Grinter Place State Historical Site

Location:  At the Junction of I-435 and Hwy. K-32 (Kaw Drive) in Kansas City, Kansas, take Hwy. K-32 East 1/2 mile to 78th street.  Grinter place is north of K-32 at this intersection.

Contact:  Ph. 913/299-0373

Hours:  Currently open only on weekends

The large brick house sitting atop the bluff overlooking the Kaw River bottom is from another time.  It stands out strikingly from the surrounding suburbs filled with look-alike houses.  Here is a house from another world, the world of the Kansas Frontier.  To enter the house is to be transported back in time, the year:  1857.  The state has just been opened to White settlement a few years earlier in 1854.  Moses Grinter, owner of the house, was here long before that.  Records are unclear, but Grinter, a Kentucky native, seems to have moved to the area in the 1830's.  Grinter operated a ferry across the Kaw River on the military road which connected Ft. Leavenworth to the North, with Ft. Scott to the south.  He also operated a trading post which mainly served the needs of Delaware Indians who inhabited the area.  Both of these ventures were apparently quite successful and by 1857 he had the means to construct what would have been a mansion in it's day.  Even today, the quiet Southern elegance is impressive.

Here is where the Flatlander's ancestors cross paths with Kansas history, albeit in a small way.  The man Grinter hired to build the brick mansion, Bernard Tertling, had emigrated to the United States at an early age.  A trained stone mason with a restless soul, he had moved to the Kansas Territory soon after it was opened to settlement.  He tried his hand at farming the rich soil of the Kaw bottom, then sold his farm in order to buy a brewery--the first in Kansas--which promptly went broke.  With no other choice, he once again took up the trade of laying brick.   The Grinter House was just one of many projects he built before finally moving to Idaho where he homesteaded on the Snake River.  From Prussia, to Kansas, to Idaho...always restless, finally laid to rest in the soil of Idaho.  But no man leaves the world without his mark, and some of his children remained in the area of what would become Kansas City.  Eventually it would come to be that this man, Bernard Tertling, builder of the Grinter Place, my great, great, great grandfather, started a family tree that took root in Kansas.

The Kansas State Historical Society purchased the house in the 1970's.  It's interior is furnished as it would have been in Moses Grinter's day when this area was still on the frontier of civilization.  The Grinter Place State Historical Site is a time capsule large enough that you can walk from room to room.  The house does not have electric lights so you really do get a feel for what it must have been like to live in an age without even the most basic of modern conveniences.

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