Lawrence, Kansas

• 1. Introduction

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  Lawrence, Kansas sits between two rivers and holds a peculiar place in American history: a city founded not for commerce or land, but as a weapon in the argument over slavery. On the 1st of August 1854, the first party of settlers ate their midday meal on a ridge called Hogback, looked out over the Kansas River valley, and began staking claims for a town that would become one of the most contested pieces of ground in the years before the Civil War. Who were these people, and why did a city in the middle of the Great Plains become a target for multiple organized military attacks? What made Lawrence survive when so many settlements simply vanished? And how did a town born in political violence become a college city with what the New York Times once called the most vital music scene between Chicago and Denver?

• 2. Born of a Political Fight

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  Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois put the match to the dry grass in May 1854, when his Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and handed the slavery question to their future settlers through a mechanism called popular sovereignty. Christian abolitionist Richard Cordley later wrote that when the bill became law there was "a feeling of despondency all over the north," because its passage had opened Kansas to the possibility of slavery. Missouri was a slave state, and the first wave of settlers in Kansas was expected to come from there.

  Opponents of the act resolved to flood Kansas with antislavery settlers before that could happen. The most organized effort came from the New England Emigrant Aid Company, whose leading figures included Amos A. Lawrence, an Ipswich businessman and abolitionist, and Eli Thayer, a member of the House of Representatives. In early May 1854, even before the act had passed, four men including Thomas W. and Oliver P. Barber had already toured the territory looking for a suitable colony site. In June 1854, the NEEAC sent Dr. Charles Robinson of Fitchburg and Charles H. Branscomb of Holyoke to scout the ground. Robinson remembered climbing the ridge that would become Mount Oread on a previous trip and recalled the magnificence of the view. That memory, Cordley wrote, "doubtless had much to do in the final decision."

  The two scouts chose the site partly because it was the first desirable location where emigrant Indians had ceded their land rights, and partly because it sat near the Oregon, Santa Fe, and 1846 Military Trails. A cholera outbreak in the Missouri Valley disrupted the NEEAC's original plan to send a large group, so only 29 men volunteered for the first crossing. Eli Thayer called them the pioneer colony. They left Boston on the 17th of July 1854, amid cheering crowds lining the station tracks for several blocks, according to Thayer's antislavery paper the Kansas Crusader for Freedom.

• 3. Naming a City Under Threat

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  The name nearly did not stick. When the first settlers arrived, most called their camp Wakarusa, after the nearby river. Pro-slavery men from Missouri had a simpler name for it: Yankee Town. Other names considered included New Boston, honoring the NEEAC's home city. Lawrence emerged as the frontrunner largely because Amos A. Lawrence was a man of wide personal influence, Cordley wrote, and one of the first men of means to fund the emigrant effort. The settlers also calculated, correctly, that naming the town after him would prompt further financial donations. One additional appeal was that the name Lawrence had, as one account put it, "no bad odor attached to it in any part of the Union." On the 1st of October 1854, the settlement's leaders voted to make it official.

  From the start, the town was organized as a political project. The settlers drew up a constitution by the 20th of September 1854, incorporating principles from Maine's prohibition law. Two free-state newspapers were running before the year ended: the Herald of Freedom, edited by George W. Brown, and the Kansas Pioneer, which John Speer eventually renamed the Kansas Tribune. A third paper, the Kansas Free State, began publication in early January 1855 under Robert Gaston Elliott and Josiah Miller. The Plymouth Congregational Church opened in September 1854. On the 10th of January 1855, the first school in Kansas opened in Lawrence, taught by Edward P. Fitch and funded by voluntary contributions. The city was building civic infrastructure at speed, under the active threat of pro-slavery men who warned the free-staters should be driven from the country.

• 4. Bleeding Kansas

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  Before the first full year was out, the territory's politics had turned violent. A census taken ahead of the 30th of March 1855 legislative election found 369 legal voters in Lawrence. On election day, between 700 and 1,000 armed men from Missouri arrived in over 100 wagons, carrying guns, rifles, pistols, Bowie knives, and two pieces of artillery. They voted in Lawrence and then camped there overnight before returning home. Of the 1,034 votes cast in Lawrence that day, 232 were legal and 802 came from non-residents. Across the entire territory, there were only 2,905 legal voters, but 6,307 votes were cast. Governor Andrew Reeder initially agreed to set the election aside but reversed course after being threatened by pro-slavery men.

  In November 1855, the murder of a Free-Stater named Charles Dow by the pro-slavery settler Franklin N. Coleman sparked a chain of events the Border War Encyclopedia would later call the genesis of the violent political divisions that characterized Kansas for the next ten years. Acting territorial governor Daniel Woodson had already given a boost to the pro-slavery side in August by appointing the zealously pro-slavery Samuel J. Jones as county sheriff. Jones arrested Dow's affiliate Jacob Branson for disturbing the peace. Samuel Newitt Wood and a group of Free-Staters broke Branson out of jail at one in the morning, just two hours after the arrest. In response, Governor Wilson Shannon called on the Kansas militia, but Jones mustered a force of 1,200 to 1,500 men, nearly all of them from Missouri. Lawrence raised a defensive force of 600 to 800 men. John Brown and his sons John Jr., Oliver, Owen, and Watson joined the defense. Five earthwork forts were constructed. A harsh Kansas winter and a peace treaty signed at the pro-slavery stronghold of Franklin prevented an all-out clash, and the standoff became known as the Wakarusa War.

  The following spring, on the 23rd of April 1856, Sheriff Jones entered Lawrence and attempted to arrest members of the extralegal Free-State legislature. A sniper named Charles Lenhart shot Jones, though not fatally. Lawrence residents offered a $500 bounty for the sniper's arrest. Weeks later, Federal Marshal Israel B. Donaldson and Missouri senator David Rice Atchison raised an army of around 800 Southerners. On the 21st of May 1856, they rode into town, arrested those on their warrant list, and began to sack the city. Jones's men smashed the presses of the antislavery newspapers, threw the type into the Kansas River, and scattered printed copies into the wind. A cannon was fired at the Free State Hotel, which was then burned down. Jones's men pillaged roughly $30,000 worth of valuables. Only one member of Jones's own force died during the sack, struck by falling masonry. In late September 1856, another attack was narrowly averted when newly installed territorial governor John W. Geary called for federal reinforcements after spotting an army of 2,700 pro-slavery men within sight of the city.

• 5. Massacre and Reconstruction

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  Kansas entered the Union as a free state on the 29th of January 1861, the Wyandotte Constitution having passed in a referendum by a vote of 10,421 to 5,530. But statehood coincided with the outbreak of the Civil War, and Lawrence became a base for the Jayhawker guerrilla units led by James Lane, James Montgomery, and Doc Jennison. These groups raided western Missouri, burning farms and taking goods, and Southerners widely believed Lawrence was where the plunder was stored.

  On the 21st of August 1863, William Quantrill and hundreds of his irregular Confederate raiders attacked and destroyed Lawrence. Between 150 and 200 men and boys were murdered. The raid left 80 widows and 250 orphans and destroyed roughly $2,000,000 worth of property. Most buildings constructed before 1860 were burned; the architectural variety seen in Lawrence today dates almost entirely from the rebuilding that followed. The Plymouth Congregational Church survived the attack, though several of its members were killed and its records destroyed.

  Richard Cordley described the rebuilding effort as carrying the character of a religious obligation. Rumors of further guerrilla attacks were thick, and Lawrence citizens organized protective companies. The federal government erected several military posts on Mount Oread, among them Camp Ewing, Camp Lookout, and Fort Ulysses, though no further attacks came and these installations were eventually dismantled. The first wind-powered mill in Kansas, built in Lawrence in 1863, had been partially destroyed in Quantrill's Raid; it was rebuilt in 1864 at a cost of $9,700 and continued operating until July 1885 before burning down in a fire on the 30th of April 1905.

• 6. Universities and Civic Growth

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  The question of where to put Kansas's state university was debated from 1861 to 1863, with Lawrence competing against Manhattan and Emporia. Manhattan secured the land-grant college on the 13th of January 1863. Lawrence's case rested partly on $10,000 plus interest donated by Amos Lawrence and 40 acres of land offered for the campus. Lawrence beat Emporia by a single legislative vote, and in 1866 the University of Kansas opened to students.

  In 1884, the United States Indian Industrial Training School opened in Lawrence as a Native American boarding school whose explicit goal was assimilation. Boys were taught trades including tailoring and blacksmithing while girls were taught cooking and homemaking. Most food was grown on the Haskell Farm, and students were expected to work in addition to their coursework. In 1885, the school expanded to include academic training; its commercial department opened with five typewriters, launching what was the first touch-typing class in Kansas. The school was renamed the Haskell Institute in 1887 after Dudley Haskell, the legislator responsible for its placement in Lawrence. In 1993 it became Haskell Indian Nations University. Haskell's athletic programs were once known as the Powerhouse of the West, with victories over Oklahoma A&M, Kansas State, Texas, and Nebraska. The Olympian Jim Thorpe graduated from the program.

  The Bowersock Dam on the Kansas River, completed after several false starts and flood-related setbacks in the 1870s, became an industrial anchor for the city. It remains the only hydropower dam in the state of Kansas. The dam closed in 1968 but reopened in 1977 when the city chose to build a new city hall next to the Bowersock Plant. Lawrence Memorial Hospital opened in 1921 in the 300 block of Maine Street with 50 beds; by 1980 it had grown to 200.

• 7. Culture and Civil Rights

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  In December 2005, Mayor Dennis Boog Highberger declared International Dadaism Month, and in keeping with Dada principles, he set its dates not as a single calendar month but as a scatter of thirteen separate dates across the year, chosen by rolling dice and pulling numbers from a hat. The gesture was representative of a city that had always been unusually attentive to cultural life. The Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival, launched in 2004 at Clinton State Park just outside Lawrence, sold almost 60,000 tickets by 2006, drawing a nationwide audience that accounted for 80 percent of ticket sales. Artists including The Flaming Lips, Wilco, and Widespread Panic performed there.

  Lawrence is also home to the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, the first research center in the world dedicated to science fiction studies. Since 1969, the center has offered courses, workshops, an annual conference, and multiple awards and scholarships. The University of Kansas student-run radio station KJHK 90.7 FM has long been a hub for a local music scene that produced bands including The Get Up Kids, Mates of State, The Appleseed Cast, and the band Kansas itself.

  On the civil rights front, Lawrence became the first city in Kansas to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, passing that ordinance in 1995 following a campaign called Simply Equal. On the 4th of October 2011, it became the first city in Kansas to ban discrimination based on gender identity, through City Ordinance No. 8672. Douglas County was the only county in Kansas to vote against the amendment to the state constitution prohibiting gay marriage and civil unions in April 2005, and that opposition was concentrated primarily within Lawrence itself. In February 2023, the city commission banned source-of-income discrimination, prohibiting landlords from rejecting housing vouchers and barring discrimination based on immigration status or being a survivor of sexual assault.

• 8. A City Still Becoming

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  The Kansas Jayhawks basketball team won NCAA championships in 1952, 1988, 2008, and 2022, and Massachusetts Street flooded with fans after both victories and defeats in the tournament finals in 2002, 2003, 2008, 2012, and 2022. KU's football team went 12-1 in the 2007-2008 season and won the Orange Bowl. In 2008, the football and basketball programs combined for 49 wins against 4 losses, which was the most combined wins by two NCAA sports programs in a single season.

  As of the 2020 census, Lawrence had a population of 94,934. The median age was 30.4 years, reflecting the large student population. The University of Kansas is the city's largest employer, with 10,116 employees as of 2020. In 2020, a report commissioned by the Lawrence City Council warned that without attracting more kinds of businesses, the city risked becoming a bedroom community that's not affordable for people who don't commute elsewhere. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Lawrence was 114 degrees Fahrenheit, on the 10th of August 1934 and the 14th of August 1936. The coldest was negative 25 degrees on the 12th of February 1899. The city's Sesquicentennial Park near Clinton Lake, established for Lawrence's 150th anniversary, contains a time capsule scheduled to be opened in 2054, the year the city would mark its second century.