Overland Park Kansas History & Facts

Overland Park is the second-most populous city in the U.S. state of Kansas. Located in Johnson County, it is also the second-most populous city in the Kansas City metropolitan area. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 197,238.

In 1905, Overland Park's founder, William B. Strang Jr. arrived and began to plot subdivisions along an old military roadway, which later became the city's principal thoroughfare. He developed large portions of what would later become downtown Overland Park.

On May 20, 1960, Overland Park was officially incorporated as a "city of first class", with a population of 28,085. Less than thirty years later, the population had nearly quadrupled to 111,790 in 1990, increasing to 173,250 as of the 2010 census. Overland Park officially became the second largest city in the state, following Wichita, Kansas, after passing Kansas City, Kansas in the early 2000s.

Population growth in the city can mainly be attributed to the traditional greenfield suburban development, appreciated on the city's annexation map. Overland Park's last annexation attempt, in 2008, garnered widespread news coverage after massive outcry from affected residents. Overland Park now has a combined land area of 75.37 square miles (195.21 km2) and spans nearly the full North-South length of Johnson County. Since the expansion of Overland Park, state legislators have amended laws governing annexations to require a majority vote of affected residents in all future annexations over 40 acres (0.16 km2).

On April 13, 2014, a pair of shootings committed by a lone gunman occurred at the local Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and Village Shalom, a local Jewish retirement community. A total of three people were killed in both shootings. The suspected gunman, described as a man in his seventies, later identified as Neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr., was taken into custody.

Overland Park is located in northeastern Kansas at the junction of Interstate 435 and U.S. Route 69 immediately east of Olathe, the county seat. The city center is roughly 13 miles (21 km) south-southwest of downtown Kansas City, Missouri.

The city lies on the northern edge of the Osage Plains a few miles south of the Kansas River. One of the river's tributaries, Turkey Creek, flows northeast through the extreme northern part of the city. South of Turkey Creek, the majority of the city lies in the watershed of the Blue River. Several of the river's tributaries run east-northeast across the city; from north to south, these include Indian Creek, Tomahawk Creek, and Negro Creek. In the far southern part of the city, two more tributaries, Coffee Creek and Wolf Creek, join to form the main stem of the Blue River itself.

Famous Peoples From Overland Park Kansas

Michael Almereyda

(born April 7, 1960) is an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer. His best known work is Hamlet (2000), starring Ethan Hawke.

Almereyda studied art history at Harvard but dropped out after three years to pursue filmmaking. He acquired a Hollywood agent on the strength of a spec script about Nikola Tesla. His first film as writer/director was a self-financed, black-and-white short featuring Dennis Hopper, A Hero of Our Time, based on Mikhail Lermontov's novel of the same title. Shot in 1985, it was finished in 1987 and screened in the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Early screenplays include Cherry 2000 (1987), the first draft for Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991), and uncredited work on Total Recall (1990).

Almereyda's films range across many genres, styles, and formats. His first feature, Twister (1989), based on Mary Robison’s novel Oh, was a comedy about a dysfunctional mid-Western family. Another Girl Another Planet (1992) was a romantic chamber piece, a black-and-white, one-hour featurette shot with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera.

Nadja (1994) was a comic vampire film shot on 35mm with Pixelvision inserts.

Hamlet (2000) was shot on Super 16mm and featured Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber and Sam Shepard. The adaptation layered a contemporary New York setting on Shakespeare's text.

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