Grain Valley City

Jackson County, Missouri

   

Grain Valley City Hall is located at 711 Main Street, Grain Valley, MO 64029.
Phone: 816‑847‑6200.

Neighborhoods

Beginnings [1]

It would be 50 years after the organization of Jackson County before Grain Valley came into being. In those intervening years, there were two small post office villages located nearby — Pink Hill to the north, and Stony Point to the south. The hamlet of Pink Hill, so named because of colorful wildflowers that dotted the landscape, was platted in 1854. It consisted of two streets, Main and Locust, and at its zenith it contained about ten houses, a church, a school, and a store. It was located, by today's reckoning, at the intersection of Pink Hill and Howell Roads.

Today, the only obvious relic of old Pink Hill is the church building, which is now a private residence. Constructed in 1871, the old church was the site of a deadly shooting spree that same year. It took place during a worship service when veterans of the Civil War — Union and Confederate — took each other to task. At that time, men still carried sidearms and something was said or done to provoke gunplay. Three men were killed. Many residents of Sni-A-Bar Township afterward circulated a petition to ban the carrying of weapons in town.

Stony Point was also a post office town, though never platted. Located south of Grain Valley on today's Stony Point School Road, three-quarters of a mile west of Buckner-Tarsney Road, it was once the site of two general stores.

One of the stores was owned by Jacob Gregg. The elder Gregg had been sheriff of Jackson County before 1840, and was postmaster at Stony Point. His son, J.F. Gregg, was born at Stony Point. Both men were arrested and confined for a brief period of time by the Yankees in 1862 for their Southern sympathies. Upon release, the younger Gregg, just 18 years old, joined a Confederate guerrilla company and saw action from Missouri to Texas for the remaining three years of the war.

After the war, he returned to farming near Stony Point, only to be arrested once again by federal authorities and held in custody for more than a year. Afterward, he fled to Texas for seven years before returning home. In 1880, he purchased a grocery store in the new town of Grain Valley. That same year, Grave's & Ashcroft's addition was platted in Grain Valley, and included a street named for Gregg.

Stony Point's other store was owned by J.H. Cannon. He was born in Virginia in 1840 and served in a Confederate cavalry regiment during the Civil War. After the war, he took up teaching and cattle-raising, and even spent a year as a miner in Colorado. He came to Stony Point as a teacher and stockman in 1871.

Two years later, Cannon opened a grocery and dry goods store there. When the railroad came through the Sni Valley in 1879, he moved to Grain Valley, and purchased over 100 acres of land in the name of his wife, Mary. Much of that land was soon platted into two subdivisions on the south side of the railroad tracks, and would include Cannon Street. In 1881, he was listed as a merchant, postmaster, magistrate, notary public, and grain dealer.

  1. Michael Gillespe, A History of Grain Valley, The Pointe (newspaper), www.cityofgrainvalley.org, accessed July, 2011.

Nearby Towns: Blue Springs City • Lake Lotawana City •


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