OUR HISTORY
The Star Block, built in 1883, played a critical role in the commercial history of Osage City, Kansas.
It opened as a centerpiece of commerce in the community and remained so for much of its history. It is one of the best remaining examples of the period when money from the coal boom of the late 1800s washed through Osage City and the surrounding area, fueling a surge in population and a rush to erect buildings with architecture to match the city’s newfound prosperity.
Over its history, it has housed at least 80 businesses, and as many as 13 at a time in its early years, including both general and specialized stores, newspapers, medical clinics, restaurants, a vaudeville theater, and offices for many of the town's most important industries and prominent citizens.
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Today, the state and federal governments have listed the Star Block in the National Register of Historic Places and the Register of Historic Kansas Places in recognition of its central role in Osage City history, and we intend to rehabilitate it to help give it a future as bright as its past.
IT ALL BEGAN IN FIRE.
Around 3:45 a.m., the clang of the Methodist Episcopal Church bell cut through the howling north wind of the early November night. A thousand residents of the young community of Osage City spilled into the streets to find a glow that lit up the night sky for miles around.
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The blaze raced through the string of wooden storefronts on the north side of Market Street, even jumping to two railroad cars parked on the nearby tracks. With sparks flying far and wide, it threatened the buildings across the street, the heat shattering glass and half-cooking apples in a display window.
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Against this, the town had no fire department or public water system and little firefighting equipment: just a single hose and a single fire extinguisher. Combined with a bucket brigade of “strong, hearty and willing men,” as one newspaper put it, residents managed to prevent any deaths and to save the singed buildings across the street.
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But by the time dawn broke on Nov. 2, 1882, they still confronted a new reality: Half of a central block of downtown was in ruins, with 10 businesses destroyed and a handful more damaged.
If firefighting equipment was in short supply, a determination to rebuild and the funds to do it were not. This was a young boomtown, after all, enjoying the prosperity of a mining operation that supplied most of the coal for the fast-expanding Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. It would rebuild bigger and better, with buildings more befitting its growing population and commerce.
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In just six months, it did. The scorched row of small wooden storefronts was being replaced with sturdy new brick buildings, larger, statelier and quite importantly more fireproof than before.
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In May 1883, the Star Block building opened as the centerpiece of the handsome new row, and was immediately called “unquestionably the best and the most attractive block of buildings in the city” by the Osage City Free Press.
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“It is probably a little wicked to say so,” the article concluded, “but the fire on the 2d of November, 1882, was a blessing to this city and not much disguised either.”
THE BUILDERS: CONSTRUCTION, AND THEN DESTRUCTION
James McNames lived a life of extremes: He was perhaps Osage City’s most prominent builder, constructing most of the landmark commercial structures in town, as well as several homes and churches. Over time, he also shot several people, shoved a boy down some stairs, beat up an elderly man over 50 cents and, when he ended up at the county poor farm as his life fell apart, broke a plate over one ward’s head and flogged another.
At the time he built the Star Block, Mr. McNames’s life was still on the upswing. Born in 1840 in Canada, he had moved to the Osage City area in 1859, and his carpentry and construction skills had brought him prominence in the quickly growing town. The Star Block was among the first of his large projects, though more would quickly follow in rapid succession. He eventually oversaw the construction of “many of our largest business houses,” as the Osage City Free Press noted in 1902, including most of the landmark structures during the coal mining boom, such as the Everest Hotel, and the Union Hall Opera House and its accompanying Union Block. He also built the Osage City Free Press building and a string of smaller commercial buildings along Market and Sixth Streets, including the buildings on the north side of Market Street just west of the railroad tracks after yet another fire wiped out that row. And he constructed the Methodist Episcopal Church and the bell tower of the Baptist Church, as well several houses.
Unfortunately, his output fell as the boom faded in the late 1880s, and it was about then that the seeds of his undoing in his personal life began to sprout. In May 1888, he got into a billing dispute over 50 cents for work he had done for E.R. Howe, who was nearly 80. Mr. McNames struck Mr. Howe in the head, leaving bruises and cuts in several places. He pleaded guilty to assault and battery and was fined $1, which even with inflation would amount to only $29 today. He didn’t escape community approbation quite so easily, however, as the Daily Kansas People noted that the incident had raised the “ire and indignation” of the community.
It would get worse. In January 1889, he arrived home late one night to find Gen. H.K. McConnell, a prominent lawyer, apparently leaving his house. Suspecting that Gen. McConnell had been “guilty of improper relations with his wife,” as the Osage City Free Press put it, Mr. McNames fired three shots at Gen. McConnell, striking him twice and wounding him so severely that some initial newspaper reports declared him dead. Gen. McConnell recovered, but two months later on a business trip to Topeka, he fatally shot himself in the head, purportedly over the reaction of his own wife to the affair.
Mr. McNames surrendered himself immediately after the shooting, apparently believing that given the circumstances, he didn’t have much to worry about from the law. He was initially held on $1,000 bond, but he was ultimately right: He was a free man weeks later, and pulled up stakes for Kansas City.
He returned to Osage City by 1891, and it was just months before he shot someone else – and possibly two someone elses, depending on the account. It began in April 1891 when a bunch of boys were goofing around in the upstairs hallway of the opera house two doors down from the Star Block. Mr. McNames was living in a room there at the time, and he did not take kindly to the noise. One of the boys, the son of George Hoover, who was the editor of the Osage County Times, “returned rather a saucy answer,” as the Osage City Free Press put it, when Mr. McNames hollered at them to quiet down. When the boy wouldn’t back down, Mr. McNames shoved him, knocking him halfway down the stairs.
The boy ran and told his father, who showed up at Mr. McNames’s door enraged. Mr. McNames apologized and said he hadn’t meant for the boy to tumble down the stairs, but Mr. Hoover was not mollified. He struck Mr. McNames with enough force that he threw his right thumb out of joint, and the builder in return pulled out his revolver and fired a shot. Where that shot went is a matter of some divergence among news accounts at the time. They agree it hit Mr. Hoover in the head. But one account has it first having struck Thomas O’Hara, a bystander who was trying to intervene, piercing his wrist on its way to Mr. Hoover’s left temple.
Whatever the case, Mr. Hoover miraculously escaped serious injury, and was back at work two days later. And Mr. McNames again avoided any significant punishment. He was arrested on $300 bond, but the matter was quickly dropped after he and Mr. Hoover met and agreed to put it behind them. What’s a little shooting between friends?
His string of good fortune with the judicial system, however, was about to come to a crashing halt, a turn that the Osage City Free Press blamed on a “bad temper, superinduced when opportunity afforded, by bad whisky.” He spent his later years shuttling in and out of jail, after a string of rage-filled assaults and charges of disturbing the peace. His declining work output and the fines he began racking up from his criminal charges left him spending much of his remaining time at the county poor farm. But even there, he found ways to land himself back in jail: In 1907, he earned his ticket back by flogging one ward and breaking a plate over the head over another one.
In March 1908, the Osage City Free Press reported that a freed Mr. McNames planned to return to Osage City and resume his work, but instead two months later he was back in jail, found guilty of disturbing the peace. The city he had helped build appeared to have turned on him. “He could just as well have been well off and have the good will and respect of his fellow citizens as to be in the predicament he now finds himself,” the Osage City Free Press opined. “No one is to blame but Jas. McNames. He had many golden opportunities, but cast them away.”
No records could be found of any projects completed by him after 1903.
Meanwhile, only a shell of his once-formidable imprint on the town remains. The Park Place senior apartments, on the southwest corner of Sixth Street and Main Street, now occupy the space where the Everest Hotel once stood. The Union Hall Opera House and Union Block, which were catty-corner from the Everest, have all been torn down.
Helping Mr. McNames with the carpentry was George Todd, which was something of a reunion between the two. The two had been business partners, but had dissolved their firm of McNames & Todd in 1881. Mr. Todd continued to partner sometimes with Mr. McNames on building projects, and he built more several more modest projects in Osage City on his own, including several tenement houses and a new baptistery for the First Baptist Church. In 1887, he was elected a justice of the peace, and in the 1890s, he left Osage City to run a lumberyard in Oklahoma.
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Isaac Platt oversaw the masonry and stonework for the Star Block, as he did later for the Union Block. Little else is known about him.
THE FOUNDERS: A LINK TO YOUR BALANCED BREAKFAST
Two pillars of the community, Marshall K. Howe and Capt. James A. Drake, had the Star Block constructed and originally co-owned it. Each of them has a fascinating tale of his own.
Mr. Howe co-owned one of the city’s opera houses, which remains the other major building on the block, two doors east of the Star Block, and he had, off and on, other businesses in the fledgling town. But his primary wealth was built with real estate, including a section of the town that he developed, Howe’s Addition. He appears to have made a princely sum off the Star Block alone, selling his half for $8,000 months after the building’s completion, as much as double what it was estimated to have cost. By 1886, he had turned his holdings of houses, land, commercial real estate and business interests in Osage City into what a St. Louis newspaper estimated to be a $40,000 fortune, making him one of the wealthiest men in the city, and he expanded his development work into Topeka and eventually Chicago. He then, after having met Charles W. Post in Osage City, became the major outside investor in what became the Post cereal empire, serving as its treasurer and running the company as part of its “cabinet” after Mr. Post’s death.
Capt. Drake, a Civil War veteran who was one of the earliest Osage City settlers, owned various buildings downtown along with his wife. He himself had a small coal-mining operation in the county and went on to help found two other major industries in the town, the brick works and the creamery. He was a consistent community booster, helping lead the efforts to lure railroads, businesses and the county seat to Osage City (the last one unsuccessful), and he later became City Council president.
