Grandview, Missouri

Grandview, Missouri, was both a practical rural community and a lasting point of reference in Harry S. Truman’s life. Its rail connections brought stores and services within reach of the family farm; its fields and roads shaped Truman’s sense of responsibility and his later ambition to build roads honestly. Although he came to prefer town life, Grandview remained home to his mother and sister, a place he visited throughout his public career, and the setting he selected for his presidential library.

A railroad town beside the farm

During the years the Trumans were away from Blue Ridge, Grandview grew about a mile south of the farm. Two railroads—the Kansas City Southern and the St. Louis & San Francisco, commonly called the Frisco—had cut through corners of the property shortly before Solomon Young’s death. The town’s post office, bank, grocery, feed and hardware stores, and two depots were now only a ten-minute ride down the rock road. On Sunday mornings, the bells of Grandview Baptist Church carried to the farm.

This growth brought the everyday institutions of a town close to a household still organized around agricultural work. The railroad did not erase the distance between farm and city, but it changed what counted as nearby: a place for business, supplies, worship, and connection to routes beyond the surrounding fields. Grandview’s position between the farm and the larger towns would recur in Truman’s life, at once making travel possible and leaving it inconvenient.

In 1909, Truman was appointed a deacon. The following year, at twenty-six, he organized a new lodge in a room above a store on Main Street and had become a notable figure in the community. Fellow Mason Gaylon Babcock considered him particularly effective in lodge work, even though he was less impressed by Truman’s farming ability and personality. Babcock described him as a “utility man” around the farm and disliked that the grown man played piano and still called his mother “Mamma”; nevertheless, he judged Truman’s lodge work “excellent.” The episode captures Grandview as more than a backdrop to farm life: it was a community in which Truman acquired standing through civic and fraternal activity.

Farm life, courtship, and difficult journeys

The road between Grandview and Independence connected Truman’s family responsibilities to his courtship of Bess Wallace, but it did not make the journey easy. North Delaware Street was only sixteen miles from the farm, yet a round trip by horse and buggy could take four hours or more, and John Truman did not necessarily make the horse and buggy available. Train travel required Harry to walk into Grandview, take the Frisco to Kansas City, Missouri, and change to an Independence train. Few trains stopped in Grandview, connections were poor, and delays could be long. Another route meant a buggy ride to Dodson on Blue River, then an electric streetcar into Kansas City, Missouri, and another streetcar to Independence. Truman made the trip whenever he could, sometimes sleeping on a couch at the Nolands’ home.

His attachment to Bess was expressed in a letter that joined romantic candor to anxiety about his prospects. He called himself a “good-for-nothing American farmer,” doubted that he would amount to something, and worried that his family were poor financiers. At the same time, he told her that he had been “crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together,” while admitting he had not thought she would look at him. The contrast between self-doubt and declaration belongs to the farm setting: Truman saw the work and financial uncertainty there as limits on his future, even as Grandview remained the place from which his relationship with Bess had begun.

Later, access to an automobile changed the character of visits. Truman could drive along Blue Ridge Boulevard to Independence in a polished car, dressed for Sunday, and take Bess and others fishing on Blue River, picnic at the waterworks beside the Missouri River at Sugar Creek, or go for a drive in the country. Grandview and its surrounding landscape thus became part of their leisure as well as the site of his labor and family obligations.

That labor weighed heavily on him. Truman took the farm’s responsibilities seriously, working long days in the fields and writing to Bess that he had been planting corn from six in the morning until seven in the evening. He felt he had to make the year succeed, and worried about weather, debts, and whether the men would work for him as they had for his father. When he chose to leave for military service after the United States entered World War I, the decision was his own. He left the farm and care of his mother to his sister Mary Jane. She later summarized the family’s endurance simply: “We got through.” The choice altered her life as well as his, making departure from Grandview a consequential break rather than just a change of occupation.

A home place and a political inheritance

Truman did not want to return to country life permanently, even though he continued to visit the farm to see his mother and sister. He loved Independence and its people; his daughter Margaret Truman Daniel remembered that he liked walking up to the courthouse square and talking with people. His public identity nonetheless repeatedly drew on Grandview. During a campaign he stressed his farm background, and a publicity photograph placed him on the farm’s porch swing with his mother, Martha Ellen Truman, and sister Mary Jane.

The countryside also fed a larger ambition. Truman’s experience with the roads around Grandview, memories of roads in France, and concern for the farm roads his father had worked to maintain came together in his determination to build the best roads in the state, perhaps the country, and to ensure they were built honestly. Years later, in Kansas City, Missouri, he sold memberships for the Kansas City Automobile Club, earning about five dollars per new member after expenses and clearing $5,000 after selling more than a thousand memberships in a year. He became president of the National Old Trails Association, which promoted highways along historic trails and encouraged history as a tourist attraction. These later activities extended, on a larger scale, a concern with roads that had been formed in and around Grandview.

Family visits kept the farm present in Truman’s life after he had settled in town. On Sundays he, Bess, and Margaret drove to Grandview for a midday fried-chicken dinner. Margaret remembered the atmosphere as entirely different from that of the household in Independence and recalled that Bess liked Mamma Truman, who was lively and outspoken, with opinions on politics. Martha Ellen Truman still went rabbit hunting with her grandsons. One day, after a tramp complained that the coffee she had offered was not hot enough, she went inside and returned with a shotgun, telling him he could leave. Such memories presented Grandview not as an idealized retreat but as a home animated by the forceful character of the people who remained there.

Grandview in public life and memory

As Truman’s responsibilities expanded, Grandview became a place reporters visited for the family’s perspective. During the 1944 convention, his mother followed proceedings by radio from her small parlor and told reporters she did not want him to become Vice President; she believed he should remain in the Senate. She also heard predictions that Franklin D. Roosevelt would die in office if elected, and hoped he would prove them wrong. When Truman became President after Roosevelt’s death, Martha Ellen Truman expressed both grief and reserve about the change. She said she could not really be glad because Roosevelt was dead, and that it did not seem right to wave flags; she added that Harry would get along all right. Grandview supplied a family voice that qualified the public celebration of succession.

Mary Jane’s letters from Grandview also conveyed the strain that followed her brother’s rise to the presidency. She described the volume of mail, the household’s difficulty keeping meals on time, and her own seven-pound weight loss in a week. When an artist from Washington came seeking photographs of their mother, Mary Jane told him that Mamma had posed for all the pictures she could for the time being. These details made the political transformation tangible at the level of family routine, while showing Mary Jane continuing to manage the burdens left at home.

In 1950, Truman flew to Kansas City, Missouri, for an honorary degree from William Jewell College at nearby Liberty and to see his mother. With help from friends, he and his brother Vivian had bought back from the county the old Blue Ridge home place, which their mother loved. Her deteriorating health meant she could not move back; she and Mary Jane continued living in a small yellow frame bungalow in Grandview, where they had lived since 1940. Truman was distressed by his mother’s decline and worried about the care falling to Mary Jane. After Martha Ellen Truman fell and fractured her hip, he flew home again and urged Mary Jane not to work too hard and to get help if she needed it.

Grandview became the chosen setting for Truman’s next major project after the presidency. He had long admired the Roman ideal of Cincinnatus, the farmer who takes command in a national emergency and then returns to the plow. In 1953, after leaving the presidency, he looked to the family land at Grandview while planning a presidential library. On a bitter day of sleet and snow, he walked the fields with local reporters, his collar raised against the wind, discussing his childhood and a project budgeted at $1.5 million. He described the library’s importance to the young people who would take over the country’s destiny.

The site reflected a personal memory as well as a public plan. Truman had sent George Elsey to examine the farm with Vivian and architect Edward Neild. Vivian first suggested a low, swampy corner near the railroad tracks; Elsey and Neild pointed instead to a more attractive rise with views. Truman had already sketched the building and wanted it to resemble the house of his grandfather Solomon Young, the large house that belonged to his childhood memories. As Roger Tubby recorded the scene, Truman spoke of looking over the prairies and imagining cities or universities arising there. The library joined Grandview’s fields to a national future: the land that had framed his early life would hold his papers and become a place where students could encounter the history he had helped shape.