Nelson Drive

Two couples, one in a horse and buggy and the other in their new horseless carriage, enjoy a spring ride on Nelson Drive - which, according to the printed title on the 1909 post card, was at 50th and Oak. The curved drive is bordered with the familiar dry rock walls used by William Rockhill Nelson in the residential district he developed near the turn of the century around his own rambling limestone home (now the site of the Nelson Gallery) and along the streets bordering the 100 rock houses he built and rented in the Rockhill District. Nelson, along with August Meyer, led the campaign for the development of parks and boulevards for the straggling town. Herbert Brackney of the present park board says Nelson gave most of Gillham Road south of 41st and virtually all of Rockhill Road to 63rd. The gifts of land were made at different times. The earliest land acquisition in the Rockhill neighborhood by Nelson and his wife was in 1887 when the property was still undeveloped farm and orchard land several miles south of the city limits. Early Tuttle & Ayers atlases of 1900 and 1907 do not list Nelson Drive, and it has not been located today, even with the help of several persons familiar with the area. Perhaps changes made in streets and boulevards and the location of new university buildings and drives are responsible. But apparently in 1909 a Kansas City photographer and a German printer joined to record in color what was once considered a beauty spot here. If the drive was at 50th and Oak it would have been near the Barstow School, which moved to a location there in 1924. Kansas City Times, June 10, 1972.