Carving Kansas City out from limestone episode artwork

EPISODE · Apr 29, 2026 · 38 MIN

Carving Kansas City out from limestone

from A People's History of Kansas City · host Jacob Smollen

Bluffs up to 120 feet tall once hugged the Missouri River by Kansas City — making it difficult to traverse the landscape and expand the growing town. So in the mid-1800s, a Catholic priest named Father Bernard Donnelly recruited hundreds of Irish immigrants for a dangerous but critical task: sculpting the city's streets from mountains of rock and mud. KCUR's Jacob Smollen reports.

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published Apr 29, 2026

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Carving Kansas City out from limestone

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