06/30/2026
We're hoping the Lee's Summit community can help solve a piece of local history.
The Lee's Summit History Museum shared these two wonderful photographs of the Hook & Sons Dairy. According to the museum, Hook & Sons Dairy was established in 1916 at Hook Road and Pryor Road. By 1926 it had become the 5th largest distributor of milk in Kansas City, distributing approximately 1,000 gallons of milk each day with five delivery trucks. It was a complete dairy operation that bred, raised, milked, processed, and distributed its own milk. One of these photos shows the pasteurizing plant, and the other shows Holsteins waiting to be milked.
What we enjoyed almost as much as the photos were the comments. So many people remembered buying milk there, having family members who worked there, living on the property, playing in the barns as children, or having parents and grandparents who drove milk trucks or cared for the farm. It's clear the Hook dairy holds a special place in the memories of many Lee's Summit families.
Here's where we're hoping someone can help.
Our family owns the farm about a half mile west of Hook & Pryor on Hook Road, between Pryor and Horridge. The Hook family owned our property from 1923 until 1951. Still standing on our farm today are a large dairy barn, a milking parlor, and a milk house—substantial dairy buildings that appear to date back many decades.
We know some people may immediately say, "Those were horse barns." And they're absolutely right—that's what they were for much of the second half of the twentieth century. After the Hook family sold our property in 1951, the Gentry family converted the farm into a horse operation, and the barns served that purpose for decades. That's the period that most people alive today would naturally remember.
What we're trying to learn is what these buildings were before they became horse barns.
The layout of the buildings—including the milking parlor, milk house, and the concrete floor where cows once stood to be milked—makes it clear they were originally built and used as dairy facilities. What we don't know is exactly when they were built or how they fit into the overall Hook & Sons Dairy operation.
The dairy at Hook & Pryor is well documented and clearly remained active long enough that many people still remember it. But were the dairy barns on our property also part of the Hook & Sons operation? Were they the original dairy facilities before the operation expanded to Hook & Pryor? Were both properties operating together? Or did the dairy buildings on our farm have an entirely different history before the Hook family purchased the property in 1923?
We're not trying to rewrite history or suggest the dairy wasn't at Hook & Pryor—it absolutely was. We're simply trying to understand the complete story of our farm and the Hook family's dairy operation so we can preserve it accurately in a history book we're putting together about our farm.
If you have first-hand memories, stories passed down by parents or grandparents, old photographs, newspaper clippings, aerial photos, or know someone who worked for Hook & Sons Dairy, We'd be incredibly grateful to hear from you. Even small details can help put another piece of the puzzle in place.
History has a way of disappearing one memory at a time. We'd love to preserve as much of this story as possible while there are still people who remember it.
