Before UMKC, there were dreams of a Lincoln and Lee university

After checking the framed diplomas in a local dentist office, a nervous patient might have balked as the whizzing instrument approached that aching molar.

After all, a 1927 sheepskin from the Lincoln and Lee University of Kansas City? Never heard of it. Put down that drill, you fraud!

But the tooth-yanker was legit.

In the 1920s, a four-year institution of higher learning, a vague idea for four decades, was seen as a necessary attraction for the booming city. As a 1926 pamphlet noted: “All history confirms the record. The university towers and Cathedral spires that fret the skies above the imperial cities of the world were never indispensable to their commerce or their business.”

Ah, good for business, you see.

And religion, too. The Episcopal Methodists, under Bishop Ernest Lynn Waldorf, were leading the charge with big and symbolic plans for Lincoln and Lee University. Put it “where North met South and East met West,” they said, and help heal the divisions of a church split since the fight over slavery.

If naming the school after the martyred president and the widely admired Southern commander wasn’t enough, then there’d be statues of both, plus the national memorial at the center of the school, two monumental tombs for an unknown Federal and Confederate soldier each. Symbolism 101.

So when first conceived, what we regard as the University of Missouri-Kansas City, just south of Brush Creek, had another name, a somewhat different mission, and a far away location: 75th Street and State Line Road.

The Battle of Westport figured vaguely into these plans, although fighting probably did not actually occur at that spot. But that’s where Kate W. Hewitt offered 146 acres of Missouri-side land, at the time used by the Meadow Lake Golf Club. Some Kansas contributions enlarged the would-be campus to 261 acres.

Hewitt, the widow of the faculty president of the old Kansas City Dental College, had her conditions: an institution devoted to Christian education; expensively substantial campus buildings, as shown by several architectural drawings; and an annual payment of $5,000.

Another who was present at the creation was Ernest H. Newcomb, former president of Central College, a Methodist women’s college in Lexington, Mo. He jumped into promotion and fundraising, but it was slow going, never more than $800,000 of the $5 million envisioned.

Then came competition, a different group of civic leaders who gained a charter to organize the University of Kansas City, more or less a secular junior college. They, too, began raising money in the teeth of the 1929 stock market crash.

The too-few endowment dollars led to a joining of forces in 1930, but squabbles soon led the churchmen to back out. The business community had never been comfortable with the sectarian nature of their proposal, anyway, or the distance of the Hewitt land from downtown.

So Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Lee lost their chance except for those collector-item dentists’ diplomas. (Before Mrs. Hewitt gave up on the school title, the Methodists had convinced the Kansas City Dental School at 10th and Troost to merge with their doomed concept.)

The church roots torn out, Newcomb did not falter. Doggedly, without pay for two years, he gathered the support of 125 city leaders, which was a threshold for William Volker, a behind-the-scenes philanthropist made wealthy on home furnishings.

Enter J.C Nichols, who envisioned a cultural center bestriding Brush Creek, just downstream of his hot property, the Country Club Plaza. On the north side would be the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. An early backer of Lincoln-Lee, he was more than happy with a site on the stream’s south bank.

Encouraged by Newcomb and Nichols, Volker bought 40 acres of key land along Rockhill Road. When Walter S. Dickey, publisher of the Kansas City Journal-Post, conveniently died next door in 1931, Volker snapped up his stone mansion. The school’s original building, it’s known as Scofield Hall.

KCU’s first classes were conducted in October 1933; enrollment was 264; faculty 17.The instructors were recruited by Newcomb; the curriculum was designed by him. For five years, he served as managing executive and Board of Trustees secretary.

When his position was eliminated in 1938, he left in great “disappointment,” and did not return for 40 years. His role was eventually appreciated again, and today the former library building, one of the first two constructed for the university, is named for him.

The school joined the University of Missouri system in 1963. There’s been talk of going back to the name of “University of Kansas City,” but oddly, nothing about Lincoln and Lee.

This story was originally published June 15, 2018 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Before UMKC, there were dreams of a Lincoln and Lee university."