Author Patricia Miller shows how the little trading center exploded into life when hundreds and then thousands of people going to Santa Fe, California, and Oregon made it their port to the west.
The Civil War stopped this frontier prosperity and for ten years, Westport and the farms and villages along the Kansas - Missouri border were terrorized by guerrilla bands led by the likes of John Brown and William Quantrill.
After the war, Westport was economically shattered but over time it transformed itself from a broken farm village to a lovely suburb so enticing to its big new neighbor Kansas City that the city swallowed Westport up, annexing it in 1897.
But Westport's history was far from over. It took on new life as a fashionable residential area and the city's cultural center.
