of Patrick Shannon for 14 years until his death in 1871, died at her home at 3112 Holmes Street.

 From the Kansas City Star

“Mary E Shannon No More. One of the City’s Oldest Residents and Wife of Patrick Shannon, Mayor. Mary Eleanor Shannon, widow of Patrick Shannon, Kansas City mayor and one of the oldest residents in the city, died of pneumonia last night at her home 3117 Holmes after an illness of but little over a week.  She had been ill for about a week. She was born in 1837 on a large farm founded in the southwest part of the city by her father Joseph Jarboe Jr., one of the earliest settlers in this part of Jackson County. The first telegram ever sent from Kansas City was to Father Bernard Donnelly at Independence, summoning him to the Jarboe farm to administer Extreme Unction to Mrs. Shannon’s mother, Lydia Ann Clements Jarboe, when on her deathbed.

“She lived here all her life. Her husband has been dead for thirty years. He was Patrick Shannon, a cousin of Gen. Phil. Sheridan. Patrick Shannon came to Kansas City when it consisted of a group of cottages clustered around a corner grocery. He was active in the up-building of the city and conducted for many years one of the first dry goods stores in Kansas City. He was mayor of Kansas City 1864-1865, and for some time a member of the Board of Education. Mr. Shannon bought the Riddlesbarger mansion at Second and Walnut, the first brick house built in Kansas City, when its owner was banished to St. Louis early in the war (this is an error. Philip Shannon bought the mansion from Riddlesbarger; Patrick and Mary Eleanor and their children moved into it after Philip’s death in 1866) and lived there until all their children were grown. In the days of war it was a favorite meeting place for many well-known men From it their oldest daughter Mrs. (Mary Lydia) Bernard Corrigan, who died eight years ago, was married. Three of Mrs. Shannon’s children survive. They are Carrie N. Koogle, Mrs. Rose S. Porter and Mrs. Leo J. (Anna Virginia) Stewart, all residents of Kansas City. Mrs. Shannon has one sister, Mrs. (Caroline E.) William White, and a brother, Samuel Jarboe.”

Marie Stewart Smith, Anna and Leo Stewart’s daughter, remembers Mary Eleanor:

“I remember her slightly as a tall, slender gentle woman and I certainly thought she was beautiful, maybe because I loved her. But she certainly had four beautiful daughters…she also had a son Phillip (sic) who died at 12 years of age and an infant son who died at birth or shortly thereafter so no one was left to carry on the Shannon name…I remember my grandmother Shannon’s funeral and how she was “laid out” in the middle of their parlor at 3117 Holmes Street where she lived with Aunt Carrie and her three and Aunt Rose and her three children. I thought all the while they were left widows while very young, come to find out they were both left…period.  That’s how come I never knew their married names.”

“We visited back and forth constantly from our home at 707 Olive Street, and many summers all five girls spent the summer with us. It was father’s (Leo J. Stewart) was of helping his sister-in-laws.”

“She was only sick about 24 hours. Caught pneumonia going to Benediction at St. Vincent’s Chapel on Sunday afternoon. Died six o’clock Sunday night. “Just breathed out her life like a candle going out,” no suffering. Received Holy Communion at three o’clock. When Father came to administer it, Mamma said her face lit up like the sun was on it and whispered “Oh, he knows what I want.”

Virginia Koogle: “The early records of K.C. land grants and other properties were destroyed in a fire of the early building that held the records. That is one reason Grandma was never able to do much about the property she was cheated out of. She should have been one of the richest women in K.C. She was a poor businesswoman as Grandpa always took care of that. After his death she rented her home (Pearl Street) while the sisters of the convent came and took her and the children, including Anna who was a baby, to the convent.  Grandma was very ill after Grandpa’s death and never did recover her health.  Mamma said the Mother of the convent wanted Grandma to give her a deed to the home and that she would rear all of the children, Mamma (Mamie was at Sacred Heart in St. Louis), Aunt Rose and your darling Mother (Carrie.)”

The convent Virginia refers to must be the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, operated by the Sisters of Mercy, at 510 E. 6th Street. Attached to the convent were a “40-room boarding house for young ladies and a house of industry.”

On August 14, 1916, John Shannon’s widow, the former Felicite Padron of New Orleans, died. From the August 16, 1916 Kansas City Star:

“The Best Dressed Woman in Kansas City Sixty Years Ago. There are few women, even in this day when women’s sphere is as wide as the horizon, with more interests, more varied and accomplished, more diverse, than those of Mrs. Felicite H. Grebe; none whose personality has won them a more distinct place in the social and musical and religious life of the community. Felicite Heloise Padron, the daughter of Vincent Anastasio and Marie Antoinette Angelica DeJan Padron, was born in New Orleans and General Beauregard, of Confederate fame, was a near relative. Mrs. Grebe married John Shannon in New Orleans, Louisiana. They later moved to Kansas City, Missouri and John opened up the firm of J. & P. Shannon Brothers. The Shannon store, at Main Street and Levee, was the big store of Kansas City. Mr. Shannon died about sixty years ago, and several years later, his widow was married to Major W. R. Grebe. Major Grebe had resigned a lieutenancy in the German Army and came to America in 1862. He enlisted in the Fourth Missouri Regiment and rose rapidly, until he became a Major. After her marriage to Major Grebe they lived in Kansas City for several years. Mrs. Grebe was a leader in the musical circles of the city. She was organist of the only Catholic Church in the city, and was a vocalist of note. Her social activities were synonymous with the social life of the city.”

Susan “Rose” Shannon Porter died at 74 on June 8, 1939 in Long Beach, California. Jennie Aloysia Shannon, John and Felicite’s last child died, unmarried, on September 12, 1938 at her home at 3109 Tracy in Kansas City.

Bingham’s Order No. 11 and Shannon’s Dry Goods
 
George Caleb Bingham (1811 – 1879) is most famous as an artist for his paintings of bucolic life along the Missouri River and today his work sells well into the millions of dollars.  Bingham also had an exceptional career in Missouri politics, and he and Patrick Shannon had been military and political allies since as early as 1861. Bingham served in Robert Van Horn’s militia unit, numerous civic and state government positions, and was Kansas City’s first police chief.

I am indebted to Joan Stack, Ph.D., Curator of Art Collections at The State Historical Society of Missouri, for correcting my errors related to Bingham’s political views in an earlier version of this text. She writes:

“…Bingham supported the federal government’s right to restrict the expansion of slavery. In 1856 he supported free-soiler J. C. Fremont for president, and by that time one can document that he was anti-slavery, anti-Kansas Nebraska Act and anti-border ruffian (he was a gradual emancipationist, not an abolitionist, however). He was sympathetic with the Republicans and supported John Bell and the Constitutional Unionists in the election of 1860. After Lincoln’s election, he solicited for a job in the Lincoln administration… After the war Bingham became disillusioned with the corruption and abuses of power by Radical Republicans and joined the Democratic party. He was never, however sympathetic with Confederates or secession, and always qualified his support of Democrats, insisting he would never support ‘rascals.’” Stack’s recent fascinating article on Bingham’s Order No. 11, “Toward an Emancipationist Interpretation of George Caleb Bingham’s General Order No. 11: The Reception History of the Painting and the Remembered Civil War in Missouri” can be found in the Missouri Historical Review.

 Bingham’s pro-Union allegiance was tested when General Thomas Ewing commandeered the studio building he owned in Kansas City to hold captured female relations of pro-Confederate guerrillas. That building collapsed on the prisoners (see Chapter 6) and sparked William Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence. Bingham was outraged at Ewing’s Order No. 11. He called it an “an act of imbecility” and insisted that the real culprits behind  the depredations committed in western Missouri and eastern Kansas were not the pro-Confederate bushwhackers, but rather pro-Union Jayhawkers and "Red Legs"  operating under Ewing’s protection.

In an oft-repeated tale, Bingham “went to Ewing's headquarters at the Pacific Hotel at 4th and Delaware in Kansas City and demanded he rescind Order No. 11.  Ewing refused, and as Bingham departed, he is said to have warned: “If you persist in executing that order, I will make you infamous with pen and brush."

Professor Stack, however, has traced the source of that quote and writes: “The story about Bingham confronting and threatening Ewing in 1863 is apocryphal, first appearing in a footnote to a Bingham letter published in 1936. There is no evidence that Bingham ever met with Ewing at the time Order No. 11 was issued.”

In November 1865, from his studio in Independence, Bingham began a painting he called “Civil War: as realized in the Desolation of Border Counties of Missouri during the operation of ‘General Order No. 11,’ issued by Brigadier General Ewing, from his Head Quarters, Kansas City, August 25, 1863 (1865–1870).” Commonly known as Order No. 11, the painting was Bingham's last major work, at six and a half feet by four and a half feet. It wasn’t completed until May1868:

“…we are allowed to look away out into the distance and see the funeral-like processions of people wending their way across the plains, and the fires and clouds of smoke outlining themselves against the horizon. The main light falls upon a family group out-of-doors near their home. A crowd of Red Legs is close behind them, and astride a horse in the center of the group is Ewing himself, complacently supervising his troops as they expel the family from their home.  A Kansas Red Leg has just murdered a young man in cold blood and another is about to shoot the elderly head of the family, who with clinched fist and enraged face is pouring forth his indignation upon the perpetrators. His daughter clings to his neck, begging him to submit rather than lose his life; A little grandson tugs at his leg, realizing that something is wrong though he cannot understand it all, while another daughter kneels before the officer, praying for her father's life. The mother has fainted in the nurse's arms, the young wife has fallen upon the dead body of her husband, and to the extreme right two terrified negro servants hurry away. The house is being pillaged by Union soldiers, one of whom bears a likeness to Colonel Charles Jennison. The soldiers are stripping the house of its furnishings, piling their wagons high with their pillage.”

From the Kansas City Times in 1939:

“On the southwest corner of Third and Main in senile disintegration stands the home of Kansas City’s first dry goods store – the “J & P Shannon Emporium” which imported Irish linens, foreign silks and dress goods from the far east. The store occupied the first floor.  In the rooms overhead George Caleb Bingham lived (the 1871 city directory shows Bingham, “portrait painter,” Main, southwest corner Third) and it was here, in March of 1870, under a canopy erected on the roof of the back part of the house, that he painted his last copy of his famous Order No. 11, on an Irish linen table cloth purchased from the Shannon store. Thousands of copies were circulated throughout the South. “(The Star articles confirm the family lore passed on by Virginia Koogle, with the exception that the tablecloth wasn’t purchased by Bingham, but that Patrick Shannon gave it to him.)



A photograph labeled “Bingham’s studio above Shannon’s store 1870” was displayed by the Nelson Atkins Museum at a 2011 retrospective of Bingham’s works.  The first version of Order No. 11, painted at Independence, is in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum; the second rendition,  painted above the Shannon store and shown here, is owned by the State Historical Society of Missouri which acquired it in 1945 for $9,000. It was valued in 2011 at “multiple millions of dollars” and was loaned, for the first time in 50 years, to the Truman Library in 2011 for its bicentennial exhibit observing Bingham’s birth. The society’s director said at the time that the painting was “the most significant piece of art that we have.” The Society has acknowledged the Shannon connection with the painting.







.
The Mayor’s Portrait Gallery



  A July 14, 1963 article in the Kansas City Times tells of the 1937 relocation of City Hall to the new building at 12th and Oak:  “Photographs of the city’s mayors had been displayed outside the old City Manager’s office, but were discarded during the move to the new location; the photographs were salvaged by city janitors, with one exception: They found all but one, that of Patrick Shannon, mayor in 1864-65. An extended hunt was made for Shannon’s picture but to no avail. However, a niece of Shannon’s who was an artist was located and she volunteered to draw a picture of her Uncle Patrick. That is the only picture in the gallery that is not an original photograph.”

Virginia Koogle writes: “That’s not how I heard it…I’ll hold this (article) about the K.C. Mayor’s pictures till I can take the time to tell the story as it was told to me at the time it happened, not too long ago. The article “isn’t like I heard tell” and “it’s too long a story for tonight, but it’s a dilly and much nuttier than what is printed here.”

The story that was passed down by Harry J. Koogle, Virginia’s brother, was that he, after having seen the Times article, asked his mother, Carrie Shannon Koogle, now 75 years old and living in Florida, to draw a picture of Patrick – she did, and Harry presented it to the City, which photographed and doctored the drawing so it would appear to be an actual photograph. The photograph shown directly above presently hangs in the mayor’s gallery. The colorized photo of Patrick shown earlier is an actual carte de visite from a family scrapbook and dates from around the Civil War.

General Philip Sheridan

Family lore passed down from two of Patrick Shannon’s daughters and their families says that Patrick was a cousin to General Philip Sheridan (1831-1888) the famous Union officer and later infamous Indian hunter. The relationship is stated in Mary Eleanor’s obituary.  Remnants of Carrie Shannon Koogle’s scrapbook inherited by her son Harry contain pasted newspaper clippings about Sheridan and handwritten notations to the effect that the Shannon brothers and Sheridan were related. Virginia Koogle:

“Of course you know that Patrick Shannon was first cousin to General Phil Sheridan (I think the mothers – Brady by name – were sisters. We are related through that branch of the family to the fabulous Brady’s of N.Y. At one time Mrs. Brady wanted to adopt your mother (Anna Virginia Shannon). She visited Grandma (Mary Eleanor) in K.C. and they had not children of their own but of course Grandma would not consider though she promised to make her an heir.  I guess they (Brady’s) are some of the wealthiest people in the world. I have clippings about them…”

General Philip Sheridan’s parents were 1831 emigrants from County Cavan, the home of the Shannon brothers.  They were John and Mary Meenagh Sheridan, second cousins, married in 1826. In Sheridan’s autobiography, he writes his mother’s maiden name was “Minor” – probably an Americanization of Meenagh. But there the trail ends; I can’t find any further connection between the Sheridans, Shannons and/or the “fabulous Brady’s” of New York. I contacted a Sheridan descendant through a genealogy website and related the family and obituary information, and his response was “that’s very interesting, and is worth pursuing. But I can’t tell you how many people have contacted me claiming their ancestors were cousins of Philip Sheridan. That lore exists in many families besides yours, and is seldom true.”  

The Confederacy Error

The History of Jackson County Missouri, published in 1881 by Union Historical Company, contains this, from a paragraph on Mary Eleanor Jarboe Shannon: “Born on her father’s farm in what is known as Jarboe’s Addition August 4, 1836, she was reared there and has made it her home since. On the 12th of October, 1858, our subject was married to Patrick Shannon, who took an active part in building up the city. He was a soldier in the Confederate army, entering as captain but being promoted to major.” There is no source quoted for the statement, or any elaboration or evidence; there is no other mention of Patrick  in the book, save his listings as councilman in 1861 and Mayor 1864-1865. No mention is made of his service in the E.M.M.; this is all it has to say about the 77th:

“In 1862 the militia of Missouri was all enrolled. The regiment raised in this city was numbered 77th; Kersey Coates was colonel and Frank Foster, lieutenant colonel. None of this militia was ever called upon to do much, and that only in their own locality. During these years, from the spring of 1861 until the autumn of 1861, the adjacent parts of Missouri were in an entirely lawless condition.”

The Journal suspended operation due to the war in March 1861 and didn’t start up again until a year later, so any local reporting of the 77th’s activities during this period is lost. But The History of Jackson County ignores the activation of the unit from October to December of 1862, pressed into service over the activities of William Quantrill and his guerilla raiders in Clay County, not is it acknowledged for protecting the city in the aftermath of the Battle of Westport.

The History of Jackson County is one of a series published by the Des Moines firm of Birdsall, Williams & Co. It is a handsome, embossed leather-bound volume of 1,003 pages. The publishers brought out about a dozen or so such lavish books, all titled  “The History of…County,”  and all followed the same format: Extensive, well-written and well-researched histories of counties and townships, supplemented by reproduction of original town records, correspondence, recollections of pioneers, maps and the like. All of Birdsall & Williams’ “History of” books I was able to identify (about a dozen of them beginning in 1879) featured counties in Iowa, except for The History of Jackson County. Historical statistics and charts add an almanac-cum-encyclopedic feel to the books. A notable feature of The History of Jackson County is an extensive, well-documented history of the border war and the Civil War in the county, with accounts from each township. It details all of the significant engagements in the area and documents the “Bleeding Kansas” era quite well. Inexplicably, the book makes the mistake of assigning Patrick Shannon of Kansas City to the Confederate army.    

Birdsall and Williams’ gimmick was to offer a “prospectus” to leading citizens of each county they canvassed – in exchange for a promise (and down payment) to buy the book, the publishers would include a flattering curriculum vitae of the esteemed personage; the enticement being that the subject would be included in a prestigious “History of…” book. Without exception, each of the biographies in the books are glowing “puff pieces.” In prefaces to the books, the publishers expressed the wish that the book “fulfills the conditions guaranteed by our prospectus.” The Kansas City section of The History of Jackson County contains about 500 capsule biographies, the overwhelming majority of which are of men born in the 1840’s, men who were children when Patrick came to Kansas City in 1855.  In the preface, the publishers describe their research methods and provide a disclaimer:  

“…to gather from the oldest citizens their reminiscences of events occurring in the first settlement of Jackson County (with) careful perusal of many old volumes and newspaper files. The old pioneer has often been able to narrate with clearness many important events, but utterly unable to give the date. Different individuals have given conflicting versions of the same events, and it has been a matter of much care and delicacy to bring harmony out of these conflicting statements. It has been our aim to record only such facts as are based upon the most reliable and trustworthy authority. It would be strange, indeed, if, in the multiplicity of names, dates and events, no errors or omissions should be detected. To say that it is perfect would be a presumption. (Thanks are given to)  Colonel Theodore Case, Jacob Gregg, J.C. McCoy, D.I. Caldwell, and Martin Rice.”

Case, a physician from Jackson, Georgia, arrived in Kansas City in 1857 and practiced medicine until 1861, when he enlisted  a private  in Company C. of Col. R.T. Van Horn’s Battalion of the U.S. Reserve Corps, afterward the 25th Missouri Volunteers. In 1862 he was appointed by President Lincoln to be Captain and Assistant Quartermaster of volunteers stationed at Kansas City, and 1863 to be Chief Quartermaster of the District of the Border by Gen. Ewing;  Case operated a wagon and implement manufacturing business with his brother at First and Wyandotte Streets. He married Julia McCoy Lykins in 1858. Case had to have known Patrick well. In addition to his serving with Patrick on the Chamber of Commerce and a civic committee to bring the Union Pacific Railway to town in 1863, he would have had first-hand knowledge of his service in the 77th E.M.M. and his documented Unionist loyalties. But the publishers didn’t uncover any of the numerous state and federal records of the 77th E.M.M. showing Patrick’s service as Captain and later Major of that unit. In fact, there is no mention of Patrick in the Union cause at all – just the unsourced statement that he “served the Confederacy as private and Major.”

The publishers could not have interviewed Patrick’s widow of ten years, 45-year old Mary Eleanor Jarboe Shannon. The brief paragraph devoted to her contains the statement that she had “made the Jarboe homestead her home since birth;” when in fact, she had lived with Patrick since their marriage and at the time of publication had resided at the Shannon-Riddlesbarger house on Pearl Street for about fifteen years. Absence of evidence aside, left unanswered is the question of how and why Patrick, a known Democrat and “Union man” and one of Kansas City’s most prominent public citizens, would have at age 42 left an immensely thriving family business and a young wife and child in 1861 in order to join the Confederate Army as a private.

A Civil War archivist addressed the issue: “The Missouri State Archives show three listings for a Patrick Shannon. These could all be the same man, two men, or, less likely, three different individuals. If he was, in fact, the Captain shown as being in Co. C of the 77th Enrolled Missouri Militia, that unit was in reserve during the Battle of Westport and did not participate in it. On the other side, if the supposition is that his rank as a Confederate was Major, it would be highly unusual for there to be no record of a man with a rank that high in regular Confederate service. There was no Major Patrick Shannon in the Confederate Army. That rank may have been given to him as the leader of some type of guerrilla or home guard unit, but he was never  recognized as such by the Confederate War Department.”

In nearly every respect, and despite its primarily commercial purpose, The History of Jackson County is a comprehensive and well-compiled account of Jackson County up to 1881. As one of the earliest and best histories of Kansas City, it has become a prime source for information for those seeking information or writing about early Kansas City.  But its error that Patrick served the Confederacy has survived and become “historical fact,” only to be repeated in nearly every other biographical account of Patrick Shannon.

  George Fuller Green’s 1968 A Condensed history of the Kansas City Area: “Patrick Shannon was elected to the council in 1861. This office he resigned to join the Confederate Army as a private, rising to a major by the end of the Civil War.” Green takes the Union Historical Company statement at face value. In part of a 1960’s series on Kansas City’s Mayors, the Kansas City Star’s Charles S. Stevenson seems to have uncovered evidence that Patrick served in a local militia – but he has to reconcile this with the Union Historical Company version, and so creates a convoluted solution to accommodate one true fact and three false facts: “In 1861 when the Civil War started, he joined the Home Guard but resigned to become a private in the Confederate Army from which he was discharged in 1864 as a major.” Still elsewhere it’s been written that Patrick “led a Confederate battalion at Kansas City’s Battle of Westport in October 1964.”

Of course it’s impossible to say where the Union Historical Company got its information on Patrick ten years after he died – certainly not from Theodore Case or anyone who knew him at the time, his widow, or any Shannon or Jarboe family members; nor from any newspaper reports or other books that have surfaced. The only hint that I can find  is a single index card in the Missouri State Historical Society archives, part of a collection titled “Missouri Soldiers (1861-1865) War Between the States.” This card, perhaps connected with a pension application, shows a Patrick Shannon of the CSA dying “near Kansas City” in 1871. There is no other information.  Perhaps this record became known to the Union Historical Company editor and he made the faulty connection. But there were at least twelve men named Patrick Shannon who were enlisted in the  Confederate Army.

Another indicator of Patrick’s Union loyalties was his documented support of the Irish Rebellion movement; Virginia Koogle’s statement that Patrick “often went to New York to see the Irish patriots,” and his prominence in the Kansas City appearance of the wife of the imprisoned Patriot, Donovan Rossa in 1869.  The Irish Rebellion movement held a bitter hatred on England, and many Irish felt the British government, although officially neutral, had sided with the Confederacy in the war.

In sum, there is no evidence that Patrick Shannon served the Confederate cause, and he obviously has no connection to the CSA soldier named on the “Missouri Soldiers” list.  Patrick’s service for the Union, commencing in August1862 with his appointment as Captain of the 77th E.M.M. (“because he had had some fighting experience back home”) and his later gubernatorial appointment by Hamilton Gamble as Major of that unit, is well documented. His support for the Union is affirmed in numerous wartime documents and by his known political alliances and activities. Patrick’s career is fairly well-documented and to my knowledge no known family history, lore, newspaper article, obituary or correspondence of the Shannon brothers or their wives and descendants make the “The Confederacy Error.”  During the period he was supposed to have been serving the Confederate Army and “rising” to Major, he was occupied with the daily operation of J. & P. Shannon Dry Goods, serving as a city councilman, and active in the Home Guard of Kansas City. Besides the impossible logistics of the matter, it would have been foolhardy in the extreme for Patrick to have been affiliated with the Southern cause in any way.

*

NOTE:  I am interested in obtaining letters, photos or information about the Shannon and Jarboe families. In particular, there are no known photos or illustrations of the J & P Shannon store; there are no known photos of John and Philip Shannon; there are no known photos of Joseph Jarboe Jr. and Lydia Clements Jarboe or their other children.  I have been unable to locate any additional photos of Pearl Street or other Shannon residences.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: In the years it has taken to bring this document to its present form, I’ve been fortunate to correspond with a number of Shannon and Jarboe descendants, including Andy Blodgett, Nancy Kinzer, Deb Clements, and, especially, Steve Soden of Kansas City, a proud descendant of Patrick Shannon and a source of much of the family material quoted herein. It was Steve who discovered the photo of Bingham’s studio above the Shannon store.

For much of the historical information, I’ve relied on various histories of Kansas City as well as a multitude of other books and sources. I take full responsibility for any errors, and welcome comments and corrections at Johndawsonkc@msn.com.  Please see my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Mayorpatrickshannon for numerous photographs, maps, and other ephemera related to the Shannon brothers and early Kansas City.