Why does Lenexa have a spinach festival? You can thank Popeye and a stroke of luck

An entire festival dedicated to one leafy green vegetable?

Only in Lenexa.

The Johnson County city goes all-out for its annual Spinach Festival at Sar-Ko-Par Trails Park each year. The festival’s spinach-themed food offerings, rock-skipping contest, baby crawling contest, live music, crafts and more have attracted thousands of visitors during the event’s 40-year history.

And — organizers hope — this Saturday will be no different.

But many Lenexa residents are unaware that the celebration’s roots stretch back 90 years, to Johnson County’s great spinach boom of the 1930s.

For a few years, Lenexa was known as the Spinach Capital of the World. It’s hard to imagine today, with most of its land dedicated to urban developments.

But in 1934, much of the city and surrounding area was farmland. Demand for spinach was increasing with the popularity of the cartoon “Popeye.”

That same year, W.A. Loree of the Ernst Applebaum Company — a major spinach buyer from Chicago — went to St. Louis to purchase as much of the crop as he could. But Loree wasn’t satisfied with what he found in St. Louis, so he decided to travel west to the Kansas City area.

Loree was impressed with the quality and quantity of spinach in Lenexa.

A Kansas City Star article from 1934 said that 150 farmers from around the county rushed to Lenexa to sell their spinach when they heard Loree was buying it at $12.50 a bushel.

“If Johnson County truck gardeners had rubbed Aladdin’s magic lamp, made a wish and that wish had come true, the result would probably be no different than the magic change that has transformed the market conditions here overnight,” the article reads.

Thanks to Lenexa’s train depot, the city exported several tons of spinach a year.

“What (Loree) ended up doing for several years was buying all the spinach he could over there,” said Bruce Daniel, director of the Lenexa Historical Society.

The Star published a cartoon that same year showing Popeye hauling a truckload of spinach from the Lenexa depot to Kansas City and New York.

“He makes spinach popular and the east beats a path to our door,” the caption underneath reads.

While several spinach farmers — many of whom were Belgian immigrants — grew spinach in Lenexa, the city exported the crop from other surrounding cities, like Shawnee.

One of the biggest spinach farms in the area belonged to the Vankeirsbilck family. On their property southwest of 75th Street and Quivira Road, the family grew tens of thousands of pounds of spinach.

Bill Nicks, Lenexa’s first Parks and Recreation director and one of the founders of the Lenexa Spinach festival, said the Vankeirsbilcks were known as the “spinach kings.”

But Lenexa’s spinach acclaim was somewhat short-lived. A 1984 Kansas City Star article written ahead of the first Spinach Festival notes that droughts wiped out most of the spinach crops a few years after Loree’s visit.

Nicks wanted to create the festival in part so Lenexans could remember and honor their history. Plus, most towns have some sort of fall festival. But the name “Spinach Festival” is much more memorable.

“You know, when you’re wearing a Spinach Festival T-Shirt in Orlando Florida, and you’re in an elevator with a person, and they say, ‘Tell me about the Spinach Festival. Where the heck is Lenexa, Kansas, and why spinach?’” Nicks said. “If you’re gonna name a festival, name it something that people are gonna ask ‘Why?’”

Even today, Nicks said, not enough residents know about Lenexa’s connection to Popeye and the spinach craze in the city. But he thinks they ought to.

“We’re all products of our past, and it helps us explain … how we got here,” he said.

The Spinach Festival is 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Sar-Ko-Par Trails Park. It is free to attend, and activities include the Spinach Dip Showdown and Spinach Recipe Contest. A full schedule is available online at lenexa.com/events-activities.