The exhibit marks Kansas' 160th birthday.
Steve Quakenbush, executive director of the Finney County Museum, said this is the first Front Door Gallery exhibit of the year. Typically, they try to have four to six a year.
Titled “Ad Astra Per Aspera," Kansas' Latin motto, the exhibit tells how the admission of Kansas to the Union on Jan. 29, 1861, was a spark that helped ignite the American Civil War, Quakenbush said. It's often overlooked.
"One of the major national issues in the late 1850s and into 1860, was whether Kansas would come into the Union as a slave state or a free, non-slave state," he said. "It was actually President Lincoln's advocacy of Kansas entering the Union as a free state that enraged a lot of House members and senators from Southern, slave-holding states and prompted several of them to resign from Congress, go home and begin forming the confederacy."