Stilwell, KS

Platted as Mt. Auburn; the plat was filed on November 30, 1886 by Michael O'Keefe, J. Larkin, W. A. Kelly and A. J. Norman. The town exists because the Missouri Pacific Railroad, planning a line south from Kansas City, was deterred by the hills north of the older settlement of Aubry and laid its track half a mile east instead. Aubry's post office closed on August 20, 1888 and what remained of Aubry merged into the new town. source

The name. Renamed Stilwell in March 1889 in honor of Arthur Stilwell, the young railroad promoter who founded what became the Kansas City Southern Railway. source

Stilwell has never been incorporated. It is an unincorporated community in southeastern Johnson County, represented by the Stilwell Community Organization; it has no city government, no mayor and no municipal boundary. This is a factual attribute a buyer needs: services, zoning and permitting run through Johnson County, not a city hall. source

1. 1888A post office was established at Stilwell on June 22, 1888, three years before the neighboring Aubry settlement had fully merged into it. The first rail depot opened three years after the town's founding, once the Missouri Pacific track was built. source
2. 1906The Standard Oil Company built a pipeline pumping station on the line south of Mastin - a Missouri Pacific stop later renamed Kenneth - with four boilers and a 115-foot concrete stack. About 150 men had been at work the previous summer laying the pipeline between Mastin and Stilwell, connecting the Kansas oil fields to the refinery at Independence, Missouri. In 1906 the Prairie Oil and Gas Company, a regional Standard Oil subsidiary, built five houses beside the station for its permanent employees; the settlement was called Redel. The pipeline passed to the Sinclair companies in 1932, and Sinclair Refining sold four of the houses to individual owners in 1937. source
3. 1910By 1910 the settlement had roughly 200 residents with schools, churches and commercial businesses; commerce flourished until about 1915. source
4. 1925A fire destroyed much of the downtown around 1925, after which the commercial district declined and did not recover. source
5. 1928Nelson Studebaker Riley, a Kansas City automobile distributor and grandson of Peter E. Studebaker, bought the property that became Blackfeather Farm from the oilman A. R. Jones in December 1927 and built a stone country house on it in 1928, with a landscape plan by Hare and Hare. A Kansas City society paper listed it in 1931 among the country estates then in fashion with the city's wealthy. Riley's fortunes turned with the Depression: he deeded the property to a Kansas City bank in 1931. The episode places Stilwell inside a documented pattern of Kansas City country retreats built in the surrounding countryside in the late 1920s. source

The median home sold here was built in 1986. Most of what sells was built between 1973 and 2013. The Census puts the median year built for all housing at 2002, so the homes changing hands skew older than the stock as a whole. 80% of sales included finished basement space beyond the above-grade footprint - which matters here, because square footage quoted above grade can understate a house considerably.

By property type, sales broke down as Single Family (69), Townhouse (1), Condo/Loft (1).

Named for Arthur Stilwell, founder of the Kansas City Southern Railway - one of the few Kansas City-area places named for a railroad founder rather than a landowner or a politician. source

It is unincorporated, which is unusual for a place of its size and value in Johnson County. source

Blackfeather Farm

A 78.9-acre country estate at 8140 W. 183rd Street, listed on the National Register in 1996 as a district of fourteen resources - a rock-faced limestone main house of 1928 in Dutch Colonial Revival with Craftsman detailing, a caretaker's bungalow, barn, chicken shed, stone summer cottage, springhouse, spring, lake and the ruins of the dam and spillway of an earlier lake. The landscape plan was drawn in 1928 by Hare and Hare, the Kansas City landscape architecture firm, and the plan for the lake below the house by the Tuttle-Ayers-Woodward engineering firm. The nomination's period of significance is 1928-1947. source 1 source 2

Redel Historic District

Five frame houses on brick foundations at 16310 Mission Road and on W. 163rd Street, listed on the National Register in 1996. They were built in 1906 by the Prairie Oil and Gas Company as housing for the men who ran its pipeline pumping station, and the nomination calls the group a rare and probably unique Johnson County example of early twentieth-century company housing for industrial workers set in open country. The houses are laid out with an even setback like an urban street, oriented toward the railroad embankment rather than the road. source 1 source 2

Schools

Blue Valley Unified School District 229. boundaries do not follow community boundaries - Stilwell has no municipal boundary at all. Blue Valley USD 229 covers east-central and southeast Johnson County including Stilwell, sections of Leawood and Olathe, and extends into Miami County. Stilwell Elementary and Blue Valley High School both carry Stilwell addresses. Confirm the assigned school for any specific address before you rely on it. source 1 source 2

Getting around

US 69 runs north-south immediately west of the community; a Union Pacific line - the successor to the Missouri Pacific track that created the town - still runs through it. source