Green leafy vegetable played an important part in Lenexa 's past

“I was twelve years old at that time. We shipped 54 carloads of spinach with 865 bushels to a carload at 12-1/2 cents a bushel.” Dick VanLerberg in an interview published in the Lenexa News, September 7, 1984.

The drought was serious in the Lenexa area in 1934. The numerous truck gardeners, most of them Belgium immigrants, were unable to find a market for or had lost their crops and were facing a hard winter. In an attempt to provide cash to tide them over, they planted a fall crop of spinach, only to realize that the market was so poor they might be forced to plow it under and prepare their soil for the next year's crop.

But then a buyer from the Ernst Applebaum Company of Chicago appeared in the market in Kansas City in search for high-quality spinach. (The cartoon character, “Popeye” had created a market for spinach.) In the market, W.A. Loree found beautiful big, leafy green spinach and asked where he could find the farmers who grew such spinach. He was directed to the farmers around Lenexa . Suddenly, the crop the farmers were ready to plow under became a cash crop that would carry them through the winter of 1934 and the following depression years.

This photo appeared in the May 17, 1939 Kansas City Star/Times with the following caption: “The shipping season is getting under way for the truck gardeners of this section, and farmers are busy with the spinach harvest. Mary Louise Verstraete, 16-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Verstraete, is busily engaged in cutting the plant on her parents' farm, a mile northeast of Lenexa , Kas. Five freight cars full and three truck loads were shipped yesterday at a loading dock nearby.”