By Diane Euston
Thirty-one year-old Edwin R. Weeks traveled by carriage from his offices at 807 Santa Fe in Kansas City to his residence at 1409 Cherry, the cold wind hitting his flushed cheeks. With Christmas just weeks away, he couldn’t wait to arrive home to show his infant daughter, Ruth and his wife, Mary what he had just received by parcel from his friends, Thomas Edison and Edward Johnson.
They sent him something special to try out in Kansas City – just in time for Christmas. And it would be electrifying. He held the wooden box gingerly on his lap, careful to not disturb the breakable contents.
Before we dive into the story of a Christmas first in Kansas City, we must follow the incredible journey of Edwin Ruthven Weeks – a man from humble beginnings who brought electric light to Kansas City.
Edwin Weeks’ Impressive Parents
Edwin Ruthven Weeks was the sixth born of seven children to Joseph V. Weeks (1821-1875) and his wife, Imogene (1821-1879). The couple met and married in their home state of New York, and after their marriage in 1842, the couple moved to Wisconsin by 1848.
Edwin was born Christmas Day 1855 in Wisconsin, a further delay to the couple’s hopes for their future. The newspaper later reported, “His [father’s] goal, when he left New York, had been Kansas, where he proposed at the outset of his journey, to join the abolitionists in their fight to make that territory a free state.”
The Weeks’ made it to Tabor, Iowa by 1860, a well-known western town with a history rooted in the abolitionist movement. As the enslaved escaped north, they would often pass through Tabor, a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Trained as a blacksmith, Joseph Weeks and his wife were not shy about their own feelings about slavery. Just outside of Tabor on the Weeks farm, “runaway slaves from Missouri on their way to Canada and freedom, were fed and taken to the next ‘station’ on the ‘Underground Railroad’ operated by a secret organization of sympathizers.”
While just a boy on that farm, Edwin attended Tabor College where he showed a tremendous thirst for knowledge.
After the end of the Civil War, the Weeks family arrived in the Kansas City area in 1865 in two covered wagons. They settled first on a farm east of Troost Ave. on Brush Creek. A short time later, they relocated closer to the town of Westport. But there was a distinct problem with this decision.
Westport “showed little sympathies for ‘Northerners’ at the close of the Civil War,” and instead of trying to blend in, the Weeks family made their presence known.
Upon their arrival, Westport was trying to open a public school for children, and Joseph Weeks asked where the school for Black children was located. He was met with a shrug.
There was little concern for the welfare of newly freed Black men, women and children, but that didn’t stop him. His 17-year-old daughter, Ella, was set and ready to act as teacher of a school for African Americans and he was ready to invest in a property near Westport to make the school happen.
“Finally the owner of a house, which had been shot to pieces badly in the Battle of Westport, told Weeks he could have the building for his new Negro school, if he cared to repair it,” the Kansas City Star reported in 1938.
Edwin Weeks helped his father put a new roof on the building and replace the broken windows so that any freedman who wished to be educated had a place to go. Edwin’s older sister, Ella died a few years later of tuberculosis, “but her work endured.” Penn School, a public school in the Westport district, opened in 1869 for Black children.
Edwin went to school when he could, but the activities of his parents made him an easy target on the playground. In addition to the school children giving him trouble for his family’s close attention to Black education, his mother, Imogene was a revolutionary of the era. She was vocal about women’s rights and a fan of wearing “the Bloomer costume,” an early alternative to skirts. She would wear “baggy trousers that reached her ankles,” and the children at school called Edwin “Bloomer.”
A Strong Work Ethic
As Edwin grew older, he worked to help his father dig cisterns throughout Kansas City after they moved to 16th and Jefferson. He attended school when he could, and he became especially interested in physics.
But earning a living was at the forefront of Edwin’s mind. While just a teenager, he began work folding and delivering newspapers. A new innovation at the post office led to his next career. When mail in the city was for the first time delivered door-to-door, Edwin was one of the first 10 mail carriers hired in the city. He walked 30 miles a day for $30 a month.
After his father passed away in 1875, Edwin’s strong work ethic was noticed by the Union Pacific Railroad. They asked if he wanted to become a pullman conductor. He said he’d like that – because it paid more than he was making.
For three years, Edwin worked on the railroad between Kansas City and Denver managing the comfort of passengers. He was known to be able to keep order on his cars, and the only trouble he ran across was when passengers “would insist on shooting buffaloes out of the windows of the sleeping car.”
When his mother passed away in 1879, 25-year-old Edwin did the unthinkable. He dropped everything to invest in his education, enrolling in Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. There, “he specialized in physics, and studied the just-opening subject of electricity.”
After graduating, he thought of following his classmates to Harvard but opted instead to return to Kansas City. On Christmas Eve 1882, he married Mary Harmon (1851-1940), a woman with a thirst of knowledge all her own.
Mary came to Kansas City with her mother and brother from Ohio after her father was killed in the Civil War. She attended the old St. Teresa’s Academy and lived “in an old barrack building used by Union troops in the Civil War.”
At just 17 years old, Mary Harmon took an exam and successfully passed her credentials to teach school. She began working as an assistant to the principal at Central High School and taught various subjects – often to students who were older than she was.
When she married the “always healthy, hungry and vigorous” Edwin Weeks in 1882, she had already been teaching for 14 years.
Electrifying Kansas City
Before Kansas City was electrically lit, gas lighting arrived in 1867. Shortly after, the technology around electricity garnered much attention. Electric arc street lamps with carbon rods in between them began appearing in the 1870s, but the modern incandescent bulb safer for home use wouldn’t emerge until Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan created an incandescent light bulb in 1879 that, with experimentation, would develop into an entire system of lighting.
The explosion of this new technology had scientists all over the world scrambling to add their own patents for electrical wonders. In 1881, the Kawsmouth Electric Light Company organized with the hopes of bringing light to Union Depot. The first experiment with electric lights included six bulbs.
In 1882, the company officially organized and brought on a superintendent who had experimented with physics and electricity while a student at Exeter. His connections there included Thomas Edison and Elihu Thomson. “I met Mr. Edison in my young manhood,” Weeks told the Kansas City Star.
The company, a precursor to Kansas City Power and Light, became known as Kansas City Electric Light Company. With headquarters at 8th and Santa Fe, the company headed by Edwin Weeks used the Thomson-Houston system where “one of the original bi-polar dynamos, invented by Thomas Edison, was used.” Weeks supervised the first plant in the world- in Kansas City- to use the Thompson-Houston system (now General Electric).
The first electric lighting in the city included 40 arc lights on one circuit which lit stores in the downtown area. By 1885, street lighting started to be replaced with incandescent bulbs. With the help of Edwin Weeks, one invention of the electric meter was perfected, which saved Kansas City from being without power at night when there was “a feature of merchants to turn lights off when daylight was present, thus eating up the company’s resources.”
In 1886, Edwin and Mary Weeks welcomed their one and only child, a daughter named Ruth Mary Weeks. In that same year, Edwin built a two-story six-room brick home for his little family at 1409 Cherry. It was modest in size but modern with its conveniences.
It was the first home to be electrified in Kansas City.
But the lights only shone bright when he was home. “He didn’t think the rest of us knew how to run it,” Mary Weeks later reported to the Kansas City Journal.
Just a year later in 1887, a special package from Thomas Edison arrived at Edwin Weeks’ office just days before Christmas.
The First Electrically Lit Christmas Tree
Even in the infancy of electricity, engineers and scientists had been working for years to perfect Christmas lights with hopes of replacing dangerous candles that were used to illuminate trees at the time.
At the time, Edwin Weeks had supervised just shy of four miles of poles carrying electrical currents to the West Bottoms, the Union Avenue business section and Quality Hill.
Weeks tightly tucked the wooden box under his arm as he rushed inside his brick home to greet his wife and daughter. In the front room, his Christmas tree stood, lit by numerous candles. He shouted for Mary and told her to come into the room.
“Wait until you see what has been sent to us!” Edwin exclaimed as he carefully placed the box on a table in the room.
With Ruth in her arms, Mary smiled and played along. “Why, what is this?” Edwin smiled widely as he turned his attention to prying the lid off the box. He tore through the protective papers and peered inside.
There they were- colored light bulbs and wiring.
“This is electrical lighting for a Christmas tree,” Edwin explained as held up one of the bulbs in his hands for his wife to see.
She looked back and forth from the candles on the tree already displayed in their front window to the lightbulb in her husband’s hand. “Are they safe?” she quietly asked.
“Of course they are safe! They have to be safer than these candles!” he beamed.
Without much of an argument in her, Mary watched in silence from the settee as Edwin gingerly screwed each bulb into the wiring. After removing each candle from the tree and cautiously draping the single strand of electric lights on its branches, Edwin leaned down to test this new innovation.
Mary gasped as the room was soon replaced from candlelight into a room of magical color. Edwin turned the lights off around the house and they raced outside to catch a glimpse of the glory from the street.
There it was, beautifully lit in an unbelievable scene of splendor. In that square bay window at 1409 Cherry, the first electrically lit Christmas tree stood proudly for all of Kansas City to see.
Other firsts happened at the home on Cherry Street. A phonograph, made by Edison in 1889, sat in his home and had a specially-made record with Edison’s recorded voice.
The family moved to 3408 Harrison, but they continued to rent their electrified house at 1409 Cherry. Ironically, while the house was being rented in 1902, the house caught fire. The cause was listed as “crossed electric wires.”
The mistrust of electricity throughout the United States continued for years. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland assisted in building confidence in electric tree lighting when the family Christmas tree in the White House was coated in hundreds of electric light bulbs.
Therefore, the evolution of electric lighting of trees became more and more popular in the 20th Century.
The Humanitarian Side
While Edwin was breaking barriers with electricity, his wife, Mary was moving mountains in education. She successfully campaigned for three years to establish kindergartens in the public schools. She authored works about the welfare of children and became the first president of the Parent-Teacher Association in Missouri.
Edwin R. Weeks remained associated with the Kansas City Electric Light Company until 1900. At that time, he left to be a consulting engineer. Much like his wife, Mary, and his parents before him, Edwin Weeks couldn’t help but look after the welfare of others.
In 1893, he became the president of the Humane Society of Kansas City, founded in 1883. With the message “Prevents Cruelty, Protects Children, Promotes Humane Education,” the organization worked to give better opportunities for children at youth camps inside Swope Park and advocated for animal welfare.
At the turn of the last century, Edwin Weeks worked as president of the Humane Society to install brass fountains across Kansas City that were for “the use of horses” on the streets. Designed by Weeks, the bowl fountains, known as the Faxon Fountain, was installed first at 40th and Main St. and was for the use of animals. Unfortunately, by 1938, the fountain disappeared.
He was a founding member of a group of organizations that called themselves the Band of Mercy, and Edwin would go to area schools where he had them pledge “to be kind to every living thing.”
His pride and joy was always his daughter, Ruth, who excelled in school. She graduated from Vassar College and was selected top of her class to study abroad. She returned to Kansas City where she taught, published poetry and wrote a book.
At 82 years old, Edwin Weeks embarked on his 45th year as president of the Humane Society, hindered by his hearing and vision loss – but with passion still in his heart. He passed away peacefully at home on August 17, 1938.
His headstone at Elmwood Cemetery reads, “Father of Power Light and Humane Education in Kansas City. . . Kind words can never die.”
The Light in Darkness
Just two years after Edwin Weeks closed his eyes for the last time, his beloved wife, Mary Harmon Weeks passed away at the age of 89 of pneumonia. Twenty-eight years later, a school at 41st and Indiana was named in her honor due to her everlasting impact on education.
Less than a year after the school opened its doors, their only daughter, Ruth passed away in 1969. She never married or had her own children.
To some, it may seem the legacy of the Weeks faded away after Ruth passed away. But this is far from the truth; the unbelievable lives that these two minds saw in their lifetimes is clearly unimaginable today.
Edwin Weeks came to Kansas City in a covered wagon to begin his journey, and he built himself up on the invention of electricity. But his true gift to Kansas City was more than the light in our homes – it was his humanitarian spirit which formed his legacy as he donated his later life to the welfare of animals and children.
His obituary eloquently stated, “He brought light into dark minds, as well as dark houses and dark streets.”
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