4038 Central St
Kansas City, MO, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Reverend Nathan Scarritt House

Statement of Significance:

The Reverend Nathan Scarritt Residence, constructed circa 1847 to 1853, is significant as the oldest surviving residence within the Westport area of Kansas City, Missouri. At the time the Scarritt Residence was built, Westport was an independent community, a vigorous, flourishing trail town at the edge of the American frontier. The Scarritt Residence typifies the domestic construction of its era and is a rare survivor within Kansas City of an antebellum house of frame construction. From 1853 until 1862, it was the home of the Reverend Nathan Scarritt and his family. Scarritt (1821-1890), a very significant figure in the history of Westport and Kansas City, was a pioneer preacher, teacher, missionary to the Indians, banker, real estate developer, and, by the end of his life, one of the early millionaires in Kansas City.

HISTORICAL DATA

The town of Westport, established in 1834, was reaching its zenith in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the period when the Scarritt Residence was erected. Built on trade -- Indian trade, fur trade, Santa Fe trade -- Westport flourished as a point of outfit and departure for wagon trains to the West. It was one mile from the Missouri-Kansas border and the last outpost on the frontier, until Kansas Territory was officially opened for white settlement in 1854. Until that date the present state of Kansas (along with Nebraska and Oklahoma) was Indian Territory, and the area west of the Missouri state line was neatly divided by the United State Government into a solid block of reservations for various Indian tribes, most of them forcibly relocated (some for the second or third time) from farther east. Just across the state line from Westport lay the Shawnee reservation, established under a treaty of 1825; the Shawnees were removed over a ten-year period from Ohio, Indiana, and eastern Missouri to this newly allocated territory. Ranged around the Shawnee reservation were reservations for the Kickapoo, Delaware, Pawnee, Kansa, Ottawa, Osage, and later the Wyandotte tribes.

Converting the American Indian to Christianity had been among the strongest motives entwined through all the centuries of European exploration, discovery, and settlement, and this drive continued unabated through much of the nineteenth century. For many missionaries, educating the Indians was a prerequisite to Christianizing them; Protestantism, especially, was predicated on reading and acceptance of the gospel by each individual. The Missouri Methodist Episcopal Church, meeting in conference in St. Louis in 1830, sent the Reverend Thomas Johnson to establish a mission among the Shawnee Indians and, in 1838, authorized him to found a manual labor school.

The Shawnees consented to having this school on their lands and allotted 2240 acres, located approximately a mile west of the Missouri-Kansas border, for the purpose." By 1847, the school had 125 students, slightly more than half Shawnees and Delawares, the rest being drawn from other nearby tribes. The school was surrounded by a flourishing farm, for which the Indian students supplied unpaid labor.
In 1848, the Reverend Johnson decided to enlarge his school, opening a department "of high order," presumably comparable to a high school, which would offer instruction in "all branches of a complete English education together with the Latin and Greek languages, "Johnson advertised for pupils among the white residents of Missouri border communities, inasmuch as Latin and Greek had little relevance for his Indian students. As principal instructor he hired the Reverend Nathan Scarritt, who, according to Johnson's advertisement, "has few equals, and no superior in the state Cove Missouri."
Scarritt was born in Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, in 1821, a few months after his parents had migrated west from New Hampshire. In spite of family crises, requiring him to return and assist his parents on their farm, Scarritt persisted in his desire of obtaining an education and, in 1842, was graduated from McKendree College, a Methodist institution in Lebanon, Illinois, approximately thirty miles from his birthplace near Edwardsville; in 1978, his Alma Mater conferred on him an honorary doctor of divinity degree (which title he always used after it was granted).

For a few years Scarritt taught school in nearby Waterloo, Illinois, but, in 1845, he moved west to Fayette, in central Missouri, to join one of his brothers-in-law in establishing Howard High School, under the auspices of the Missouri Conference of Methodists.8 The next year Scarritt was ordained a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a separate division of Methodism which organized independently in 1845, following a sectional controversy over the slavery issue.

Scarritt left Fayette to take up his position as teacher at the Shawnee Indian Manual Labor School. Among the acquaintances he made in neighboring Westport was a young lady named Martha Matilda Chick, who married Scarritt in the spring of 1850. The bride was the daughter of William Miles Chick, a Virginian who had resettled in central Missouri in 1822 and on the Missouri border in 1836. At first a merchant in Westport, Chick later expanded his operations to include a warehouse on the levee of the Missouri River, the geographic area which became the nucleus of the Town of Kansas (Kansas City); in fact, Chick was one of the shareholders in the original Town Company of Kansas, organized in 1838. It seems probable that the wide-ranging commercial, mercantile, and financial interests of his wife's large family must have stimulated a similar interest in Scarritt. In 1855, Scarritt made his first real property investment; he paid the Reverend Thomas Johnson $1900 for, a tract of land near the Missouri River levee, within the village of Kansas City.