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100 Kansas History “A Spot of Ground Which Human Interest Clings To”: Changing Perceptions of Quindaro and Its History

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100 Kansas History “A Spot of Ground Which Human Interest Clings To”: Changing Perceptions of Quindaro and Its History Alfred Gray, Quindaro’s first mayor and later chief clerk of the territorial legislature, then secretary of the State Board of Agriculture. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 42 (Summer 2019): 100–111 100 Kansas History “A Spot of Ground Which Human Interest Clings To”: Changing Perceptions of Quindaro and Its History by Ian H. Munro n 1915, almost sixty years after the founding of Quindaro, Charles E. Cory, a Fort Scott lawyer and pioneer historian of slavery in Kansas, visited the abandoned townsite in company with George M. Gray, nephew of old Quindaro’s first mayor, Alfred Gray, and O. W. Little, a newspaper editor. As a historian might do, Cory sought out Gray’s company so that he would know what he was seeing, although his description of Alfred Gray’s abandoned home was filtered through the gothic sensibility of his time: it was, he thought, “a fit place for bats and owls.” Cory was Ione of many visitors to old Quindaro, both before and after its abandonment, who have written about it and shaped perceptions of Quindaro through the lenses of their period and individual perspectives. This article traces the arc of representations of Quindaro from its origins to the present, considering as it does so why Quindaro, alone among the dozens of towns that sprang up in Kansas during the 1850s and soon died, has remained, in Cory’s words, “a spot of ground which human interest clings to,” to be revisited, recollected, and reinterpreted by later generations.1 Significant influences on how subsequent generations would come to view the town were the “aspirations and the hopes and the expectations,” as Cory put it, of the first shareholders in the Quindaro Town Company and the settlers who followed them. Not content with their town being known as the only port on the Missouri River where free-state emigrants could debark without fear of harassment from proslavery Border Ruffians, the founders’ vision went fur- ther. Before a single building had gone up, they pictured a great commercial city arising, the capital of a future state of Kansas, and they reserved a large public square on the town plat for municipal, county, and state buildings.2 Many of the first commercial and ecclesiastical buildings were imposing three-story edifices constructed of quarried stone blocks, intended to last. Ian H. Munro is emeritus professor of English at William Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri. His article “C. H. J. Taylor and Black Empowerment in Post- Reconstruction Kansas, 1877,” published in the autumn 2017 issue, was awarded the Langsdorf Award for best article in Kansas History of 2017. He is currently writing a study of the life and writings of C. H. J. Taylor. 1. “Old Quindaro, the Charm of It,” Fort Scott Daily Tribune-Monitor, June 14, 1915. 2. “Old Quindaro,” Gazette Globe, August 29, 1911. A Spot of Human Ground 101 1857, shares in the company that had sold for $150 were going for up to $1,200. “Ten months since,” reported the Missouri Democrat, “scarcely an hour’s work had been done here; now warehouses and stores are being built, and a hotel finishing which, when completed, will be the largest in the territory, with a single exception.”4 The Democrat’s story was reprinted in newspapers across the country, thanks to the founders’ connections through the NEEAC with antislavery newspapers, including Horace Greeley’s influential New York Tribune. The town was “coming into very general notice throughout the country,” wrote John M. Walden, coeditor with Clarina Nichols of the Quindaro Chindowan, “and is beginning . to be regarded as a most important and promising point. We hardly open an Eastern newspaper that contains no allusion to it.”5 Finally, writers were drawn to Quindaro’s story be- cause of its national reputation as, in the words of the New York Times, “distinctively and radically a Free-State town” whose citizens “almost without exception are opposed to the extension of Slavery a single foot beyond its present limits,” a promise that drew antislavery emigrants and financial support from the Northeast. At the same time, Quindaro was viewed as an outpost of Yankee enterprise on the western frontier: “None but a Yankee would ever have thought of building a town on the tops of such hills and bluffs,” one reporter wrote in September.6 Charles E. Cory was a Fort Scott lawyer and historian who visited Terms such as “enterprise,” “Yankee ingenuity,” the what remained of Quindaro in 1915 and wrote about what he saw “Yankee spirit,” and “progressive” were often associated there. with Quindaro in sympathetic reports to create connec- tions between free-state settlers and the antislavery sen- Charles Robinson, head of the first enterprise of the timents of readers in the Northeast. The “Yankee” trope New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC) in Kansas also contained, however, a racially charged narrative Territory and a major shareholder, proposed bridging contrasting white values with those of Native Americans the Missouri River between Parkville, Missouri, and who owned agricultural land coveted by settlers. Leading Quindaro, “thus securing for [Quindaro] a concentration men among the Wyandotte Indians were described in of railroads that will insure its growth. By this route,” the New York Herald Tribune as “lacking that energy of Robinson’s argument ran, “goods can be carried from the Yankee blood.” The acquisition of Indian trust lands Boston to San Francisco without the delay and expense was eagerly sought by Quindaro town leaders. In the of ferriage.”3 Quindaro, in his imagination, was to be Chindowan, Walden described nearby farmland owned by the buckle in a future transcontinental railway system, Delaware Indians as “a wide profitless waste, containing guaranteeing a generous return on his investment. many thousand acres of land, owned by an indolent set Writers about Quindaro would also be attracted to a of beings, who, by their presence and possession, are pre- romantic narrative of Quindaro’s lightning development and precipitous decline. Within months of its founding, Quindaro was living up to the founders’ hopes: by April 4. “Emigration of Kansas—The Condition of the Territory,” Missouri Democrat, reprinted in Buffalo Daily Courier, April 7, 1857. 5. “Progress of Quindaro,” Quindaro Chindowan, July 4, 1857. 3. “Kansas Valley Railroad,” Kansas Herald of Freedom, December 14, 6. “Kansas,” New York Times, September 14, 1857; “On the Wing,” 1856. Emporia Weekly News, September 12, 1857. 102 Kansas History venting it from being converted into grain fields and gardens.”7 Quindaro’s reputation was further enhanced in the eastern press by the efforts of proslavery forces to discredit it as a “Yankee town” and an “abolition hole.”8 In August, the Star of Empire, a proslavery paper published in Westport, Missouri, accused Quindaro residents of inciting slaves to escape and conceal- ing them in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law. Walden responded that the people of Quindaro “are unanimously opposed, upon conviction to the extension of slav- ery one foot beyond its present limits. But they recognize the compromises of the Constitution; and they neither entice away slaves, nor knowingly harbor fugi- tives. If our neighbors in Missouri are wise and know their own interests they will meet us in a reciprocal spirit of good faith and good will.” Quindaro citizens, said Walden, were inclined neither “to insti- tute an inquisition before which negroes entering the town will have to appear and answer certain questions as to where they are from” nor “to countenance fugitives should they be known as such.”9 After a Quindaro wag with abolition- ist sympathies humorously offered a re- ward for the “non-apprehension and non- lodgment” of an escaped slave, the Star of Empire urged an invasion of Quindaro in Tintype of unidentified African American woman circa 1860s. It was a family heirloom of retaliation. “It was ultimately decided,” re- the Platt family who could trace involvement in the Beecher Bible and Rifle Colony and an ported the Chicago Tribune, “that Quindaro Underground Railroad station in Wabaunsee County, both illustrative of the territory’s need not be sacked for the present; but one abolitionist activities such as were found in Quindaro. or two of the colored audience having re- ceived public information of the road to freedom, made By mid-1858, stories about Quindaro were beginning straight for Quindaro,” contributing to the town’s reputa- to disappear from national newspapers. As the border tion as well as its growing black population.10 war subsided in northeastern Kansas, local leaders of all political stripes became more concerned with developing the area’s economy even as the border war continued in southern Kansas, as Jeremy Neely pointed out.11 Towns along the Missouri River began to compete fiercely with 7. “Wyandot City, K.T., March 31, 1857,” New York Herald Tribune, each other for survival. Quindaro had outlived its found- May 12, 1857; “Trips in Kansas—No. 2,” Quindaro Chindowan, September 3, 1857; 8. “Quindaro, that Abolition Hole!” Quindaro Chindowan, August 8, 1857. 9. “A Modern Munchausen,” Quindaro Chindowan, August 8, 1857; “Incendiary,” Quindaro Chindowan, August 1, 1857. 11. Jeremy Neely, The Border between Them (Columbia: University of 10. “Blue Lodges on the Move,” Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1857. Missouri Press, 2007), 83. A Spot of Human Ground 103 An 1878 map of Wyandotte County, Kansas, including Quindaro, showing the route of the Missouri Pacific Railroad as well as Wyandotte City, the future Kansas City, Kansas. It includes a caption identifying the first white settle in the area. ing mission as towns on both sides of the river suppressed famous City among the hills,” he called it, where “there the activities of Border Ruffians and welcomed emigrants is not level land enough to align a Corporal’s Guard.”12 regardless of their opinions on slavery.
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