photo by: Elvyn Jones
The Black Jack Battlefield Board of Trustees is looking to undertake a series of improvements at the site east of Baldwin City. Included among them is a visitor center that would be built near the Robert Hall Pearson farmstead, pictured on April 24, 2021, which is also part of the park.
Jonathan Hart, the chairman of Black Jack Battlefield’s board of trustees, wants to restore the historic site to a condition that John Brown, Henry Clay Pate and the other men who fought there in 1856 would recognize.
The Battle of Black Jack on June 2, 1856, marked an escalation in the violence of the Bleeding Kansas era that preceded the Civil War. It was the first time organized, armed militias from proslavery and antislavery groups met in combat. Brown’s antislavery forces prevailed when one of his sons got behind Pate’s lines and falsely shouted that the proslavery fighters were surrounded.