Dusting Off Kansas Citys Cowtown History
What’s the saying? One man’s trash is another’s treasure?
Lucinda Adams recalls the day, five years ago, when she and a couple of members of the Library’s facilities staff were led into a converted storage room in the old Kansas City Livestock Exchange building in the city’s West Bottoms.
The place hadn’t been touched for decades and it looked it — dusty and unkempt, hundreds of drawings and other documents in piles or strewn across the floor.
“The entire floor was covered,” says Adams, lead archivist for the Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections. “Some (of the documents) were rolled. Some were flat. Pieces were breaking off.”
It was history for the taking.
The items — some 5,000 in all — included blueprints and architectural drawings of the iconic Kansas City Stockyards, revealing details down to the specially designed nails and screws used in the wooden livestock pens. There were photos and maps. Many of the documents appeared to have come from the office ...

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