Joe's Kansas City Bar-B-Que: World-Famous Barbecue Born in a Gas Station RoadyGoat

1996

Joe's Kansas City Bar-B-Que, at the corner of 47th and Mission in Kansas City, Kansas, is one of the most celebrated barbecue joints in America, and it lives inside a working gas station. It opened in August of 1996, founded by Jeff and Joy Stehney, whose competition team Slaughterhouse Five won grand championships on the barbecue circuit, including the American Royal. It first opened under the name Oklahoma Joe's and was renamed Joe's Kansas City Bar-B-Que in 2014. The food earned national fame: Anthony Bourdain put it on his list of thirteen places to eat before you die. The signature is the Z-Man, a sandwich of slow-smoked brisket, smoked provolone, and two onion rings on a kaiser roll, named for a Kansas City radio host called The Z-Man. People still line up at the gas-station counter for the brisket, the burnt ends, and the ribs. (Sources: Joe's Kansas City; Wikipedia; Entrepreneur; Men's Health via explore.com.)

RoadyGoat → · 13.3 mi away

Bleeding Kansas - The Border That Started the Civil War RoadyGoat

1854

The Kansas-Missouri border became the most violently contested line in America before the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 let settlers vote on whether Kansas would be slave or free, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise. Missouri, already a slave state, shared its entire western border with Kansas. Pro-slavery Missourians and anti-slavery Northerners both flooded in to tip the vote. On March 30, 1855, hundreds of armed Missourians called Border Ruffians crossed into Kansas and stuffed ballot boxes, installing a pro-slavery legislature by fraud. Anti-slavery settlers called Jayhawkers refused to recognize it and set up a rival government. On May 21, 1856, Border Ruffians sacked Lawrence, Kansas, burning buildings and destroying a newspaper press. Three days later, abolitionist John Brown retaliated at the Pottawatomie Massacre, dragging five pro-slavery settlers from their homes and hacking them to death with broadswords. Meanwhile in Washington, a South Carolina congressman walked onto the Senate floor and beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death with a metal-tipped cane over a speech about Kansas. Sumner could not return for three years. About fifty-five people were killed in the territory between 1855 and 1859. Kansas was admitted as a free state on January 29, 1861, days after Southern senators began walking out. The border you are crossing is the line that Border Ruffians and Jayhawkers fought and died over.

15.2 mi away

Kansas City, MO RoadyGoat

Kansas City is a place where the past hums beneath the surface, quite literally. A vast underground of limestone — some of it cut by water over millennia, most of it hollowed out by miners — snakes beneath the rolling hills that define the city's landscape. That stone once held secrets, just as the city itself held the raw energy that birthed a distinctly American sound. In the 1920s and 30s, Kansas City jazz flourished, its influence rippling outwards to reshape the musical landscape. It's a legacy that echoes in the birthplace of Burt Bacharach, whose melodies would later captivate the world. The Missouri River, edged by stands of Eastern Cottonwood trees, has always been both a blessing and a threat. The Great Flood of 1951 stands as a stark reminder of the river's power, a disaster that spurred massive levee construction. Even before that, the city's history is etched in moments of both progress and violence. On June 17, 1933, gunmen ambushed a prisoner transfer outside the city's grand railroad depot and killed four lawmen and their prisoner in about thirty seconds — the Union Station Massacre, over almost before anyone understood it had started. Today, healthcare is a major employer, a testament to the city's growth and evolution, but the echoes of those earlier eras still resonate in the streets and stories of Kansas City.

16.6 mi away

Quantrill's Raid: The Burning of Lawrence

1863

On August 21, 1863, Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill led 400 raiders into Lawrence at dawn, killing up to 200 men and boys in one of the bloodiest atrocities of the Civil War.

18.9 mi away

National World War I Museum and Memorial

1926

The only museum in the United States dedicated to World War I, built around the Liberty Memorial tower that was dedicated in 1926 before a crowd of 100,000.

16.0 mi away

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

1933

One of America's finest encyclopedic art museums, built from the bequests of Kansas City newspaper publisher William Rockhill Nelson and schoolteacher Mary Atkins.

16.3 mi away

Kansas City Stockyards Site

1871

Once the second-largest livestock market in the world after Chicago, the Kansas City Stockyards processed millions of cattle and defined the city's identity for over a century.

17.5 mi away

Bonner Springs, Kansas

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