I don't have the whole story but bits and pieces so if anything is not right, send me a note so I get the right history recorded. Back in the 1950's, someone had the idea that the recently annexed southern Clay County portion of KCMO needed to preserve a greenway and parkway system. This was accomplished by a property or sales tax assessment and most everything in green in the map below was acquired.
A greenway was acquired about a half mile north of Vivion Road which was supposed to be the Big Shoal (?) Parkway which would have extended Englewood Road over to the future Searcy Creek Parkway near Maple Park Middle School. Fortunately, the greenway was acquired and folks decided there really didn't need to be a four lane road (or any road) built so the area remains as it was pre-development.
I had the fortune of walking it last week to explore the opportunity for a developed trail along the creek. We were doing this to develop a federal grant application to try and get some federal funds to construct a segment of it.
I uploaded some pictures of the greenway at panoramio.com here but here are a couple of samples of this awesome linear park.
I've also heard of this area being called the Mill Creek greenway because there used to be a mill in the area. I didn't see anything that looked like remains of a mill but didn't do any research beforehand to know where/what to be looking for.
If you want to check this area out, the best place to access this area is off of North Indiana at the baseball field parking lot. You can also park along the side streets of North Brighton and walk accross the new bridge and head west. You can also check out the new KC Parks mapper here for other corridors to explore (while wearing orange) throughout the whole city.
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