August Meyer (20 August 1851-1 December 1905) was an American mining engineer who founded the town of Leadville, Colorado and laid out Kansas City's park and boulevard system.
Biography[]
August Meyer was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1851 to German immigrant parents from Hamburg. He was educated in Switzerland and at Freiberg in Germany, after which he returned to St. Louis in 1873 and worked in the coal industry. He founded an ore-crushing mill in Alma, Colorado in 1875 and struck it rich during that town's silver boom, after which he founded the town of Leadville, where he came to live. In 1881, he founded a smelting and refining company in Kansas City and became an advocate of the "City Beautiful" urban revitalization movement during the late 1880s, resulting in his appointment to the city's first park board in 1892. He died in 1905, and Meyer Boulevard in Kansas City is named for him.