Henry Fortunato goes the extra mile for the Indian Creek Trail Project

For certain ambulatory, outdoor-minded persons, summer’s real independence day comes about a month before the Fourth of July: National Trails Day. The first Saturday in June has for the past few decades been the American Hiking Society’s annual celebration of the National Trails System, a loosely woven highway beloved by nature walkers, birders and the generally less TV-addicted.

For Henry Fortunato — historian and veteran Kansas trail walker — Saturday, June 4, marks a different kind of pioneering step. From 9 to 11 a.m. this National Trails Day, he debuts samples of the Indian Creek Trail Project’s first four panels at the Roe Park Shelter, at 10400 Roe in Overland Park. (Expect refreshments, a talk and an appearance by educator Bill Worley, in character as Johnson County’s namesake, the Rev. Thomas Johnson.) The deeply researched and richly illustrated signs, kicking off an eventual series of 18, detail the lineage of the area’s land and its inhabitants, from long before statehood through the boom of recent generations. Reading one of them is like pausing for water on a hike, wondering for a moment what this area was like 100 years ago, and finding an encyclopedia open to just the right page — and then another volume, and another.

Fortunato, former director of public affairs for the Kansas City Public Library, has assembled the signs in conjunction with the Johnson County Museum, and the project is backed by a who’s-who of regional nonprofits and philanthropists. It’s a big deal, in a quietly Kansan way, and Fortunato answered questions about it by e-mail last week.

The Pitch: Kansas City is one of those areas where people seem proud to live their whole lives. Why don’t people, especially here, know more about the history of their community?

Fortunato: A lot of people who live here, particularly in Johnson County, aren’t originally from here. They grew up somewhere else and came here for a job. Their focus has been work, raising families, etc. And outside of the exhibits at the Johnson County Museum and some of the local historical societies, it’s not like the history of this place is staring you in the face every day — unlike, say, Philadelphia or Boston, where there are reminders of the Colonial era on nearly every block. And my sense is that local, state and regional history is not taught as extensively as perhaps it could be. I was talking to my younger kids about it the other day, and they don’t recall any attention at all paid to the history of Overland Park or Johnson County in school, and the only time they learned about the history of Kansas was in the fourth quarter of their seventh-grade social-studies class. That’s not a lot to go on.

In combination, these two factors mean that local history gets short shrift. And in the process, a lot of fascinating stories — stories that unearth largely unknown narratives and unusual happenstances that can help explain what Johnson County was like pre-suburbanization, and how it became what it is today — are not told in an engaging and accessible way.

And speaking of Shawnee Mission, hardly anyone knows that one of its buildings also was used briefly as a Prohibition-era roadhouse run by a Kansas City gangster. Or take Quivira Road: That name harkens back to a supposed city of riches supposedly located in present-day central Kansas, that was the objective of 16th-century Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Quivira was nowhere near what is now Johnson County. But a real estate developer thought the name had lore — and would be alluring — and thus expropriated it for his own ends. It turns out that determining the derivation of otherwise prosaic street names is an ideal organizing tool to examine compact bits of history that have been otherwise forgotten.

It seems like this project grew out of your walking adventures. Can you describe how your devotion to firsthand observation on foot correlates with the historian’s discipline?

I live to walk and I walk to live. It’s the healthiest thing you can do. It’s got to be one of the reasons why I hardly ever get sick. I also have a passion for making history accessible to the general public in an engaging and compelling manner. Thus, my current mantra: Hiking + History = Health & Wellness. Langston Hughes titled one of his autobiographies I Wonder As I Wander. That kind of sums up how I do it, too. When I am walking on a trail or a backroad, I am always thinking about what happened in this place I am passing through. And at three miles per hour, you have the time to cogitate about these things.

And then you do the research, you start finding connections, you discover old photographs and maps and other ephemera, you put together a narrative with style and substance and a bit of wordplay that speaks to people’s intelligence, and voila — you’ve got a story worth telling. We’ll have hundreds of them by the time the Indian Creek Trail project is completed this fall. And if that pilot project works, there’s 80 more miles of trails in Overland Park, and hundreds more in Johnson County. I’ve got a lot of miles to go, as it were, before I sleep.