Kansas City Public Library: KC Black History: Do You Know The Town That Was A Stop On The Underground Railroad?

Press release from the Kansas City Public Library:

March 9, 2022

Quindaro only lasted for six years—but one hundred sixty years later, it still fascinates people for its links to the Underground Railroad.

The Kansas town sprang up on the south banks of the Missouri River between Leavenworth and Kansas City in early 1857, a time when the Kansas-Nebraska Act spurred “free soilers” and pro-slavery forces to battle over the future of the state.

Many of Quindaro’s founders were Northerners affiliated with the New England Emigrant Aid Society, an abolitionist group that settled Lawrence a few years earlier.

They chose a site to create the town six miles above the mouth of the Kansas River, on the northern edge of what is now Kansas City, Kansas.

A rock ledge at the foot of its steep bluffs and wooded hills created a natural landing for steamboats. The town founders made it the only port on that stretch of the Missouri not controlled by Southern sympathizers.

They purchased the parcel from the Wyandot tribe, which settled there in 1843 after the U.S. government forced them to move from Ohio.

The new town took its name from a tribal member, Nancy Quindaro Brown Guthrie. Her husband, Abelard Guthrie, worked with the Wyandot in Ohio, and helped the Town of Quindaro Company broker the deal.

Keeping Kansas free from slavery was an important part of the founders’ mission, but they also profited from the deal. Border wars or not, land speculators demanded a substantial return on their frontier investments.

The speed with which Quindaro took shape was nothing short of amazing.

By summer of 1857, the new town had 600 residents, two hotels, a sawmill, a brickyard, a grocery store, hardware store, doctors, lawyers and despite the presence of a strong temperance movement, a tavern or two.

The muddy streets were cleared and graded for easier access to the commerce that clustered around Kanzas Avenue, stretching uphill toward what is now N. 27th Street.

Quindaro had its own newspaper, the Chindowan—a Wyandot word meaning “leader” that was filled with civic boosterism and free-state advocacy.

Clarina Nichols was co-editor of the Chindowan. A widow from New England, she later made headlines of her own in pursuit of women’s rights and suffrage.

In 1882, a memoir Nichols wrote for the Wyandotte Gazette pulled back the veil on Quindaro’s role in the fight against slavery. She revealed that “conductors” on the Underground Railroad often used a house nicknamed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for harboring runaways. Most notably, she claimed to have sheltered a young girl in her own cistern.

“One beautiful evening in October ‘61, as twilight was fading from the bluff,” she wrote, “a hurried message came to me from our neighbor, Fielding Johnson: ‘You must hide Caroline. Fourteen slave hunters are camped in the Parkhe, r master among them.’”

Another Quindaro resident, Benjamin Mudge, wrote a letter in February 1862 published later by the Kansas State Historical Society including a tale of slave hunters at his door looking for “contraband” that they (correctly) believed Mudge was hiding.

Bluffing that he was “heavily armed,” Mudge proclaimed, “I don’t want to harm anyone, But if any man enters my house in the night… he will likely get hurt.” The men outside threatened “to go see the captain,” but didn’t return.

It was too risky for those harboring formerly enslaved people to keep close records. But area families often passed down stories of ancestors who fled to freedom in Quindaro, sometimes by slipping onto the ferry that connected it to Parkville.

This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.