William Rockhill Nelson

William Rockhill Nelson (March 7, 1841 – April 13, 1915) was an American newspaper publisher, real estate developer, cattle breeder, art collector, City Beautiful campaigner, journalist, editor, editorialist and co-founder of The Kansas City Star in Kansas City, Missouri.

William Rockhill Nelson
Born	(1841-03-07)March 7, 1841 Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.
Died	April 13, 1915(1915-04-13) (aged 74)
Resting place	Mount Washington Cemetery Independence, Missouri, U.S.
Education	University of Notre Dame
Known for	co-founder of The Kansas City Star Urban planning Art collecting Cattle breeding
Parent	Isaac De Groff Nelson (father)

He was born in Indiana two decades before the American Civil War into a family with clear Southern sympathies. Toward the end of his life, Nelson donated his estate (and home) for the establishment of the renowned Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and a trust for the former international agriculture and animal husbandry research center Sni-A-Bar Farms.

Nelson crusaded for community improvement while retaining conservative, small-town values. He was among a handful of newspaper publishers to denounce fake news and yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century, particularly the American propaganda of the Spanish-American War.

He was considered one of the most Progressive city editors who ran one of the most highly respected morning and evening daily newspapers in the country. Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway learned how to write as a cub reporter on The Star.

Nelson saw the newspaper as a means of providing a “liberal education” for people too busy or poor to acquire one, so his papers incorporated the writings of classical authors along with current news.

Upon Nelson's death in 1915, A. S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, said, “Journalism has lost one of its best examples of the right kind of independence, courage, ability, and enterprise." Nelson is buried in a memorial chapel at Mount Washington Cemetery in Independence, Missouri, with his wife, daughter and son-in-law.

In early 2021, after a series investigating its own history of how it covered — and failed to cover — Black Kansas Citians, the Kansas City Star “stripped from its pages and website the name, words and image that recognized its first publisher and founder, William Rockhill Nelson.”

Early life

Nelson was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father was publisher Isaac De Groff Nelson (1810–1891) and his mother was Elizabeth Rockhill (1816–1889), the daughter of William R. Rockhill, an important farmer and politician in Fort Wayne. For a short time, Isaac Nelson owned The Sentinel newspaper (which became the Fort Wayne News Sentinel). But I.D.G. Nelson, as he was fondly known for many years in Fort Wayne, was much more renowned as a nursery owner. His own estate, "Elm Park", was considered "the showplace of Allen County."

Nelson, as a 15-year-old, attended the University of Notre Dame (which accepted high school students at the time) for two years; he described it as "Botany Bay for bad boys." Notre Dame was reported to have asked that he not return.

He was admitted to the bar in 1862 and was a campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden told him: "While it is a great thing to lead armies, it is a greater thing to lead the minds of men." Nelson “expressed compassion toward the South.” He and his father opposed Abraham Lincoln in the elections of 1860 and 1864.

Nelson was involved in pavement engineering (the Nicholson pavement patents) and bridge building and ran a small construction firm that was responsible for the erection of "a large part" of the Southern Illinois Penitentiary at Chester.

He bought a plantation where he planted Sea Island Cotton and attempted to run a store in Savannah, Georgia, with a partner, but it failed and he lost most of his money. The southern sojourn was to earn him the nickname "The Colonel" even though he never served in the military. William Allen White said later: "Not that he was ever a colonel of anything...He was just coloneliferous."

One biographer put it: "The smart, rich, tempestuous kid grew into a big, brash lawyer who never practiced; a dilettante of failures; a young adult with little focus. Dismissed from Notre Dame, Nelson had worked half-heartedly on his father’s farm; failed in construction; unsuccessfully farmed; and knowing nothing about newspapering, bought the Fort Wayne Sentinel."

Newspapers

Debut issue of the Kansas City Evening Star, September 18, 1880. William Rockhill Nelson and Samuel Morss, proprietors

Nelson formally took over The Sentinel in Fort Wayne with Samuel Morss in 1879.

In 1880 they moved to Kansas City and started The Kansas City Evening Star. At the time there were three daily competitors – The Evening Mail; The Kansas City Times; and The Kansas City Journal, most selling for a nickel. Nelson took over sole ownership of The Star within a few months and sold his newspaper for two cents.

Kansas City was considered an outpost of civilization. "Simmering beneath the thin upper crust of frontier gentility was a motley stew of renegade Indians, demoralized soldiers, unreformed bushwhackers, and border ruffians, thieves, and thugs imported from anywhere, professional train-robbers of home growth, and all kinds of wrecks of the Civil War."

Nelson's business strategy called for cheap advance subscriptions and an intention to be "absolutely independent in politics, aiming to deal by all men and all parties with impartiality and fearlessness."

”A family journal…strictly first-class” was how The Kansas City Evening Star described itself in a statement of purpose from its inaugural issue published Saturday, September 18, 1880.

The following year, Nelson met and married Ida Houston, newly transplanted from Ohio. They had one daughter, Laura, born in 1883.

He purchased the The Kansas City Evening Mail and its Associated Press franchise in 1882 and started The Weekly Kansas City Star in 1890 and The Sunday Kansas City Star in 1894. Nelson bought The Times in 1901, putting The Morning Kansas City Star on it, beginning what he called "the 24-hour Star."

This was among the first such enterprises in print media, presaging the 24-hour news cycle in radio and ultimately today's cable, satellite and online television news delivery services.

Nelson sent advice to his reporters and editors such as: "In every editorial room the warning sign of the New England railroad crossings should be posted: 'Stop, Look, Listen.' A good head is a mighty fine thing, but unless guided by good conscience it can do a world of mischief in a newspaper office."

In August 1902, President Harry S. Truman worked two weeks in The Star mailroom, making $7.00 the first week and $5.40 the second.

In his office, Nelson had portraits of the Bourbon Democrats Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, as well as President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt stayed at Nelson's south Kansas City limestone mansion, named Oak Hall.

One of Nelson’s editors remembered him as part “Renaissance prince, part robber baron, ‘a combination of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Jim Hill, with a dash of St. Francis, Nietzsche, and Oliver Cromwell…’”

In one encounter at The Star’s offices, Kansas City Mayor Joseph J. Davenport was thrown down a stairwell at the Star building by editors (including William Allen White) when he was believed to have physically threatened Nelson. Nelson said afterwards, "The Star never loses!"

Nelson considered himself a nonpartisan “and promoted some Republican causes, advocated Democratic liberalism mixed with capitalistic philosophy, and supported Bull Moose Progressivism at various times.”

Nelson was “a rich man willing to attack the rich, especially if they were slumlords thwarting his dreams for a beautiful Kansas City,” according to William Allen White, the future newspaper editor and Progressive leader who worked for The Star beginning in 1891.

In 1908, The Star stopped advertising liquor for fear it was “encouraging readers to endanger their health and happiness.” Its last alcohol-related advertisement for 40 years was for Good Ole Guckenheimer Rye, whose flavor is “surpassingly fine; its purity is never questioned.”

Nelson was a beloved boss and champion of the individual reporter. He once said that "the reporter is the essential man on the newspaper. He is the big toad in the puddle....He must be honest and accurate." Though he paid his reporters what was considered little at the time, Nelson treated workers as family members and offered his employees nearly a year’s sick pay, an eight-hour day and reportedly invented the concept of the “open newsroom.” He believed closed doors meant that time-consuming appointments would need to be scheduled, which interfered with the timely transfer of information.

He developed, however, countless reasons for not advancing wages in his printing plants.

Other interests

Oak Hall, the residence of William Rockhill Nelson. Erected in 1887 on the southeast corner of 45th and Oak, KCMO. Demolished in 1928 for the construction of the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art

In addition to his newspaper duties, in 1886, Nelson erected several single-story homes and named the development DeGroff Place for his paternal grandmother's noted family of New York. In 1897, William purchased more land and erected two dozen, two-story homes that recalled the "well-proportioned cottages that French settlers built along the Mississippi River before the West was won." He named the development DeGroff Way.

Between about 1890 and 1910, Nelson developed an area of farmland south of downtown Kansas City into a neighborhood of more than 100 houses, including his own mansion, erected in 1887, called Oak Hall. Named the Rockhill Neighborhood, it was noted for its use of limestone in both the houses and in stone walls that stood beside the streets.

Nelson "created deed restrictions, setback standards, a Homes Association, allowed only three architects to design homes, created the Tennis Club for homeowners and maintained landscaping and carpark facilities."

Considered a model subdivision with its tight-knit homeowner associations, “social and athletic clubs, Christmas caroling, and lawn and garden contests,” the District “doubled as a high-class residential neighborhood and as a kind of company town for [Nelson’s] notoriously underpaid employees at The Star.”

In 1895, he established the Western Gallery of Art in the Kansas City Public Library to introduce copies of works by the European masters to the masses.

Nelson was known for a time as the "Baron of Brush Creek," which runs by the site of his former mansion house and through the Rockhill Neighborhood in South Kansas City.

Nelson was instrumental in planning “the network of broad, European-style boulevards and gracious urban parks that transformed the dusty cow town [Kansas City] into an advertisement for the City Beautiful movement.” He paved the way for his protégé, the real estate developer J.C. Nichols, to transform the city with opulent homes, neighborhoods, parks, exclusive social and recreational clubs, golf courses, swimming pools, fountains, sculpture, landscaped terraces, shopping villages, schools and roads—civic planning ahead of its time that would become the premier model for cities across the country into the 21st century.

Nelson campaigned in his newspapers for Nichols' developments and for Kansas City's George Kessler-designed park and boulevard system. He pushed for the 1900 “Kansas City Spirit” to build Convention Hall in 90 days in order to host the 1900 Democratic National Convention after the original (and new) convention hall had burned in April 1900.

"The Cottage" at Magnolia, Massachusetts, erected 1907.

In 1907, Nelson's interests went national. After establishing relationships with President Theodore Roosevelt and then Secretary of War William Howard Taft, Nelson erected a vacation home in Magnolia, Massachusetts, on Boston's North Shore, to escape Kansas City's sweltering summers and to be "closer to the action." He modeled the "cottage" after Oak Hall's guesthouse; its elaborate gardens replicated Kessler's landscaping of The Paseo in Kansas City. He had long admired the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper. Both Presidents Roosevelt and Taft were guests. Ida Houston Nelson, Nelson's widow, took ill here in 1921 and died a week after returning to Oak Hall in Kansas City.

Three years later, in 1910, he erected for his daughter and son-in-law as a wedding present, a large home, still standing, that became the home of the Rockhill Tennis Club for fifty years though now is a residence. The Nelson Guest House on the northeast corner of Rockhill Road and 47th Street (Cleaver II) was designed as a “sister house” to Nelson’s Massachusetts summer home. In August 2020, the eight bedroom, ten bathroom mansion went on the market for just under $3 million.

In the early 20th century, Nelson began breeding cattle as a hobby, especially the Shorthorn after acquiring a show winner from the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. In the 1910s, he began acquiring farm pastureland to the east of Kansas City, and by 1913, Nelson had assembled more than 2,400 acres (9.7 km²) in what is presently Grain Valley, Missouri. He established Sni-A-Bar Farms, named for the creek and the Township. It is believed that the word “sni” is French for “slough” and “Abar” was the name French explorer who discovered the waterway.

He next purchased 200 “common red cows” at the Kansas City Stockyards, which were shipped from Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska for slaughter and became the foundation female stock for the breeding operation. The Farms featured "17 houses, several more barns, and acres upon acres of pasture and crop fields." It became one of the world's leaders in animal health and improved farming for more than three decades. A recent biography of Nelson put his influence on the City this way:

"In afterlife, the Baron of Brush Creek, his sins mostly forgotten, would himself become a patron saint of his adopted city. In his apotheosis, cow town and City Beautiful, commerce and art, would be providentially reconciled."

Death

In February 1915, Nelson took ill with “a stoppage of the liver which interfered with nutrition and with the elimination of toxins.” A few weeks later, on March 5, he developed “uremic poisoning.” He underwent treatment at home. He lost consciousness for five days before he died at home, at two a.m., on April 13, 1915. His last words were reportedly, “I’m not afraid to die. The next time let me go. It is no kindness to keep me alive.” He was 74. His three immediate family members died within 12 years. There were no grandchildren.

Legacy

In addition to influencing much of the built environment, social dynamics, and landscaped suburban green spaces in Kansas City today, Nelson contributed to arts, agriculture and journalism. The Wills of he, his wife and daughter were published and "presented to their grateful beneficiaries, the people of Kansas City."

Arts

Nelson provided in his will that following the death of his wife and daughter his Oak Hall mansion be torn down and its 30-acre (120,000 m²) estate turned into an art museum. His estate was worth about $12 million at the time (in 1915), which was at least $387 million in real price or $814 million in relative value in 2023.

The fortune was used to build the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and was reportedly the largest endowment outside of the MET in New York City. The Museum opened in 1933 and originally contained a re-creation of Nelson's oak paneled room from Oak Hall (and namesake of the estate). The room contained Nelson's red plush easy chair and bookcases. The room was dismantled in 1988 to make way for a photography studio.

Agriculture and animal husbandry

Nelson’s will also established a trust for Sni-A-Bar Farms, his nearly 2,000 acres of “demonstration farms, research centers, and pillars of international agricultural innovation" in and around Grain Valley, Missouri, just east of Kansas City. Presidents from the University of Missouri, the University of Kansas, and the University of Oklahoma were charged with selecting its trustees.

The Farms purpose was to "pioneer new agricultural techniques to benefit common farmers." A U.S. Department of Agriculture report published after Nelson's death, "The Grading-Up of Cattle," called Sni-A-Bar, "a breeding program which progressively improved the stock of common cattle." The Farm was the first to "introduce Korean Lespedeza and Atlas Sorgo, crops for grazing cattle, to Missouri." Sorgo is a drought-resistant plant, capable of producing 8 to 10 tons per acre in drought conditions. Both crops are used across the state to this day.

Agricultural experts from Russia, Germany, and Peru, to name a few, conducted research here, and the USDA had permanent residency in two of the farm’s houses. Interns came from University of Missouri, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Michigan, and Purdue "to learn the novel techniques in practice on The Farms."

During the Great Depression, the Nelson Trust and Sni-A-Bar Farms helped the region through the "worst of the hardship" by employing local workers and purchasing animal feed and other supplies from local businesses.

The Trust ensured Sni-A-Bar operated for 30 years after Nelson's death. It was sold in 1945 and reportedly the herd went for a larger price than the real estate itself. In 1999, a Grain Valley suburban subdivision was named in its honor. All that remains are located near the corner of Sni-A-Bar Boulevard and Main Street with "a silo standing northeast of the intersection of Eagles Parkway and Buckner-Tarsney Road."

Journalism

Nelson was an early advocate of focusing investigative reporting in The Kansas City Star and his other publications on local municipal corruption rather than simply printing the exposés of nationally famed muckrakers.

Among the many causes Nelson championed was the Progressive movement's philosophy of driving money out of both the voting booth and the courthouse, of providing free justice, and of providing minimum-wage standards. He pushed for the municipal proprietorship of public utilities, bringing running water into farm women’s kitchens and establishing parks and boulevards to enrich the urban environment.

One recent biography had this to say:

"To a degree seldom approached in any other American community, Nelson's newspaper defined Kansas City's self image and physical development, set the public agenda, and created a potent and enduring civic mythology."

Upon hearing of W. R. Nelson’s death, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote: “There was no more useful or more patriotic citizen in the United States. No man who better exemplified how to be the highest type of public servant; although in private life, he was one of the staunchest and most loyal friends that ever lived. I mourn him as a friend. I mourn him still more deeply as an American citizen."

President Woodrow Wilson wrote that Mr. Nelson had "left a deep and abiding mark upon the annals of his profession.” President William Taft referred to him as “a man of most exceptional ability, great power, and the widest influence, which he exercised with undaunted courage for the right as he saw it.”

After Nelson's death, his daughter Laura Nelson Kirkwood allowed the publication of the first photograph in The Star and the publication of ostensibly the most widely read part of the newspaper to this day: the comics. Her father had refused to publish both, eschewing the trend of yellow journalism, which was in its heyday at the time. The paper was one of the few that was "sober and repressed in its typography" and "renowned for stylish writing and fearless editorial policy."

Nelson was one of the leaders in condemning what today would be called "fake news." He sent reporters to cover the Spanish-American War and cautioned his readers to not believe "everything they read in the newspapers," referring to the false pretenses that led to the conflict.

A revised legacy

William Rockhill Nelson's legacy is complicated, if not deeply flawed. His relationship with his protégé, the younger developer J. C. Nichols, ensured the imposition of racially restrictive covenants that excluded Black people and Jews from living in certain neighborhoods or owning property there, not just at the time, but "into the limitless future." Nelson was the first to write covenants into his developments’ bylaws though not indefinitely, like Nichols. Nelson's use of his newspapers to promote Nichols' developments helped market the homes, neighborhoods and affluent lifestyles to consumers, ensuring the exclusion of most non-white, non-Christian people from living there.

"Nothing in the surviving record paints either man [Nelson and Nichols] as a virulent racist," The Star wrote. "But like most powerful men of their time, they viewed the world through a white lens, and saw segregation as a necessity for a cohesive, ordered society. In the world of real estate, that meant homes built with restrictive covenants — documents that dictated not only the details of design and construction of homes, but who could live in them."

Nelson ordered his foreman to lend equipment for Nichols to pave his streets. “[Nelson] was an ardent believer in better residential areas, and better planned cities,” Nichols wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. “He encouraged me greatly by telling me that anything would be better than the use of the land made by the pre-Civil War owners.”

The legacy of their relationship "rippled across the decades in Kansas City, laying the foundation for a system that denied Black families access to a housing market that created wealth for generations of white families."

In addition, after Nelson‘s death in 1915, The Star did not report on, or feature news of, the lives of Black people and communities within the pages of its newspapers for most of the 20th century, which “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.” This negatively and irrevocably played a contributing role in race relations and standards of living for Black people and others across the Kansas City metropolitan region and indeed the Midwest.

In 2020, the newspaper apologized and ran a six-part series about its generational racism and consequently “stripped from its pages and website the name, words and image that recognized its first publisher and founder.” The series was part of a movement of reckoning within the media and newspaper industry for its historic and continuing racism in the wake of the protests after the death of George Floyd.

In 2021, The Kansas City Star President and Editor Mike Fannin said William Rockhill Nelson’s slogan, ‘A Paper for the People,’ was “lofty but ultimately dishonest.”

“The Star was not ‘A Paper for the People’ through much of its history,” Fannin said. “It was a paper for only some people, namely white people. Those values don’t square at all with The Star newsroom today.”

Memorial

The William Rockhill Nelson Memorial Chapel, Mount Washington Cemetery, Independence, Missouri

William Rockhill Nelson is interred in a Baronial family chapel and memorial located at Mount Washington Cemetery, in between Truman Road and US Route 24, in Independence, Missouri.

His wife and daughter arranged for his remains to be placed in a two-ton, finely polished granite sarcophagus, which is located at the far end of the structure. A trust for its upkeep was specified in the will of his daughter, Laura Rockhill Kirkwood. She died, alone, in a Baltimore hotel room in 1926. Kirkwood, her husband and mother are interred here as well.

The Tudor-Gothic mausoleum was constructed, in part, with The Baron of Brush Creek's favorite limestone, which was quarried from lot at the southeast corner of 50th and Cherry Streets and had been used to erect the homes in Nelson's Rockhill Neighborhood and in his grand estate that was demolished in 1928. The memorial building was designed by renowned architects Jarvis Hunt and George A. Fuller with tile work by the inimitable Spanish engineer Rafael Guastavino.

In 1917, two years after Nelson's death, the mausoleum was completed by Fuller's construction company, which built the Lincoln Memorial, the Supreme Court Building and the iconic Flatiron Building in New York City. The Nelson Memorial was closed to the public and fell into disrepair until 2022 when funds were raised for its restoration and opening to the public through efforts of the Cemetery's Historical Society.

Further reading

Bell, William Jackson. A Historical Study of the Kansas City Star Since the Death of William Rockhill Nelson, 1915-1949. N.p., University of Missouri-Columbia, 1949.

Coulter, Charles Edward. Take Up the Black Man's Burden: Kansas City's African American Communities, 1865-1939. United States, University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Dodd, Monroe. The Star and the City: For 125 Years, Kansas City's Chronicler and Crusader. United States, Kansas City Star Books, 2006.

Ford, Susan Jezak. Biography of William Rockhill Nelson (1841-1915), Newspaperman. Kansas City Public library, 2009.

Fannin, Mike. City Star Series The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star. December 22, 2020.

Gotham, Kevin Fox. Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, Second Edition: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2010. United States, State University of New York Press, 2014.

Haskell, Harry. Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star. United States, University of Missouri Press, 2007.

Johnson, Icie Florence. The Life and Career of William Rockhill Nelson, Editor of the Kansas City Star, and His Contributions to the Journalism of His Times. Dissertation, United States, Northwestern University, 1934.

Johnson, Icie Florence. William Rockhill Nelson and the Kansas City Star Their Relation to the Development of the Beauty and Culture of Kansas City and the Middle West. Burton Pub. Co, Kansas City, Mo., 1935.

King, Judith, et al. Mount Washington Cemetery: In Search of Lost Time. United States, Mission Point Press, 2020. Visit: https://mwchs.org/cemetery-book

Morrison, John. Star Truck. United Kingdom, Trafford Publishing, 2009.

Owen L. (2016) Beautiful and Damned: Geographies of Interwar Kansas City. UC Berkeley. ProQuest ID: Owen_berkeley_0028E_16563. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5w141s1. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2m26z9v3

Quigley, Martin Peter. Mr. Blood's Last Night: End of an Era in Journalism a Reporter Remembers Kansas City and the Times in the Late Thirties. ISBN 0866290230. Published by Sunrise Pub Co, Austinburg, Ohio, U.S.A., 1980.

Rogers, Charles Elkins. William Rockhill Nelson, Independent Editor and Crusading Liberal. United States, University of Minnesota., 1948.

Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials by Theodore Roosevelt. Introduction by Ralph Stout, Managing Editor of The Star. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1921.

Schirmer, Sherry Lamb. A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960. United States, University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Staff of The Kansas City Star. William Rockhill Nelson: The Story of a Man, a Newspaper and a City. United States, Printed at the Riverside Press, 1915.

Wolferman, Kristie C. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A History. University of Missouri Press, 2020.

Worley, William S. J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities. United States, University of Missouri Press, 2013.

External links

• Works by or about William Rockhill Nelson at the Internet Archive