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About Kersey Coates
- Kersey Coates (September 15, 1823 – April 24, 1887) was a businessman from Kansas City, in the U.S.
- state of Missouri, who developed Quality Hill, founded the Kansas City Board of Trade, and was among those who attracted the Hannibal & St.
- Joseph Railroad to the city. Born a Quaker in Pennsylvania of Lindley Coates (1794–1856) and Deborah Simmons (1801–88), he was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover.
- He moved to Kansas City in 1854, a year after it was formally incorporated.
- He purchased land on the bluffs above the Missouri River on Quality Hill to develop an upscale neighborhood.
- In 1855 he married Sarah Walter Chandler, who was also from Pennsylvania and had come to the area with her family a year earlier.
- They had four children. He was active in the Free State Movement during the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes with neighboring Kansas.
- During the American Civil War he became a colonel in the Missouri Militia.
- He turned his planned hotel at 10th and Broadway into a Union Cavalry stable.
- After the war the stable was to become the Coates Hotel. Future Secretary of War Stephen B.
- Elkins served under Coates in the Battle of Lone Jack, the only battle in which Elkins served.
- Elkins was to say that the experience at Lone Jack filled him with disgust about war.After the war, he along Robert T.
- Van Horn and Charles E.
- Kearney persuaded the Hannibal & St.
- Joseph Railroad to build the first bridge across the Missouri River in Kansas City at the Hannibal Bridge.
- The bridge made Kansas City rather than Leavenworth, Kansas, the dominant city of the region.
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