Longview Mansion

Longview Mansion is a 22,000-square-foot Spanish Colonial Revival house in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, built 1913–1914 for lumber baron R.A. Long.¹² At its peak it anchored a model farm of roughly 1,780 acres regarded as one of the finest private agricultural estates in the United States.¹ Longview Farm is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the mansion operates today as a private event venue.³⁴

History

In 1912, Robert Alexander Long — Kansas City’s dominant lumber magnate and one of the wealthiest men in America — began planning in earnest for a country estate in the rolling farmland of southern Jackson County between Hickman Mills and Lee’s Summit, roughly twenty miles southeast of downtown Kansas City. He purchased more than 1,500 acres, land he found reminiscent of his native Kentucky; the holding later grew to roughly 1,780 acres.¹ The National Register nomination records that assembling the tract required buying sixteen separate farms from private owners, producing a rectangular parcel about one and one-half miles wide by one and three-quarters miles long.⁵ His intent was to build a world-class working farm estate centered on a grand family residence, in part to accommodate the horse stock of his younger daughter Loula, an accomplished horsewoman from childhood whose animals had outgrown the stables at the family’s in-town house.¹

Construction began in 1913 and ran eighteen months for the main house, which was ready for occupancy on June 1, 1914; the broader estate complex was finished by 1916.³¹⁶ At the time it was reported to be the largest building project in the country, employing over 2,000 workers, among them Belgian craftsmen and Sicilian stonemasons.¹ The Kansas City Star called the finished compound “a rural Versailles.”¹ Longview was organized as a demonstration farm for scientific agricultural methods, with model livestock operations, experimental crop programs, greenhouses, a dairy, a hog farm, an orchard, and a powerhouse supplying electricity.¹ More than forty structures — barns, stables, staff residences, a chapel, and service buildings — were constructed across the property, unified by stucco walls and red tile roofs.³¹⁶ Roughly 800 acres were given to oats, corn, wheat, and soybeans; the remainder to the residence and gardens, a ten-acre lake, the equestrian and dairy complexes, and commercial greenhouses.³ A nine-mile fence enclosed the property.³

At its peak, Longview Farm was regarded as one of the finest private agricultural estates in the United States. It was never intended to be profit-making.⁷

The mansion and buildings

The mansion itself is a 22,000-square-foot structure containing 48 rooms: 14 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, and 6 fireplaces.² Its main facade extends 138 feet, with a projecting colonnaded porch focusing the center bay.³ The architect was Henry Ford Hoit (1872–1951) of Kansas City, who carried a unified Spanish Colonial Revival vocabulary across all the estate’s primary structures; the Historic American Buildings Survey documents the property under Hoit’s name as the Robert A. Long House.³⁷ George Edward Kessler (1862–1923) — the landscape architect also responsible for Kansas City’s park and boulevard system — served as the estate’s landscape planner, laying out gardens, drives, farm lanes, and ornamental grounds.³¹

The supporting farm buildings drew particular admiration from architectural and agricultural observers of the era. The Show Horse Barn, built for Loula Long’s show-horse operation, measures roughly 280 by 150 feet, is crowned by a cupola carrying a striking clock, and enclosed an indoor show ring.³ Hoit designed the farm buildings against the published “scientific farm” literature of the day, including Radford’s Combined House and Barn Plan Book (1908) and Modern Farm Buildings (1913).³

The estate’s NRHP-listed footprint encompasses approximately 325 acres of the original farm and seventeen buildings and structures, including the main residence, the show horse barn, and the dairy barn complex, along with farm lanes, fencing, the lake, formal gardens, ornamental entrance markers, and lighting fixtures.³ Longview Farm was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 24, 1985 (reference number 85003378).³²

R.A. Long and Loula Long Combs

Robert Alexander Long (1850–1934) was born in Shelby County, Kentucky, and built his fortune through the Long-Bell Lumber Company, eventually operating its own sawmills — including what was then the world’s largest — and distributing through over 100 Long-Bell lumberyards.⁸ In Kansas City he is remembered for two signature commissions: the R.A. Long Building at 928 Grand (1906–07), Long-Bell’s corporate headquarters and the first all-steel-framed building in the city, and Corinthian Hall on Gladstone Boulevard, his lavish Beaux-Arts in-town residence completed 1910–1911, which later became the Kansas City Museum.³¹⁸⁹

Longview Farm was in many ways built around his younger daughter Loula Long Combs (1881–1971). An internationally recognized equestrienne, Loula entered her first horse show in 1896 at a fair in Kansas City’s Fairmount Park and went on to win blue ribbons at competitions across the United States, Canada, and England for nearly sixty-five years.¹⁰ She was a perennial presence at Kansas City’s American Royal, appearing yearly into her eighties, and in 1967 was elected to the Madison Square Garden Hall of Fame.¹⁰ She married Robert Pryor Combs in 1917 and made Longview Farm her permanent home.

R.A. Long died in 1934, having spent relatively little time at the farm and preferring his city house; Loula and her sister Sallie America Long Ellis inherited the property.³¹ Loula remained at the estate for the rest of her life and died there in 1971.¹⁰

Current use

The Great Depression began Longview Farm’s slow decline: the lumber business and the farm both took financial hits, followed by staffing losses during World War II, and by mid-century most of the fields were rented out to other farmers.¹ In 1968 Loula Long Combs and her older sister, Sallie America Long Ellis, donated 146 acres of the farm to the Metropolitan Junior College District for a new campus.¹¹¹ MCC-Longview (Metropolitan Community College – Longview) opened on that land in 1969 with 1,517 students and remains in operation on the southeastern edge of Lee’s Summit.¹¹ A decade later the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acquired roughly 950 more acres for Longview Lake, part of the Little Blue River Project; deteriorating farm buildings were removed in the process.¹

Seventeen core buildings, including the mansion and the show horse barn, survived the reservoir project and were placed on the National Register.³¹ In 2004 developer David Gale advanced a $330 million plan for New Longview, a mixed-use retail, office, and residential neighborhood; the mansion was renovated to serve as a wedding and event venue and the show horse barn was repurposed as Longview Farm Elementary School.¹ In 2018 the mansion underwent a $3.2 million restoration.⁴ Today The Historic Longview Mansion operates as a full-service special-events and wedding venue at 1200 SW Longview Park Drive, Lee’s Summit, MO 64081.⁴

See also

• robert-a-long — estate builder; lumber baron and KC philanthropist
• r-a-long-building — Long’s downtown Kansas City skyscraper (1906)
• kansas-city-museum — Long’s in-town Gladstone Boulevard residence
• gilded-age-kc — the broader era of Kansas City wealth and institution-building

Sources

Footnotes

1. Kansas City Public Library, Missouri Valley Special Collections, with The Kansas City Star (“What’s Your KCQ?”) — “KCQ: The History of Longview Farm” (January 2021) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

2. Wikipedia — “Longview Farm.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. National Park Service / Missouri Department of Natural Resources State Historic Preservation Office — National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form, Longview Farm, Lee’s Summit, Jackson County, Missouri (ref. 85003378; listed October 24, 1985) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

4. The Historic Longview Mansion — official venue site ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Legends of America — “Longview Farm, Lee’s Summit, Missouri.” ↩

6. Missouri Preservation — “Longview Farm.” ↩ ↩²

7. Historic American Buildings Survey — Longview Farm / Robert A. Long House, Longview Road, Lees Summit, Jackson County, MO (HABS MO-1222), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division ↩ ↩²

8. The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library) — “Robert A. Long,” by Daniel Coleman ↩ ↩²

9. Wikipedia — “R. A. Long Building.” ↩

10. The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library) — “Loula Long Combs,” by Dory DeAngelo ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Metropolitan Community College – Kansas City Libraries — “Local and Regional History Research Guide – Longview: History of Longview and Its Environs.” ↩ ↩²