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NOTE: This article is taken, with permission, from Pat O’Neill’s book, From The Bottom Up: The Story of the Irish in Kansas City.  The book is available through amazon.com

“Vinegar Gulch”

Irish shantytown left a bad taste in high society’s mouth

Clachan.”  In the Irish, it means a cluster of houses.

In America, we would say “neighborhood.” Or if the occupants were poor, “slum or shantytown.” Poor Irish clachans, or shantytowns, were common in Kansas City in the mid- to late- 1800s.

The Irish were the largest immigrant group in Kansas City’s history. Beginning just before the Civil War, they came by the hundreds to labor as stonecutters, railhands, maids, stockyard cowboys, teachers, priests and politicians. The shantytowns they built in the shadows of the Missouri Rive bluffs were dubbed “Kerry Patches.”

One Irish “clachan” that stuck out like a particularly sore thumb, and provoked calls from Kansas City society to “clean it up,”; was a helter-skelter group of small homes and ramshackle store buildings clustered in a ravine, a stone’s throw from a series of mom- and-pop limestone quarry operations at the southern edge of the city. Those small quarries produced much of the signature stone that graces many of Kansas City’s historic churches and residences.

In the 1880s “Vinegar Gulch,” as the snobs called it, was a neighborhood of owner-built cabins or shacks that fanned out from Doc Winford’s Spring, which poured out of a stony bluff near what would now be 30th and Broadway. It was a sort of crude, helter-skelter village, denied city water or gas service, with few sidewalks and no paved streets. It was a make-do clachan occupied by the families of laborers and stone carvers, mostly Irish, along with a few Negroes and Germans.

For decades, the reliable spring was a gathering place for stout-armed Irish women. Every morning, they waded through ankle-deep goo – past watering cows and goats – to fill buckets and tea kettles with water that spilled from a pipe into a large wooden tank.

A Star article in 1900 described the spring as “a meeting place for all kinds of people. Men, women and children, white and black, bookkeepers, lawyers, blacksmiths, grocers, packinghouse workmen, teachers and some few politicians.” The spring would be a romantic sort of place, the paper noted,  “if it were not so abominably muddy!”

The ravine known as Vinegar Gulch – that same, landscaped, scenic ravine Kansas Citians drive through on Penn Valley Parkway today – was considered an eyesore and a detriment to visitors and investors. The little working community was remembered this way in a Parks Department flier printed in 1905: “A deep ravine with 300 houses scattered on its sides. None of the structures cost more than $2,000 and many of them cost little more than a hundred dollars each. A few streets, unpaved and rough, sprawled about and through the settlement, and board walks dipped and rose following the contour where possible. In places the walks were hung on wobbly stilts ... Penn Street Ravine (Vinegar Gulch), a few minutes from the heart of the city, was… a place of ramshackle homes … A goat would have had a hard time trying to pick his way along the side of the old Penn Street ravine.”

City Beautiful proponents in 1895 instigated plans to get rid of the embarrassing shanties and create another jewel of a park. The Parks Department over several years acquired the homes and businesses and eventually sold them at auction, with the stipulation that they be moved. House movers and scrap dealers paid a total of $33,500 for the buildings once owned by families like the Sullivans, McLanes, McGanigles, Donahoes and Coughreans. Some houses were bought back at a discount by their previous owners and moved a few blocks south to a new “Kerry Patch” that was developing between 31st and 33rd, Pennsylvania and Summit.

In 1898, from her little farm in Ireland, Johanna Sullivan worried that the move might prompt her son, Patrick, a widowed stonecutter living with his children in Vinegar Gulch, to do something rash. Indeed, Patrick was contemplating moving on to the gold fields of Alaska.

Glin minardApril 17, 1898

My Dear Son Patrick,

I take the liberty of ritting you these few line hopping to find you in good helth…

You said that you would go to Clondyke. I ask you for gods sake to take care of your children. Dear son it was Sunday after Patrick day I got a letter from your sister Mary, she told me that her son was gone to Clondyke. I hear it is like a place of starvation that they mostly eat one another. I cried enough when I heard the letter read, as much as I cried after your brothers son when he died.

I want to know from you is it in a quarry you are working or not. Tell me in your next letter is there any employment near you, if any of your children be able to work… I thought I would never again get a letter from you. I was very with the grief that is very numerous in the old country… I do always be expecting a letter from you when any person goes to post around the place. It gives me I think longer life to hear from you… good boy

I am your truly mother untill death

Johanna Sullivan

rite soon dont delay XXXXXX

Parks Department engineers went ahead and enclosed Doc Winford’s old spring, filled in the exposed cellars, bulldozed the rubbish and dammed up the ravine to create a large pond for fishing and ice skating. They secured the bluffs, planted trees and built a winding, scenic boulevard through the proud new 130-acre park–over the remains of the now-forgotten clachan known as Vinegar Gulch. Quarryman Pat took his mother’s advice and stayed in Kansas City. He took a job with the parks department. His descendents still live in the city today, working as lawyers, policemen, mechanics and ironworkers.

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