George E. Nicholson House

This Neo-Classical Revival mansion was constructed from 1917 to 1918 for wealthy entrepreneur George Edward Nicholson along Kansas City's Ward Parkway. Nicholson earned a fortune operating cement plants, brick kilns, zinc mines, and gas companies throughout the Great Plains, Midwest, and South. By 1909, Nicholson's worth exceeded $4 million (equal to more than $120 million in 2024 dollars). At the end of World War I, Nicholson led a group of investors in purchasing the Kansas City Gas Company and the Wyandotte County Gas Company. Nicholson's decision to build his home beside Ward Parkway reflects the growth of the Country Club District, which attracted many of the wealthiest families from other parts of the city. In 1908, Real estate investor J.C. Nichols worked with the estate of the Ward Family, donating the land that would become Ward Parkway so that it would become part of the city's parks and boulevard system. The creation of Ward Parkway greatly enhanced the value of the Ward family's adjacent landholdings, and Sunset Hills and other neighborhoods adjacent to the parkway grew rapidly in the 1920s.

Real estate developer J. C. Nichols developed a plan in the first decade of the twentieth century to connect this part of the city to the system of boulevards, bridges, and private parks that the parks department was planning under the leadership of architect George Kessler. Inspired by the nationwide City Beautiful Movement, upper-class and upper-middle-class residents of Kansas City pushed their elected officials to invest heavily in constructing a network of parks connected by wide boulevards that included monuments, fountains, and landscaping.

With investments from the heirs of Seth Ward's vast landholdings, Ward Parkway became the city's most prestigious street by 1920. Placing restrictions in deeds that prevented Black and Jewish families from moving to the neighborhoods Nichols and others developed along the parkway accelerated patterns of residential segregation. The grand parkway, with its elaborate landscaping and luxurious architecture, was a source of civic pride for many, but only the city's wealthiest white families could call this area home.

At the time of the construction of this home, George E. Nicholson was one of Kansas City's wealthiest residents. Although born in New York in 1861, Nicholson spent most of his life in Missouri and Kansas. At age fourteen, he began an apprenticeship with his father, a building contractor, who handled the construction of a building on the campus of the University of Missouri. From 1880 to 1887, George Nicholson worked as a lead smelter for his father before opening his own zinc plant in Nevada, Missouri. By the turn of the twentieth century, Nicholson had established a large zinc plant in the natural gas fields in Iola, Kansas, owned and managed a chain of cement plants, owned businesses that manufactured bricks, and invested in natural gas operations; he became the first producer of natural gas to try to run a line out of Oklahoma.

Around 1910, at the age of 49, he married for a second time and established residence and headquarters offices for his Portland Iola Cement Company in Kansas City. In 1919, two years after building his now-historic grand estate on Ward Parkway, Nicholson headed a group of investors in purchasing the Kansas City Gas Company and the Wyandotte County Gas Company and served as president. The companies later merged to become Cities Service Company.

Despite not having a college education, George Nicholson was well-educated and maintained what was generally regarded as one of the best private libraries in the area within this mansion. In addition to his business activities, Nicholson established Methodist missionary schools in Baroda, India, and Manila, Philippine Islands. He also served as a trustee and endowed a chair of Philosophy and Bible at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas. In 1937, at age seventy-six, Nicholson died at his second home in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Newspapers.com. The Iola Register, April 10, 1937. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-iola-register/96585773/.

Schwenk, Sally F. "Registration Form: Nicholson. Georqe E., House." National Register of Historic Places. archives.gov. 2005. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/63819072.

Worley, William S. J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.