Pony Express Founder’s Descendant Guides Tour : Kansas City Home Preserves 1850s’ Life

Kansas City’s newly restored Alexander Majors home was the centerpiece in the 1850s of an 800-acre farm surrounded by gardens, a grape arbor, an apple orchard and a smokehouse, with a commanding view of the prairie that spread to the West.

Majors, a founder of the Pony Express, made it the headquarters for his freighting business, which is regarded as having played a significant role in opening up the West.

And today, tour guide Paula Smith tells visitors of the “eight wagon trains of 25 wagons each, pulled by six teams of oxen that would arrive and depart from the house every day.”

Smith knows her history well; she is Majors’ great-great-great-granddaughter.

Majors, who built his reputation developing freighting routes westward from the Missouri River, formed the partnership of Russell, Majors & Waddell in the 1850s. Their Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express became the route for the famous Pony Express and later for the railroads.

Majors was also Kansas City’s first millionaire, his wealth apparent in his vast home. Glass was transported from the East for its 43 windows, says Smith, one of many volunteer guides. With its architectural origins in the South, the double portico antebellum home is unusual in the Kansas City area.

Now restored to its original splendor, the house is furnished with family heirlooms and donated period pieces, such as the rosewood grand piano, a wool looped rug, kitchen implements that include an apple press and candle mold, and a now-rare “bride’s basket” of cranberry glass and coin silver, a popular gift of the day. There is also Majors’ dispatcher’s desk in the south parlor.

“He was a deeply religious man,” Smith says of her forefather. “He gave his drivers Colt revolvers as a defense against Indians and snakes, and a Bible against moral contamination,” she says as she points to a Bible still clearly embossed with “Presented by Russell, Majors & Waddell, 1859.”

Nearby is a copy of Majors’ “Seventy Years on the Frontier,” which he wrote as an old man at the urging of Buffalo Bill, a lifelong friend and Pony Express rider. On the wall is a map showing the stations of those daring and adventurous rides across the West.

Up the staircase, which Smith says is steep and narrow to make walking upstairs in long dresses possible, is the “keeping room,” a kind of family room of 100 years ago where children could play. The bedrooms have large clothing closets, an unusual feature for the time.

“They must have needed the extra space for dresses and petticoats,” Smith says, referring to Majors’ six daughters. Smith often dresses in costume for the tour. And, since business was conducted from his home, Majors’ daughters may well be the reason that he required his employees to sign an agreement “not to use profane language, not to get drunk, not to gamble, anot to treat animals cruelly and not to do anything else that is incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman,” under threat of losing their jobs.

Smith, 39, is related to Majors through his oldest daughter, Rebecca, who later took over the house. Eventually other families lived there, and it briefly became a schoolhouse. There was even an effort to tear the house down in favor of a brick building, but that failed when it proved difficult to remove the square nails from the solid oak.

The house was overgrown and forgotten until 1930, when one of Majors’ great-granddaughters bought it and began a one-woman attempt at its restoration. After her death, the restoration became a community effort. In the spring of 1984, after literally thousands of hours of work donated by local craftsmen and designers, the home was opened to the public.