The founders of Lawrence thought big.

Oh, sure, the 1854 townsite map for the city showed Lawrence growing only to roughly Iowa Street in the west, Haskell Avenue in the east and 16th Street in the south — an area that covers a scant four square miles.

But, Dave Carttar says, city leaders were hoping for much, much more.

“The founders of the city in some respects hoped, if not expected, that Lawrence would become one of the major cities of the West,” said Carttar, who this year unveiled a map tracking the city’s early growth as part of sesquicentennial celebrations.

“They were capitalists and industrialists,” Carttar said of the town’s early leaders. “For Lawrence to rival any of the cities of the East, I think would not have been unsavory.”

That rivalry hasn’t quite happened. But the city has grown considerably. As it has grown, the city has crossed a river, ravines and other topographic obstacles once thought to signal the end of Lawrence’s growth.

Surviving, thriving

Before the city could grow, though, it first had to survive. The 1863 sacking of Lawrence by Quantrill’s raiders nearly killed off the town.

“There were fears in the weeks following the raid that Lawrence would have to be abandoned,” Carttar said. “The object was the complete annihilation of the city — if not physically, then by attrition.”

Instead, the city began to rebuild. And after the Civil War ended, money began to flow into Lawrence as leaders began to envision the town as a center of commerce.

“One newcomer from Illinois was so impressed in 1865 by the rebuilding after Quantrill’s Raid that he commented, ‘a people that can make such improvements as I see amid such ruin and slaughter as this city has experienced, show enterprise such as I never saw,'” Dale Nimz wrote in the 2001 book, “Embattled Lawrence: Conflict and Community,” a collection of essays about the city’s history. “This is bound to be the city in Kansas.”

James Shortridge and Barbara Shortridge also chronicled the early physical growth of the city for “Embattled Lawrence.”

“Early Lawrence was entirely on the south side of the Kaw (River),” they wrote. “Because abundant rains during the 1854 season had given hope that steamboats could regularly ply the river, the town’s economic center was the wharf area at the north end of Massachusetts street.”

Plenty of shoppers were out on Massachusetts Street on Christmas Eve 1953. This view looks south.

To the train, away

Growth to the west was hampered by a “substantial ravine” between Kentucky and Tennessee streets, extending south from the river to what is now Eighth Street.

“All the old city maps show this steep-sided gully,” the Shortridges wrote. “It was a useful hiding place for residents during Quantrill’s Raid … and was not bridged adequately until about 1880.”

The Old West Lawrence neighborhood came into existence after that 1880 bridging. Dale Nimz, also writing in “Embattled Lawrence,” said in the intervening years homes were built mostly in East Lawrence and North Lawrence — thanks largely to the construction of lines for the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad and the Kansas Pacific Railroad in the respective neighborhoods.

Those railroads also became responsible for the later residential development west of Massachusetts Street.

“Although a few people may have wanted to be near the single building of the University of Kansas that had been erected southwest of downtown in the 1860s, a more important reason for their reorientation was the emergence of a major drawback to living in East Lawrence,” the Shortridges wrote. “This was the noise, soot and smoke that accompanied the daily operations of the” Leavenworth railroad.

Cars sparked growth

But the city wouldn’t grow much farther west than Iowa Street for decades. Instead, it headed in the direction of Mount Oread.

“When the city was established, it grew principally to the south,” Carttar said. “I don’t know if that was because of the extension of street car lines (most popular during the 1920s), but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Even then, the growth was relatively slow compared with recent years.

“The pace of growth in Lawrence wasn’t terribly rapid in the first few decades,” Carttar said.

The spark for growth, he said, was the rise in KU’s student population thanks to the GI Bill after World War II. That period, in which university enrollment crossed the 10,000-student threshold for the first time, also marked a rise in car ownership, Carttar said, that made it easier for Lawrence residents to travel the longer distances across town.

Paul Caviness, then a Kansas University graduate student, chronicled that growth in a 1985 term paper.

“The pattern,” he wrote, “is well established in Lawrence: Commercial development will follow auto traffic, which will follow residential development, which will spread outward as long as movement among home, shopping and workplace is convenient and quick.”

Doubled, doubled again

With more development springing up and streets getting busier, city planners decided to build bypasses around town. In 1948, the city widened 23rd Street to serve as a southern bypass. In 1953, Iowa Street was widened as a western bypass.

The opening of the Kansas Turnpike in 1956 proved the last catalyst to transportation-driven growth.

“People would be more willing to travel to Kansas City and Topeka,” Lawrence historian Steve Jansen said in 2001. “People saw Lawrence as a smaller place to live, a better place to live.”

By 1960, the city had doubled its originally envisioned size, to eight square miles. It doubled again to 16.93 square miles in 1970.

Even by the mid-1970s, however, Clinton Parkway didn’t exist, Wakarusa Drive was a gravel road known as Dragstrip Road, and 15th Street didn’t extend west past Kasold Drive.

Bob Billings helped change that.

In 1968, Billings made plans to create a public golf course, Alvamar, west of Iowa Street. However, in the next 30 years, Billings and his partners slowly began to acquire about 3,000 acres of land in west Lawrence. The commercial and residential developments began to take shape in the late 1970s, 10 years after the golf course project was complete.

The future

By the end of 2003, the city had nearly doubled again in size, to more than 31 square miles. The city limits now extend all the way west to the South Lawrence Trafficway.

And the growth isn’t done.

Asked recently if the SLT would prove to be Lawrence’s western boundary, City Manager Mike Wildgen laughed.

“I’m sure years ago a reporter asked a city manager if Kasold would be the western border,” he said. “I’m sure a reporter asked a city manager if Wakarusa would be the western border.”

Cycles repeat themselves, though, and experts are once again looking south for Lawrence’s growth. The city is expected to jump the Wakarusa River and add 20,000 new residents by 2025.

Officials, in other words, are thinking big again.

“One of the lessons I would expect we should try to live is to be visionary,” Carttar said. “Not to make decisions on what we want the city to be next year, but to envision what the city should be like another 150 years from now.”