Thick smoke slows traffic along Interstate 35 through the Kansas Flint Hills each spring when ranchers set the prairie afire so the grass will grow back thick and tall on millions of rolling acres that have changed little since herds of wild bison roamed where beef cattle now graze.
Bill Haw Sr. never ceased to be awed by the land’s majesty, acquiring thousands of acres for his cattle feeding business and that of National Farms, the big agribusiness company he ran for three decades.
“You can’t look at this without saying, ‘My God, that is beautiful,’” he told a local historian a few years ago at his Crocker Springs Ranch in Chase County.
At that time, he was preparing to sell 14,000 acres he owned in the Flint Hills with perpetual easements to preserve the land as it had been for eons. If a buyer wanted to add a house, it couldn’t be visible from the highway.
“I don’t want it to remain perfect and unspoiled just for my lifetime, but forevermore,” Haw told a Wichita Eagle reporter in 2021.
The 85-year-old Kansas City businessman died Thursday, son Bill Haw Jr. said. However, his gift to future generations of travelers through the Flint Hills wasn’t his only legacy. Haw Sr. was also synonymous with Kansas City’s West Bottoms area, owning the Livestock Exchange Building and developing the real estate around it.
He was born in Bonne Terre, Missouri. His dad was a medical doctor and his a mother nurse and artist. He graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in English literature and served two years in the Army immediately after college..
Following his service, Haw began working toward a master’s degree in finance to secure a well-paying job, but stopped short of getting a degree when Commerce Bank in Kansas City hired him halfway through the coursework. He quickly rose through the ranks and by his mid-30s, he was executive vice president.
He left banking in the early 1970s when stockholders of a near-bankrupt agribusiness company convinced him to become president of the National Alfalfa Dehydrating and Milling Co. Haw ran National Farms, as it was later renamed, for three of the four Bass brothers of Fort Worth, Texas, while also accumulating a considerable amount of real estate of his own.
By the time Sid, Lee and Ed Bass sold the company in 2002, National Farms was among the top 10 cattle feeders in the country.
Haw and his wife, Maggie, bought the Livestock Exchange Building from National Farms and began spending more time in the Flint Hills. One of his proudest accomplishments was removing 30 miles of fence to accommodate his growing cattle grazing operation, reclaiming the wide-open feel lost when the land was divided into chunks surrounded by barbed wire for smaller cattle farmers.
“You can’t look at the Flint Hills in small pieces,” he told the Eagle. “It has to be as far as you can see to be able to fully appreciate it.”
The Haws also helped revive the town square in Cottonwood Falls by restoring several historic buildings in that Chase County town, while also restoring the Hotel Frederick in Boonville, Missouri.
All the while, Haw remained devoted to reviving the West Bottoms by developing land around the Livestock Exchange Building in an area he called the Stockyards District. His goal, he told a Star reporter in 2011, was to transform that once deserted Kansas City neighborhood — the Kansas City stockyards finally shuttered in 1990 after decades of decline — into a citywide draw that was “appealing, approachable and safe.”
That transformation is now well underway and, according to his family, is a testament to his vision and persistence.
No funeral is planned in accordance with Haw’s wishes.
Source Agencies
