North Terrace Park, Fountain and Cliff Drive

A bleak winter scene of Cliff Drive, high above the Missouri River, with barren trees silhouetted against the sky, appears on this photographic post card mailed in 1907 to Miss Margaret Yates, Regina Post, Canada. At the left side of the picture is the spring where people filled their jugs with cool water on hot summer evenings. The spring was condemned and closed years ago, when the city found the water to be unsafe for drinking. The recessed wall was rebuilt and the fountain removed. The Scarritt family, whose farm occupied the fertile lands above, used the spring for years to keep milk and butter cool. Cliff Drive was once a cow path along which the Scarritt boys took their cattle to water.A souvenir booklet put out by the Board of Park Commissioners of Kansas City in 1914 stated: Cliff Drive, the drive that has made Kansas City's park and boulevard system famous, meanders through North Terrace Park for its entire length and when completed to the Indian Mound will be, with its approaches, 5.98 miles in length. The first 0.46 miles of this drive was completed in 1900. When all the drives in North Terrace Park are completed, there will be 8.06 miles of the most picturesque drives in this country, every foot of which will be a surprise and a delight to the visitor and a pride to the resident of the city.Some of the land for the park was purchased from the Scarritt family and the rest was donated. Today the name of the park is Kessler Park, honoring the landscape architect who planned it before the turn of the century, about 1893. Kansas City Times, January 16, 1981.