At first, Unity Farm was just what the name implied—a 53-acre parcel a few miles north of Lee’s Summit along US 50. A place where members of Unity, the spiritual movement founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in downtown Kansas City, could grow crops and enjoy the outdoors.
By the 1920s, new structures began to appear on the site, most notably the Unity Tower and Silent Unity Building. The Fillmore’s son, Rickert, chose a modified Italian Renaissance design for the tower, which .rose 165 feet above the farm fields around it.
But its exotic looks weren’t the whole story. Along with offices and a radio station, the tower (or campanile as it was called at the time) held a huge water tank to serve the cause in a practical way…