George Porterfield Gates

George Porterfield Gates was an Independence miller and prominent local businessman whose wealth helped give North Delaware Street its changed, increasingly affluent character. His large house embodied the town’s postwar building boom; his place in Bessie Wallace’s family made that house part of her life story; and a tale he told about Jim Crow Chiles preserved a vivid strand of the region’s remembered past.

Business and the Growth of North Delaware Street

Gates came from Vermont by way of Illinois and entered the milling business with William Waggoner in 1883. Their company, Waggoner-Gates Milling Company of Independence, had been founded in 1866 and prospered through Queen of the Pantry Flour, a product known throughout the Midwest. Gates’s career thus joined an influx of newcomers and new capital to an older town: the growth of Kansas City, the railroads, and local enterprises had helped remake Independence in the years after the war.

North Delaware Street showed that transformation in its buildings. The large homes of the Bullene family, Aaron Sawyer, and Gates were all built after the war, reflecting the new money behind the town’s commercial growth. Gates’s own house stood at the corner of North Delaware and Blue Avenue. After joining Waggoner, he greatly enlarged and remodeled the relatively modest residence; the Independence Sentinel reported that the work cost a remarkable $8,000.

The finished house was a substantial fourteen-room clapboard residence, painted gray with black window trim. It had front and rear verandas, ornamental fretwork, tinted glass in the front bay windows, and a slate roof. Gas lighting and hot and cold running water further distinguished it. These details made the home more than a private dwelling: among the conspicuous houses that lent North Delaware Street its standing, it displayed the resources of a successful local business family.

Family and Social Position

Gates was Bessie Wallace’s grandfather, and his residence was one of Independence’s showplaces. Bessie’s childhood and social world were associated with North Delaware Street’s large houses and with the wealth and distinction of the Gates household. The social boundaries of the town could be sharply drawn: Bessie was a Presbyterian, a position described as socially elevated, while Harry Truman was a Baptist. Her friend and neighbor Mary Paxton later recalled that religious difference when asked whether she remembered Truman hanging around the Wallace home as the children grew up.

After Bessie’s father died by suicide, her mother, Madge Gates, and the younger children eventually moved in permanently with her maternal grandparents at 219 North Delaware. Bessie had been away in Colorado Springs with her family and later attended a Kansas City finishing school; by the time she returned, the Trumans and Wallaces were living separate lives. The move placed her in the Gates mansion as the family’s cherished young woman, while the Truman family’s circumstances had sharply declined. The account establishes Gates’s house as the setting for this change in the families’ fortunes, without describing his own part in the decision.

A Story About Jim Crow Chiles

Gates entertained Bessie and her friends with an account of a late-night journey home by buggy from a country wedding. In his version, a mysterious rider emerged from the darkness, put a gun to his neck, and held him at gunpoint on the ride into town. Gates believed the rider, Jim Crow Chiles, meant to kill him. As they turned onto North Delaware Street, however, Chiles laughed and disappeared into the night.

The tale brought the town’s past into the setting of Gates’s own distinguished street. It made North Delaware not only a marker of newer wealth, but also the destination at the end of a story about an older, unsettled local history. Gates’s account presented Chiles as a frightening presence and ended with his sudden vanishing; its dramatic contrast between the threatening journey and the return to town helps explain why Gates used it to delight and alarm his young listeners.

Place in the Town’s Memory

Gates’s significance in the account rests on these overlapping roles: businessman in a successful regional mill, builder of one of Independence’s prominent homes, grandfather in Bessie Wallace’s family, and teller of a story about a notorious local figure. The house supplies the clearest measure of his public standing, down to its fourteen rooms, modern utilities, and reported cost. The story, by contrast, preserves his voice indirectly through the details he chose to recount and the effect he sought on his listeners.

Together, these details locate Gates between the town’s expanding commercial life and its strong attachment to local history. The mill’s flour reached customers across the Midwest, while his home anchored his family in a neighborhood identified with Independence’s leading houses. His remembered encounter with Chiles carried a different inheritance into that domestic setting: a tale of danger that concluded on the street where Gates’s prosperity was most visible.