From Spring Hill Ranch to national park
By JIM HOY
In my past few columns I've been writing about the Spring Hill/Z Bar Ranch, which is now the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, which is the only national park in Kansas. I'll conclude this series with an account of the various owners of the ranch as it made the transition into a park.
Stephen F. Jones and his wife Louisa came to Kansas from Colorado to establish the Spring Hill Ranch in 1878. Ten years later the Joneses sold their ranch to Bernard Lantry for $95,000. They moved to Kansas City and had David Rettiger, who had built the striking native-stone ranch house, build them a house in Kansas City with stone cut from Chase County quarries.
Captain Barney Lantry, a stonecutter from New York (he got his title from having piloted steamboats in Wisconsin), had come to Chase County in 1877. Not having much call for piloting boats in Kansas, Lantry returned to stone work, contracting with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad to provide ballast for tracks, build bridges, and construct station buildings. Among many other projects (from Michigan to California and into Mexico) Lantry and his sons built the cog railway that runs up Pike's Peak near Colorado Springs.
The house that Lantry built for himself on the northwest side of Strong City, although not as spectacular as Jones', was nonetheless a showpiece. His multifaceted operation, which he called Deer Park Place after the small herd of deer he kept around the house, included raising wheat, oats, and corn, as well as cattle, sheep, and hogs. Like Jones, he was interested in improving the quality of his breeding stock, which consisted of Hereford, Shorthorn, and Angus cattle. He amassed more than twice as much ranch and farm land as had Jones, eventually owning 15,000 acres. After adding the Spring Hill Ranch to his other holdings, Lantry's operation was interchangeably referred to by either that name or Deer Park Place.
Upon Lantry's death in 1895 (at which time he was reported to be a millionaire), his sons continued the construction business, but within a decade they had begun to dispose of some of the land. In 1904 more than 9,500 acres, including the old Spring Hill Ranch, were sold to Charles and Nannie Patten of Reading in Lyon County. Five years later the Pattens sold 1,080 acres, which included the Spring Hill headquarters, to Otto and Flora Benninghoven.
In 1935 George H. Davis, president of Davis-Noland-Merrill Grain Company of Kansas City, bought the Benninghoven property, along with 10,000 adjoining acres that included the remaining 6,000 acres of Jones' original holdings as well as much of Lantry's Deer Park Place. The ranch was called the Davis-Noland-Merrill Grain Company Ranch until 1975, when the company changed its name to the Z-Bar Cattle Company and the ranch became the Z-Bar Ranch.
In 1986 the ranch was bought by Boatmen's First National Bank of Kansas City, but retained the Z-Bar name. In 1988, with thoughts of a potential national park in mind, the National Audubon Society took an option to buy the ranch, but did not do so. In 1994, the National Park Trust, formed some 11 years earlier by the National Parks and Conservation Association, bought the 10,894 acre Z-Bar from Boatmen's First National Bank. Two years later, ownership of 32 acres, including the ranch buildings and the one-room school, was transferred to the National Park Service, the balance owned privately by first the National Park Trust, then the Kansas Park Trust, and now the Nature Conservancy. As I said earlier, it's well worth a visit.
