"You've asked me to talk about some of my memories of Pleasant Hill and of George M. Kellogg, my maternal Great-Grandfather. Mr. Kellogg died before I was born, so I never had the privilege of knowing him personally. However, I know of many of his contributions to Pleasant Hill and I'm proud to share some of this with you. He was a man of humble means when he first arrived in Pleasant Hill in 1867 with his wife and four children, but through his honest labor and advanced ideas he became a very successful self-made man. Because he had the town's interest at heart and because of his philanthropic work here, I believe he is still regarded by many as one of the great builders of early Pleasant Hill.

When the Kellogg family first came to Pleasant Hill they lived in an old boarding house which had been used in connection with a Young Ladies Seminary, conducted in what would later be the Kellogg home at 1209 North Independence. The home is still standing, but the old boarding house is long gone. From his old boarding house Mr. Kellogg began growing and selling flowers. He would take baskets full and sell them from the platform of the Missouri Pacific depot to passengers on the trains stopping there. And, in season, he would take vegetables from a small truck garden and sell them in Pleasant Hill and nearby towns. In 1880 he established a small hothouse for the propagation of houseplants and from there on he began to prosper. As the business grew he began to develop and expand a system of greenhouses and by 1905 had nearly nine acres under glass and his weekly pay- roll to employees was more than $600. By 1910 the sales from the greenhouses amounted to more than a third of a million dollars per year and his green- houses were well known as the largest west of the Mississippi. Great-Grand- father's Geo. M. Kellogg Cut Flower and Plant Co. was the forerunner of the current A.D. Mohr Greenhouses, located on the same site.

He installed an organ at the greenhouse and had Mother, Gertrude Cook Wallace, play for the employees during the noon hour. He, in turn, gave her the land at 122 North Jeffreys where the old Congregational Church had been. He was a staunch supporter of the Congregational Church and one of its charter members in Pleasant Hill. He established boarding and lodging in the old boarding house where he had originally lived for his single male employees; only stipulation being that they must attend church, somewhere, each Sunday.

Mr. Kellogg had his own system of waterworks from ponds on the greenhouse land to supply water for his greenhouses, but in 1901 he installed a pipe from what was then known as "Horseshoe Bend" on Big Creek to the greenhouses to supplement the ponds in dry weather. In 1902 he built Kellogg Lake. The green- house furnaces were fired with coal and the Kellogg coal wagons were a familiar sight in Pleasant Hill back then. All the streets in Pleasant Hill were dirt and in wet weather the coal wagons would mire down. In 1902 he built what was known for many years as the "cinder road" from the corner of Campbell and Olive, out across the Kellogg Lake dam, to his greenhouses. On each trip to town after coal, the Kellogg coal wagons would dump a load of cinders from the coal furnaces onto the road and soon Pleasant Hill had a hard-surface road. The city used the road to go to the Pleasant Hill Cemetary because it was the only road that wasn't a mud-wallow in bad weather.

In 1893 he bought the canning factory which was at that time located in the southeast bottom of Pleasant Hill, renaming it the Gold Coin Canning Factory. He gave employment to about two hundred people and sold plants and seeds at wholesale prices to anyone who wanted to plant and cultivate produce to sell to the canning factory. In 1896 over sixty thousand cases of canned tomatoes alone were shipped from his factory.

Approximately 1882, he built a large icehouse on Big Creek and for many summers helped Pleasant Hill keep cool while at the same time having ice for his green houses. The ice was cut from the creek with saws and packed in sawdust in the ice house until needed. It was considered to be of superior quality to lake ice because the waters of the creek would be sheltered from the wind by the trees while the wind, at the same time, would be lashing the water of the lakes and causing the lake ice to be rough. The icehouse was located just northwest of town on Big Creek, going north to the City Lake. You can still see the hole in the ground where it stood there on the creek bank.

Fred Kellogg Rowe
Grandson of George M. Kellogg

In 1898 Mr. Kellogg bought the old Stone Mill at what is now 400 Cedar and renovated it into an Opera House. It was noted as being far ahead of small town ideas of an opera house with it's gaslights, balcony over the main auditorium, loggias at each side, orchestra pit in front of the large stage, and dressing rooms. It was quite a place and for twenty years the Kellogg Opera House was the pride of Pleasant Hill.

In 1905 he built and operated what was known as the Kellogg Model Dairy. It was located back of the greenhouses, where the big old cow barn still stands today. His purpose for establishing the dairy was primarily to secure a regular supply of the best fertilizing material for his greenhouses and he installed a drainage system for carrying the manure into a sink from where it was pumped by a large steam pump to the greenhouses. The dairy was no "small potatoes" though. He had a large herd of some of the best bred Holsteins in the country and his dairy products were sold locally and shipped to Kansas City. In 1905 the cream from the dairy sold for 7 cents per pound, which was a good price in those days.

I've been told Mr. Kellogg used to plant beds of flowers around the Missouri Pacific depot each spring and furnished floral decorations for school commencements, local entertainments, etc., at his own expense. He was, evidently, a man who loved beauty and tried to beautify Pleasant Hill as best he could. He was a lover of music and this is evidenced by the fact that in 1904 he gifted the Pleasant Hill public school with eight organs and a piano, with the provision of a program of music instruction for the students be introduced in the school. In addition to giving the instruments he also paid the salary of Stella Dallas, who was selected as music instructor. A few years later the school decided to discontinue the music program and I'm told Great-Grandfather said to go ahead - he would remove the instruments and give them to Harrisonville. The Pleasant Hill music program was continued.

Now for some of my memories of Pleasant Hill. When I was a boy, downtown Pleasant Hill was quite a place. On Saturday night the town was so full of people it was hard to get up and down the streets and the hitchracks were all full of horses. People would come to town and visit until maybe midnight and then start buying their groceries, etc. Stores all stayed open until one or two in the morning. The big Oppenheimer store was in its glory then and known throughout the county as 'the' place to shop. One of the Oppenheimers had a large home on North Taylor. During the winter months Mrs. Oppen- heimer lived at the Hotel Muhlebach in Kansas City. I believe the house burned and later Dr. Carl Conrad built the two-story frame house standing there today at 326.

The railroad traffic - freight and passenger - through here was very large and there was nearly always a crowd of people in the depots all night. There were several all-night restaurants and Pleasant Hill was a busy place.

The Swarthout Saloon was where the library is now at 125 South Lake, facing more toward the depot. The big old house standing now across from City Hall was the Swarthout home and used to sit right behind the saloon. At some point in time a gas station (now gone) was built on the southwest corner of Paul and South Lake and the house was moved to its present location. Originally it had an iron fence all the way around it.

I remember a place we called 'Hog Island' back then. It was a little island in the middle of the Artic Dairy pond and Su Rolley kept his hogs there, feeding them the waste from the dairy. The Artic Dairy was quite a large operation and was located on the north side of what is now #58 highway, just a short way past the old Rock Island tracks back of downtown.

Some of these big old houses in Pleasant Hill could tell a good history of Pleasant Hill if only they could talk. Grandfather, George Cook, built the large frame house on the southeast corner of Jeffreys and Oak and today my daughter, Marcia, and her husband, William McConville, are restoring it to its original state. Their children will be the fifth generation of our family to live in the house.

'Bill' Allen lived in the huge three-story house at 623 Harper and Grandmother's sister and her husband, F.A. Beeler, lived in the house north of Kellogg Lake in the 300 block of North Campbell. Allen and Beeler were both known for their 'colorful' language and many mornings, while they were outside harnessing or saddling their horses, their voices carried back and forth across the lake in lively fashion. Beeler had an extract factory here in Pleasant Hill. I've been told he invented the powder you put into ice cream to keep it from crystallizing and make it smooth. They manufactured the powder here and shipped to other ice-cream plants. His factory was located on Locust, just back of where the post office is now.

I practically lived in Kellogg Lake during the summer when I was a boy; the lake and Big Creek. We had swimming holes all up and down the creek and had our spots named- -Broadheads, Horseshoe Bend, Water Hole, etc. Broadheads was just across from the Kellogg Icehouse which stood on the east side of the road, south side of the creek below Lake Leonard. It was a wonderful place to swim and there was a big timber nearby called Broadhead Timber where people went for picnics. Horseshoe Bend was part of Big Creek that wound up through the Broadhead Timber and was in the shape of a horseshoe. It was a good swimming hole, too, and the site of many a baptism. Water hole was across the road to the south of the Artic Dairy, just below an old bridge then called the 'old woolen mill bridge'. That place in the creek had a gravel bottom and even depth and was a favorite place to water stock, wash buggies, hold baptizings, etc. for many years.

Great-Grandmother Kellogg lived on in her home on North Independence after Great- Grandfather Kellogg died in 1908 and I recall many family dinners we had there with her. She and Mr. Kellogg were the parents of eight children and by the time we great-grand children came along there was a big family of us. At these family get-togethers we kids would all go out into the greenhouses to play. Mr. Great-Uncle Millard Parker lived in the house nearby at 1003 Wright. Both houses are still standing today. The Kellogg children were Blanche (died young), Grace (married George Rowe), Zadie (married Millard Parker), Georgia (married George Cook), Clara (married F.A. Beeler), Jessie (married Harvey Lamb), Ella (married James Bush), and one son, Ralph Kellogg.

I have lots of fond memories of this little town, the people who were once here and some who still are, events that took place and days gone by. It's been a pleasure to call some of it back again for awhile."