Michael Bushnell
Northeast News
This Real Photo advertising postcard shows heaps of quarried limestone on the grounds of what was to become one of the largest manufacturing plants in the Blue River Valley.
The caption on the bottom of the card notes the beginning of construction of the new plant which was located “on the Missouri Pacific and Kansas City Southern” at the end of the 15th Street electric (car) line, Centropolis, Kansas City. Witte Iron Works was founded in 1870 by August Witte, a German born brass founder and finisher. It was located at a foundry on 11th Street between Main and Walnut.
After only four years of formal schooling, Witte’s son Edward H. Witte began an apprenticeship in his father’s shop that had just moved to an area near the Kansas City Hay Press in the West Bottoms. By the time the young Witte was 18 years old, he was a journeyman in seven trades.  Hungering for more education, Witte traveled to New York to work in the large factories in the city. During that one-year period, Witte worked in more than 20 factories, learning new techniques that streamlined the manufacturing process.
In 1886, Witte bought his father’s shop and began the process of developing industrial steam pumps for use in large manufacturing operations. Witte later began to develop gasoline engines for manufacturing, which was something of a novelty because steam engines were the primary power source for manufacturers at the time. Witte’s first sale of a gasoline engine was to the Kansas City Printing Company. Soon after, every printing company in town was running a Witte gasoline engine. And so it went, from industry to industry until Witte gasoline engines were in use in factories all over the world.
In 1907, the plant was relocated to the area seen on this postcard near 16th Street and Oakland, joining dozens of other manufacturing operations in the Blue Valley. In a supplement to the Feb. 25, 1910, Sheffield Press, the Blue Valley was described as a “natural and logisitical location for the manufacturing district of Kansas City for many reasons.” An etching of the finished plant was published in the Sheffield Press and is shown above.
In 1944, Edward Witte sold the company to Oil Well Supply Company, a subsidiary of the United States Steel Company.  Witte sold his fashionable Sunset Hill home on West 59th Street and retired to San Marino, Calif.