Ensor Park and MuseumTucked away on a picturesque eight-acre site at 18995 W. 183rd Street, what may well be Olathe's best-kept secret, Ensor Park and Museum, reopened to the public this month.
Under normal circumstances the facility owned and operated by the City of Olathe would have reopened for tours in early May, but because of some physical deterioration issues and concerns about COVID-19 protocols and safety, the city decided several weeks earlier that the facility would remain closed.
Then in mid-July our club learned that the city had finished an assessment of conditions at Ensor Park and Museum and had given the go-ahead for tours to resume in September.
Amateur radio operators who belong to Santa Fe Trail Amateur Radio Club will be leading the guided tours weekends in September. Weekends in October, that duty will be handled by members of the Johnson County Radio Amateurs Club.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, Ensor Park and Museum honors the rich legacy of the Ensor family, parents Jacob and Ida and children Marshall and Loretta.
“The City of Olathe, the Santa Fe Trail Amateur Radio Club, the Johnson County Radio Amateurs Club, and the Marshall Ensor Memorial Organization Amateur Radio Club are all very happy that the Ensor Park and Museum will be open for the fall tour season of 2021," Marty Peters, the secretary-treasurer of our club, told me recently. "The farmhouse, the outbuildings, and the many furnishings and artifacts give a picture of the lives of a Midwestern farm family in the first half of the 20th century. While in some sense an ordinary farm family, this family was extraordinary in that two of the members, Marshall and Loretta, became ham radio operators in the very earliest days of ham radio.”
Marty, who was in Marshall Ensor's Electronics Club at Olathe High School (now Olathe North High School) in the mid-1960s, went on to mention the transmitters Marshall built, the radio room just off the kitchen where Marshall and Loretta operated, and the 80’ towers that held the antenna that connected the two of them to other ham radio operators around the world, all of which can be viewed by visitors to Ensor Park and Museum.
Admission to Ensor Park and Museum is free, but donations are gladly accepted.
The hours of operation are Saturdays and Sundays 1 to 5 p.m.
For more information about the facility, go to:
www.ensorparkandmuseum.org.