The Western University Alumni Association has partnered with KCMC and the Mellon Foundation to preserve and interpret the Quindaro Townsite and Western University. Quindaro, Kansas, was a free-state boomtown founded in the 1850s. It was a direct response to the proslavery control of the Missouri River and the towns along it during the Bleeding Kansas period, when those who supported or opposed slavery in Kansas fought for control of the state. Founded with a group of Wyandots and white colonists from the North, Quindaro quickly flourished into a river port granting access to Kansas’ interior. Not only that, but there is good evidence that it served as a stop of the Underground Railroad before and especially during the Civil War As quickly as it rose in 1858, it collapsed. By 1862, few people remained in the town. By 1880, only ruins remained.
The legacy of this anti-slavery town was preserved by Western University, a historically black college founded as Freedman’s University in the aftermath of the Civil War. The school came under the control of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and became one of the premier black institutions west of the Mississippi. Serving as a seminary, a music school and eventually the black technical college for Kansas, Western University was a vibrant institution with national recognition. Sadly, the Great Depression and WWII forced the school’s closure in 1943.
The Western University Alumni Association is pioneering work that will reinvigorate this site. WUAA has proposed a series of walking trails through the Quindaro Ruins, complete with multiple interpretive plaques that will make a site that is now overgrown accessible to the Kansas City Metro population. Signage will highlight the complex nature of slavery, Kansas, boomtowns, and collapses, tying this important site to a broader history on what was once America’s borderland between slavery and freedom.
Moreover, the site will highlight Western University’s contributions to both Missouri and Kansas, and how its graduates helped shape the area they lived in. Using physical as well as digital markers, this site will become a destination for people curious about how this contested region developed and what the legacies of Bleeding Kansas were in and around the city. Take a virtual tour of the Western University Site here.
Photos from the Kansas State Library
