A long-vanished town is an important part of Black and Indigenous Kansas history, but preservation advocates have spent decades fighting for resources.
The settlement of Quindaro, Kansas, in what is now Kansas City, originally began life in late 1856, created by abolitionists along the bank of the Missouri River as a resistance to stop the westward spread of slavery and to serve as an effort to make Kansas a fee state. The town soon saw a deluge of migrants who were trying to help secure Kansas as a free territory, and became an important runaway-slave settlement and port of entry for abolitionists and free state activists, with Quindaro heavily involved in aiding the underground railroad at the time, helping slaves who had escaped from Missouri. When Kansas eventually became a free state, its growth slowed somewhat and parts of it became abandoned, it still functioned for some time as a gathering place for former slaves, and in 1865 the Quindaro Freedman’s School was established, which was the first black school west of the Mississippi River. It was a very important town in its time, but it also has a secret dark history of a hou