Honors students create digital walking tour for Maryville

Dec. 11, 2024 | By Kathleen Harner, communication assistant

A group of honors students at Northwest Missouri State University gained some insight into the history of Maryville's downtown blocks this fall, and their findings are now available to residents and visitors interested in exploring the area.

The students in Dr. Elyssa Ford's U.S. Since 1877 honors course were assigned a business or building on the downtown square and researched their history. They referenced historic Sanborn maps created in the 1800s and 1900s to gather information about the history of Maryville. Students also used digitized newspapers to determine building history and published their findings using Clio, a digital walking tour application.

The tour is accessible at this link.

"I thought this would be a really great project for the honors class because we start with going on a walking tour of downtown and looking at the Sanborn maps," Ford said. "I had done that last semester, and then this semester I decided to take that a step further."

Starting with the Nodaway County Courthouse and ending with a parking lot west of A&G Restaurant, tourists are taken through 25 historical sites in Maryville. Each site contains a description of the place's significance along with its history and uses. Many of the sites on the tour have served multiple purposes.

For example, the building that currently houses Northwest Audio Visual, at 202 E. Third St.,once was a hotel owned by Martha K. O'Reilley. In 1902, it became Kane's Saloon and gained notoriety for robberies, fights and other illegal activities there. In 1916, the saloon closed due to Prohibition.

Throughout the project, students found themselves fascinated with learning the history of downtown buildings. Darren Bix, a sophomore accounting major from Sheridan, Missouri, says he wishes he could have continued his research about the Maryville Lumber Company but had to stop short due to the limits of the course schedule.

Bix researched the building that is now Maryville Lumber Company, 315 N. Market St.,which has been inhabited by multiple lumber businesses throughout its history, in addition to a business college with 200 students during the early 1900s.

"Who would have thought that the Maryville Lumber Company had all this research and interesting history about it," Bix said. "I didn't even get to everything. I could have kept going down a metaphorical rabbit hole."

Kynlee Kimpson, a freshman animal science major from Gravity, Iowa, studied the building where Edward Jones is located at 305 E. Third St. Starting as a hardware store in 1886, the building was used for different purposes for more than a century before it became Edward Jones in 2003.

Kimpson said the research project enhanced her writing skills and will be beneficial to the community.

"Tourists who come into Maryville and want to learn more about Maryville can look at the walking tours that we did in class to kind of further their own knowledge and experience of the town itself," Kimpson said. "They can learn what each building was used for, what Maryville looked like back then, and can compare it to how it looks now today."