Explain Like I'm Not From Lawrence

More than you ever wanted to know about stuff in and around Lawrence, Kansas

[misteruniqueness]

Moving on

I’ve reached a point where using tumblr just doesn’t make sense anymore, unfortunately. Going to keep all the old posts up with links to their place on the new blog at true Lawrence. Come check out all the new stuff, starting with the list of names Lawrence might’ve been called

[misteruniqueness]

Messing with Texas

(and a few other states)

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

If you are like me, part of the difficulty of researching and then writing about something is that you end up discovering all sorts of other interesting stories in the process that want to pull you away from what you are supposed to be focusing on. Very quickly these become their own piles of scribbled notes and bookmarked browser tabs and staying up too late “to look up one more thing…” side projects, with the end result that you never end up finishing any of it.

My recent deep dive into all things Pinckney/Pinkney Street has left me with dozens of these stories, some little, and many not so little that I am going to try and finally clear off my desk. This first one is most closely related to the Pinkney street naming saga: the reason behind the ”missing” state street names from the core of Lawrence (Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Texas).

The answer turns out to revolve around a treaty that the US government signed with the Wyandot Native American tribe when they lived in northern Ohio in 1842. And maybe a hill. Buckle up folks, ‘cause it’s gonna get convoluted!

AD Searl’s 1854 map of Lawrence. Click for embiggened version here.

To recap, all six of those missing state streets are shown on the original ‘map’ of Lawrence, as surveyed and plotted by A D Searl in the autumn of 1854 and labeled by Dr. Thomas Webb, secretary of the Massachusetts (later New England) Emigrant Aid Company that same fall. That map, however, was nothing more than wishful thinking, a city of three square miles when the law only allowed them to claim one sixth that amount for a settlement, and plotted out on land they might not even have a right to settle on in the first place. 

Get your float on!

This is where the 1842 treaty comes in. When the federal government negotiated to move the Wyandot tribe from their ancestral lands in northern Ohio to northeastern Kansas, one component, Article 14, created special land grants for 35 named members of the tribe. Each one of those people were reserved the right to select a single section of land (or 640 acres, or a square mile) anywhere west of the Missouri river. Because these reservations were not tied to a specific piece of land, they were considered “floating reserves” or “Wyandot floats”.

For a variety of reasons, including the indifference of the federal bureaucracy overseeing Native American affairs at the time, almost none of these Wyandot floats had been patented at the time the Kansas Territory was opened to white settlement in 1854. Soon after, the Wyadot tribe revised their 1842 treaty, formalizing their ownership of land near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, selling off other land, and updating the nature of the floats, making them now eligible to be placed on any federal land west of the states of Iowa and Missouri, and allowing the floats to be assigned or sold.

White settlers, land speculators and town agents alike quickly saw the value the “floats” could have to add legal heft to the status of their otherwise uncertain claims. And Lawrence very much had uncertain claims. For the first winter and spring of its existence, sparring groups of townspeople (who had formally organized themselves as the Lawrence Association), squatters and speculators fought over who had the right to be there, sometimes in lawsuits and claims at far off courthouses and land offices, sometimes by physically removing camps and structures. In the end, the Lawrence Association negotiated a deal with a group of squatters, led by William Lykins, who held claims on much of central Lawrence. In an effort to protect the deal and the nascent town of Lawrence from further claims, the combined group acquired the Wyandot reserve # 12 from Robert Roubatille and placed it over the heart of the Lawrence townsite in the spring of 1855.

Around that same time, a separate group of early NEEAC settlers and out-of-territory investors obtained another Wyandot float, the Joel Walker float (Wyandot reserve #5), and located it just to the west of central Lawrence, calling it West Lawrence.

Searl would re-survey and replat the town to the new boundaries created by dropping these two, roughly square cookie cutters on the old map, to create the first true map of Lawrence in 1857. (Although this map is undated, there is very strong evidence to place its production in 1857, which is detailed at the end of the article)

AD Searl’s 1857 map of Lawrence. Click for embiggened version here.

The entire area of the city west of Alabama and south of Warren is now gone. A formal boundary was set at Maryland street to the east. Halfway between Adams (now 14th) and Morris (now 15th) Street was now the southern boundary. And so Lawrence lost Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia streets in the east and the distance between the current 14th and 15th streets is half that of any of the blocks north of 14th.  

Details from the southeastern portion of the 1857 map of Lawrence - several state streets lost and the distance from 14th to 15th streets (at the bottom) halved.

Detail from the northwestern portion of the 1857 Lawrence map. Jay Street is now the northern border and Iowa has leapfrogged California

In West Lawrence, Mason (what would have been “Zero” Street had the grid never changed) was lost, leaving Jay (what would have been 1st Street) as the northern boundary. Additionally, the orderly city blocks filled with small residential lots envisioned in the 1854 map give way to larger and larger lots west of Michigan street, likely owing to the demands of the groups that invested in the land there. Texas Street, originally between Florida and Wisconsin, disappears from the northern portion of the map, although three blocks of it still run from Pinkney (now 6th) to Warren (now 9th) streets. The original location of Iowa Street is no longer there, but instead of shifting everything, Searl kept California in its ‘original’ location and Iowa leapfrogs it to be the westernmost street on the map of Lawrence. (If it hadn’t, the current Iowa Street might’ve ended up being called California Street)

More surveying by the state and federal government would be done in the next few years, adjusting Lawrence’s borders again as the entire region was stitched into alignment with township and county borders. And although no other maps from this era - including official plats used by the city for maintaining property locations and records - survived Quantrill’s raid in 1863, the first maps produced after showed a few more streets being squeezed out as a result of the process  

Maps produced after the raid are broken up by the Wyandot float they were initially limited to. The map of central Lawrence, formally received by the city no earlier than 1866 (the first year S.S Horton became Register of Deeds) has Delaware street as the eastern edge of the city:

Detail from 1866 map of Lawrence

As for West Lawrence, the earliest post-Quantrill map is from 1868, and Jay is gone from the north, and the remainder of Texas Street was written out of Lawrence history as well. Texas’ demise appears to have been a practical, rather than cartographical, decision. Nothing to the west of Michigan Street made it south of what is now 6th Street as drawn on Searl’s map, likely owing to the steep hill that begins to rise there. 

Detail comparison of 1857 and 1868 maps of West Lawrence 

And that’s how Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland got squeezed out of Lawrence and Texas got erased. When I first started looking into these things, I’d thought that maybe there was something deliberate in their disappearance, as all but Maryland were part of the confederacy. But sometimes history is as much the cumulative acts of a ceaseless bureaucracy as it is the deliberate actions of determined men.

TRIVIA EXTRAS

Basic Trivia: South Park was originally a far bigger park than what we have now - it was supposed to stretch north-south from 11th St to 13th Stand east-west from Rhode Island Street to Tennessee Street. But in the deal the Lawrence Association made with the Lykins group to settle their land claims, the agreed to give members of the Lykins group so many lots in the city that there weren’t enough to satisfy the Free State settlers. So they carved more lots out of the boundaries of South Park, reducing its overall size by more than half.

Bar Trivia: Final lawsuits by people & groups claiming ownership of the land Lawrence sits upon would not be settled until 1865 when the Wyandot float for West Lawrence was officially patented. Showing off Trivia: In 1854, some squatters attempted to bolster their claim to the land Lawrence is now on by partnering with a land agent and surveying and laying out streets of an entirely different town which they named “Excelsior”.

LFK Trivia: There was a Wyandot float that was supposed to fill in the southwest corner of Lawrence that is missing from the 1857 map, acquired by Lawrence founding father (and first governor of Kansas) Charles Robinson for that purpose. Ultimately it was used to claim land near Pike’s Peak, and holy schnikes the story of it and how the final boundaries of the other two floats that formed Lawrence got settled sounds bonkers. From an article about the Wyandot floats:

Additional problems arose because of the arrival of James H. Lane, who bought out a claimant on the fringe of the colony. Lane, a lieutenant colonel in the Mexican War, former lieutenant governor of Indiana, and only recently a member of congress, was a hard man to have for an enemy. The land claim contest, involving Lane and Gaius Jenkins has been justifiably identified as “the most famous… which arose in Kansas,” and it had its repercussions on the use of Wyandot floats on the Lawrence townsite. Where else could one find a killer in a homicide case (Lane) gain exoneration for his crime, get elected to the United States senate shortly afterwards, and have his land claim resolved to his satisfaction? In the process two Wyandot floats had to adjust their boundaries to Lane’s demands, and a third float [Robinson’s] was relocated.

Details of the 1857 map of Lawrence

AD Searl resurveyed Lawrence at the time each of the two Wyandot floats were used to secure Lawrence’s borders. A court filing defending the townsite against other claimants noted that Searl surveyed the No. 12 Wyandot float on April 3rd, 1855:

And on the post-Quantrill’s raid map of West Lawrence (situated on the No. 5 float, Searl wrote:  “I hereby certify that this is a true and correct plot of Wyandotte Reserve No. () or what is known as the Joel Walker Float. The blue line represents the boundary of the Reserve as surveyed by me June 22nd, 1855 … Soon after the original location of the Reserve, I surveyed it into Streets, Lots and Blocks as shown on this Plat.”

Two letters written to Hiram Hill, an investor in property in West Lawrence, in 1857 by his agents in the territory note a map of the area was to be soon available. H.M. Simpson wrote Hill on Jan 17, 1857:

“We Shall have maps of West Lawrence as soon as they can be lithographed”

Erastus D. Ladd’s letter to Hill on June 29, 1857 explained the unusual reason for a delay in getting the map of West Lawrence to Hill: 

“Mr Searl informs me that the maps of W. Lawrence were lost in the sinking of a boat on the Missouri river. and that he has ordered more.”

Finally, Searl’s partner named on the map, Eugene Burke Whitman, would leave the territory in 1858, meaning the map couldn’t have been produced any later than this.

Important Sources

Wyandot Floats, Homer E. Socolofsky https://wyandotte-nation.org/culture/history/published/wyandot-floats/ https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/12355526/wyandot-floats-wyandotte-nation Originally published in the Kansas Historical Quarterly, Autumn 1979, Volume XXXV Number 3

The Kansas Conflict, Charles Robinson https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Kansas_Conflict/AvZ5AAAAMAAJ?hl=en

History of the State of Kansas, volume 1, Alfred Theodore Andreas Claim Troubles (p 314) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951p01071158p&view=1up&seq=302

Albert Dwight Searl: A Free-State Surveyor in Bloody Kansas https://blogs.lib.ku.edu/spencer/tag/maps/

Partisan Cartographers During the Kansas-Missouri Border War, Karen Severud Cook tinyurl.com/mryeuvs3

Brief for Applicant in the matter of the "Wyandott Robitaille Float." https://territorialkansasonline.ku.edu/index.php?SCREEN=show_document&SCREEN_FROM=immigration&document_id=102592&FROM_PAGE=&topic_id=88 https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/3997

Earliest Post Quantrill's raid maps of Lawrence Douglas County Register of Deeds office Create a free log in at https://landmark.douglascountyks.org/LandmarkWeb/Account/LogOn; then search by book and page.  The Book Type is Plat Book.  Enter Book 1, Page 1, the results "West Lawrence" and "Lawrence - original townsite" have the oldest maps

[misteruniqueness]

The end of the road

It has always come down to this one sentence: “The reasons which influenced me in making the selection shall be hereafter given.” 

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

I found this article on the very first day I started looking for clues about the original name of Sixth Street and why a city whose founding was premised on anti-slavery would name a street after one of the biggest defenders of slavery at the Constitutional Convention (Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) or his cousin, the literal author of the Fugitive Slave clause in the Constitution (Charles Pinckney)

Finding this quote from Dr. Webb made me believe that somewhere, online or offline, there must be a document outlining his reasoning. So I kept plugging away, whenever I had a little extra time to poke around on the internet, reading another first-hand account of a Lawrence settler, or trying to read the barely legible handwriting on one of their letters that had been scanned but not transcribed and it was unlikely to have any clues. (But better to be safe than sorry, right?) 

Finally, it came down to the nine rolls of microfilmed New England Emigrant Aid Company records at the Kansas State Historical Society. The Kenneth Spencer Research Library here in Lawrence has copies of those rolls (and a few boxes of letters and documents of Charles Robinson) that I was able to arrange to see. COVID restrictions meant that the time I was allowed in the archives was limited and so it took most of the spring to go through them. 

Unfortunately, Webb’s reasoning was nowhere to be found. But what is there is ironclad evidence that Webb did in fact name the streets and he did so by himself - meaning we can eliminate debate about the ‘intentions’ of everyone else when it comes to the street names of Lawrence. Plus there is more circumstantial evidence that William Pinkney was the person Webb intended the street to be named for as well

Evidence of Webb as the sole author of the street names is found in the records of the  organization’s Executive Committee. The Executive Committee oversaw the day-to-day activities of the NEEAC that Dr. Webb, as the organization’s secretary, carried out. The first meeting was on July 24, 1854 (as the NEEAC’ forerunner organization, the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company), meetings then took place almost every week through the end of the year with Dr. Webb, as secretary, taking meeting notes. Most of the discussion revolved around fundraising, the progress of groups of emigrants, and entering into the record letters concerning NEEAC affairs that had been sent to the organization.

The official surveyed map produced by A.D. Searl is Is not mentioned until late in the fall. It had been carried back to Boston by S.C. Pomeroy and presented to the Executive Committee on November 22, and the notes show that the Executive Committee authorized it to be lithographed.

”Mr. Pomeroy exhibited a Plat of Lawrence City which the Secretary was empowered to cause to be Lithographed.” Also at the same meeting, the EC assigned Dr. Webb to name the new community’s streets and parks as its last order of business:

“The Secretary was requested to select names for the Streets and Parks of Lawrence City.”

At the very next meeting Webb says in the notes that the naming is progressing:

“The secretary stated that he was attending to the subject of selecting names for the streets of Lawrence.”

This was December 2nd. Webb would soon write to Charles Robison regarding the map and to say that he would reveal his reasoning behind the names (the letter published in the Herald of Freedom and pictured at the beginning of this post). So it was with great anticipation that I carefully scrolled through the microfilm, reading those last few meeting notes of 1854. Even if there wasn’t a direct explanation of each individual name, I was hoping for at least a list of the full names of each person chosen, or perhaps Executive Committee members would want changes to some of Webb’s choices, and the ensuing discussion would reveal why some names were deemed worthy while others were not.

Instead, there was only one more mention of the map, on Dec. 23, 1854, when Webb wrote:

“The Secretary exhibited to the Trustees the Lithographed Plan of the City of Lawrence in Kansas Territory. After that the meeting was adjourned.”

And that would be the last mention of the map that I could find in the minutes, at least through the end of 1855.

So despite the hint dropped in the letter to Charles Robinson, there seems to be no surviving record of Webb’s thinking on the subject. In his correspondence that I could locate with other key members of the NEEAC, (such as Amos A. Lawrence, Eli Thayer, E.E. Hale, and Charles Robinson) Webb never asked for advice or feedback on names. Nor are there any drafts of really anything that Webb was involved in producing, such as the Information for Kanzas Immigrants - a 24 page “circular” full of geographical, meteorological, and agricultural information and travel guidance he wrote in mid 1854, shortly after the Emigrant Aid Company as organized. (This was both odd and frustrating, as manuscripts and notes for other Company publications such as E.E. Hale’s similar book Kanzas and Nebraska run to hundreds of pages.)

While it is disappointing not to have this additional proof, I do believe the case for William Pinkney to be very strong. Especially since (as detailed previously) for the next four years, whenever Webb wrote about property owned by the NEEAC on the street, he wrote it as “Pinkney”. As a Harvard-educated doctor and devoted anti-slavery activist, the chances that he was continually misspelling “Pinckney” - including at the presentation of the map - while none of his also highly-educated peers corrected him seems unlikely.

If anything the opposite problem - misspelling Pinkney as “Pinckney” - seems more likely. As I mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of handwritten pages from E.E. Hale, who was a driving force behind the NEEAC, and the organization’s connection to the Northern ecclesiastical community. Beyond his book “Kanzas and Nebraska” these writings include article drafts and fragments written between 1854 and the early 1890s. One undated article fragment about the 1820 Missouri Compromise, shows that Hale clearly knew of William Pinkney: 

“Pinkney had made his debut in public life, by a speech in the Maryland Convention in favor of the Emancipation of Slaves; - but that alas! - was a generation before! The young man of ‘89 was no longer young.”

Later on in the notes, Hale discusses William Pinkney across five pages, misspelling him as “Pinckney” every time and having to later correct himself, as on this page:

Chances are this is also what happened with the earliest and most prominent usage of “Pinckney Street”, when Lawrence’s newspapers printed the inaugural address of Lawrence’s first mayor, James Blood, on July 30, 1857. It was custom at the time for speeches to be written out by their authors for future publication, and a slip up by Blood in his own notes was likely faithfully reproduced by the typesetters when they set up their pages.

Who else were the streets named for?

The other angle I pursued when avenues of research on Webb ran dry was whether a clear theme could be discerned from the names of streets collectively. Were they all anti-slavery activists or thinkers? Or important Revolutionary-era figures? Or maybe just a collection of names of streets near the Boston offices of the NEEAC that an overworked secretary facing a time crunch simply cribbed from?

Here again Webb leaves us little to go on. The formal presentation of the map of Lawrence  - written by Webb - that was published in the Jan 20, 1855 edition of the Herald of Freedom says this about the named streets: “The streets running east and west are named in honor of distinguished men, who have done something in the cause of liberty”, a description so anodyne as to be meaningless. In an updated version of the Webb-authored “Information for Kanzas Immigrants” from 1856, he tweaked the criteria slightly, writing “...other streets, which are named after individuals, distinguished for their Patriotism, Philanthropy, and Love of Liberty.”

So I started researching all seventeen names from the original map, looking for commonalities. But here again there were no clear answers. Here are the names, plotted against some of the common theories for what connects them (listing both Pinkney and Pinckney):

In some cases there are different people who the street could be named for (Adams could be for Sam Adams, John Adams or John Quincy Adams); in others a single person might fit multiple criteria (Morris could be for Gouverneur Morris, the most passionately anti-slavery of all the founding fathers). In some cases a name might fit, but has only a weak correlation with one or both (Reed may have been named for Joseph Reed, an aide to Washington during the Revolutionary War and known to favor a gradual end to slavery.) Some names, like Berkeley, are a huge question mark. (The other blank entry, Penn, was likely named for William Penn, the colonial-era figure who founded Philadelphia and is the namesake of Pennsylvania, and Winthrop is most likely for a key founder of the Massachusetts Bay colony.)

But no while no category can lay claim to being the obvious winner, one thing does appear to be consistent throughout the names: there are no figures who were unabashedly in favor of slavery - unless you believe that a Pinckney is being honored. For while there are likely slaveowners on the list (such as George Mason, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee) all of them made very public and well known arguments against slavery or attempted to pass laws ending it both pre- and post-Independence. 

On the other hand, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney argued at the Constitutional Convention that South Carolina would not ratify the Constitution if there were a move towards the emancipation of slaves, or even if the slave trade were abolished. Later when arguing for adoption of the Constitution in front of the South Carolina legislature, he crowed "We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before." He could make that argument because the other Pinckney at the Constitutional Convention, his cousin Charles, had authored and secured the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Clause.

So while it is true that William Pinkney’s late in life defense of the Missouri Compromise must be considered when weighing him versus one of the Charles Pinckneys (and we know from E.E. Hale’s writing, at least, that he was deeply disappointed and saddened by Pinkney’s support of the Missouri Compromise) we know he never advocated for slavery. Plus, the continued popularity and usage of his 1789 speech by mid 19th century anti-slavery activists made it clear they felt the words of his youth outshone those of his later years. And like Patrick Henry’s Letter to John Alsop, they were more than happy to use the elegant arguments of people who perhaps didn’t fully live up to them in their own lives. And that’s where I think i have to leave things. In my view, everything points to a functionary, busy with what he felt was more pressing work, tasked by his superiors with a job they didn’t seem to think was important enough to contribute to themselves, did the best he could to nod to the anti-slavery mission of the organization while still including broadly recognizable figures from history.

[misteruniqueness]

“Waked up stark mad abolitionists”

“We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

— Amos A. Lawrence, (namesake of Lawrence, Kansas) on June 1, 1854

Drawing of Lawrence Kansas from its first year in existence, overlaid with the locations of modern streets

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

As the saga of the Pinckney Neighborhood name change continues, one thing keeps coming up in Lawrence journal-World articles and Facebook comments: the ‘intent’ of ‘the founders’. I touch on this in the previous entry of the blog (To “C” or not to “C”) and I highly recommend reading that article first to learn more about the broader evidence pointing to William Pinkney (no “c”) being the real namesake of what would become Pinckney Street. But I feel like the “founders” issue deserves additional examination because it is so persistent, especially in the absence of any direct documentary evidence of why the names were chosen.

Which “founders”?

The first thing to examine of course, is any evidence that points to who actually named the streets in the first place. It is well established that our city’s name of Lawrence was chosen by a vote of the earliest settlers, shortly after the second party sponsored by the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company arrived in mid-September, 1854. (Up until then the community had been known back east as New Boston and by Missourians as Yankeetown.) But that appears to be the sum of the influence that the on-the-ground “founders” had on labeling anything in the city.

As has been noted before, the town site of Lawrence was surveyed in the fall of 1854 by A D Searl, on behalf of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company . The Company was eager to have a formal map with property lines as early as possible because, in its original incarnation, it intended to make money as part of the town-building, and this included land speculation. (It would not change its name to the New England Emigrant Aid Company and become a benevolent [non-profit] corporation until early 1855). The emigrants sponsored by the Society would be allowed to claim a certain amount of property in this new community, while some was allocated to the Company  (The legality of the Company even being able to do this was hotly contested by early, unaffiliated settlers in the area with their own claims to the land.)

But back in Boston, the Company was busy producing more materials to encourage additional emigration to Kansas, and a handsome map of a burgeoning town was an important element in that effort. Searl’s platted survey upon which a map would be produced arrived in Boston in late 1854, and by the end of the year was turned into the commercial promotional piece that would be sold by the Company to parties interested in emigrating to Kansas.

It seems that in this rush to produce the map, there wasn’t time to gather any input at all from the town’s “founders”, whether they be the ones on the ground in Lawrence or the New England-area financial and political backers who made up the Company itself. The key piece of evidence to this is the letter published in the January 20, 1855 edition of the Kansas Herald of Freedom, from Dr. Thomas H. Webb, the secretary of the Company. In a letter noting the completion of a map of the town, he claims sole responsibility for the naming of the streets and parks, in particular noting it “devolved” to him, and added, “the names selected, I hope, will prove acceptable.”

Up to this point, there appears to have been only one street in Lawrence that the 300 or so people living in the area had given a name. The main business thoroughfare was referred to, unsurprisingly, as “Main Street” in correspondence and newspapers in early 1855. (It is now Massachusetts St.) Nothing so far available via digital resource searches indicate that other streets had pre-map “local” names, or that there was correspondence between Dr. Webb and settlers in Lawrence regarding street names. Nor can any communication between Webb and key members of the Company (or amongst Company members themselves) be found discussing it either. While there may yet be documentary evidence to be found in the archives, for the time being the best evidence we have is that Dr. Webb alone named the streets of Lawrence.

The final part of Dr. Webb’s letter is the most tantalizing and frustrating. “The reasons which influenced me in making the selection shall be hereafter given.” Again, nothing has emerged beyond the few broad, vague descriptions included in articles and pamphlets he authored, all nearly identical to this one in the 1856 Information for Kanzas Immigrants: “... other streets, which are named after individuals, Distinguished for their Patriotism, Philanthropy, and love of Liberty.”

That can mean … just about anything.

The Best of Intentions

So to bring this back to the “intentions” of those who created the town and the man who named the streets, I think it is important to examine the forces that brought the Emigrant Aid Company into existence in the spring of 1854. Forces that were causing political upheaval throughout the country, but especially in Northern political circles. While detesting slavery, they had come to accept the uneasy equilibrium that the Compromise of 1820 provided the Union. Slavery’s advance was contained and power equal in the Senate, with an identical number of slave and free states. States continued to be added in a manner that kept this balance until 1850 when California looked to join the Union as a free state, threatening the give anti-slavery states an advantage. The architect of the Compromise of 1820, Henry Clay, again attempted to appease all parties, this time with a complicated set of bills involving numerous aspects of slavery in the eastern states and the western territories. A key demand of the slave states was a more aggressive Fugitive Slave Act, to force the return of runaway slaves from Free states. It did so by empowering and rewarding federal agents to pursue slaves, compelling state and local officials to assist, overriding any local laws that interfered with slave-catchers, harshly punishing private citizens assisting runaway slaves, and giving those accused of being slaves no legal right to challenge their apprehension. While most of the northern politicians were unhappy with this and other elements of what would become known as the Compromise of 1850, slavery would still be kept from expanding across the continent, and the Union was still intact.

But instead of helping to tamp down sectional tensions, the Compromise of 1850 started a new fire for every one it put out. The new Fugitive Slave Act was a particular flash point. Northern communities were long accustomed to bolloxing up slave catchers with local ordinances and procedural maneuvering under the much weaker Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The slave power, however, was determined to press the advantages they had negotiated via the new Act, and when Northern states attempted to resist, the administrations of presidents Fillmore and Pierce generally interceded on the slave power’s behalf. Yet by forcing Northern officials and citizens into becoming active agents of the slavers, it brought many more people formerly without intense feelings about slavery into the ranks of the anti-slavery cause.

In Boston in particular, resistance to the new fugitive slave law was intense from the beginning. A group sprung up - the Boston Vigilance Committee - to assist in keeping slave catchers from returning escaped slaves. In one high profile case in 1851, the group was able to rescue a captured slave, Shadrach Minkins, by force, overwhelming federal agents at the courthouse where Minkins was being held and ultimately spiriting him away to Canada.

In this environment, the announcement of the proposed Kansas-Nebraska bill in early 1854 exploded like a bomb in Boston. The ignominy of freed slaves returned to bondage was supposed to have been the price paid to keep slavery from spreading throughout the territories of the American West, yet just four short years later even that was being thrown aside. On February 23rd, despite a raging snowstorm, mass meetings were called for. Two were held - one led by radicals, the other led by men considered moderate or conservative, including several former elected officials and members of the moneyed elite who had supported elements of the 1850 compromise and who would become supporters of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company  Held at Faneuil Hall and attended by over 3,000 Bostonians, the fiery speeches of these moderate men at that night indicated they were coming to the conclusion that there was no amount of compromise, no amount of trading off one’s principles, that would satisfy the slaveholders, edging them towards more radical positions.

Then, just three months later, on May 24, a recently escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured by a slave catcher outside the shop where he worked, in the heart of Boston. Although an attempt was made to keep Burns’ apprehension quiet, word leaked out and unrest quickly spread. Handbills appeared with language like “The compromises trampled upon by the slave power when in the path of slavery, are to be crammed down the throat of the North.” Supportive lawyers were able to slow the process at the courthouse and two days later, another impassioned meeting was held at Faneuil Hall, and members of the Vigilance Committee led some of the audience to the courthouse to attempt to rescue Burns by force. They attacked the courthouse, breaching the doors but were turned away by armed guards, and several were arrested. The local US Marshal in charge of Burns’ confinement quickly called up federal troops to protect the courthouse; when news of the unrest reached Washington DC, President Pierce sent further federal reinforcements to ensure Burns would be remanded to his owner.

The legal maneuvering was doomed after the defanging of the new Fugitive Slave Act, and on June 2nd, Burns was ordered to be returned to bondage in Virginia. By this time thousands of people from surrounding communities had flocked to Boston. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had been signed into law by President Pierce just days earlier, on May 30th, and unrest was expected. More than two thousand federal soldiers and marines cordoned off the streets of Boston for Burns’ procession to a waiting ship in the Boston Harbor. But while there were acts of civil disobedience that caused the procession to take hours to reach the harbor, the event was largely peaceful:  

(James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryant campaign of 1896) 

This was the moment that caused Amos A. Lawrence to utter his famous quote used at the beginning of this article. This was also the environment that birthed the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, chartered by the state of Massachusetts on April 26, 1854. Amos Lawrence would serve as treasurer, and Dr. Webb, one of the first to join the endeavor, served as secretary of the Company, managing much of the day-to-day operations.

It would not be six months later that the responsibility to name the streets of the new city of Lawrence would “devolve” to Dr. Webb. As to what this “founder’s” intentions were, it is possible that he decided to exclusively honor Revolutionary War heroes, but everything leading up to the moment of him choosing names seems to argue against it. (Especially with the name Pinckney linked so inextricably to slavery - Charles Pinckney, the author of the Fugitive Slave Clause in the constitution, from which the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 drew its authority; and Thomas Pinckney, his son, the namesake for a gag rule that prevent members of the House of Representatives from discussing slavery in Congress from 1836-1844.) I have spent some time investigating possible namesakes for all seventeen of the original east-west streets, and a filter of “Revolutionary War military/political figures” lines up far less well than “people of significance to the anti-slavery movement as it ramped up in 1854”. This isn’t to say that the latter has perfect alignment - there are still some stretches and guesses - but far fewer than what it takes to get alignment with the former. (The investigation of the full list of street names has been its own endless series of rabbit holes, hopefully someday I can get it organized enough for its own article.)

The Other Guy

Finally, one other curious piece of evidence exists regarding the names on the map. The original letter from Dr. Webb regarding the map appeared in the Kansas Herald of Freedom, a newspaper funded by the Company. There was a competing paper in the nascent town of Lawrence, and not only was it unaffiliated with the Company, it actively demonized the group. The Kansas Free State, while also stridently anti-slavery, railed against the Company and its agents and benefactors, even accusing the Herald’s publisher of admitting to not care if Kansas entered the Union as a free or slave state. As touched on throughout this article, the politics of anti-slavery and abolition were complex; Josiah Miller, the publisher of the Kansas Free State was seen as more ‘conservative’ than the Company men. He was against the Company ’s influence in the community and thought it endangered both the chance of Kansas becoming a free state and the long term viability of Lawrence as a city. In an article in the March 10, 1855 edition of his paper about the establishment of Delaware City, he notes that giving a community a person’s name such as “Douglas, Lawrence, Whitfield or Atchison” are sure ways to invite controversy because of the political positions associated with those individuals:

This context may explain why Miller, upon seeing the map of Lawrence, was not impressed. From the January 24th, 1855 edition of the Free State:

“The streets running North to South are called by the names of the States; those running East to West by the names of distinguished persons. We regret the bad taste displayed in the system of naming the streets and the parks, but in every other respect we decidedly fancy the plan of the city.” Perhaps Miller’s disdain at the idea of place names that are strongly associated with political issues of the day may explain his antipathy towards the Lawrence street names as well? Would he have felt this way if the names were more ‘universal’ or ‘apolitical’ in their appeal, such as those of Revolutionary War heroes?

At the end of the day, bits and wisps like this are all we have to work with when trying to gauge the “intent” behind these oddly named streets. Cases can still be built to support a number of different outcomes. But until more primary sources emerge (and I hope to spend a few days at the state historical society looking for them in the near future) I really do believe that the simplest argument is still the strongest: that in 1854, Dr. Thomas Webb alone choose a handful of personally and politically meaningful names for the streets of the new city of Lawrence Kansas.

A note on research and sourcing: I have mentioned this before in other articles, but there are likely many new readers so I will state it again: Although I don’t treat this blog like an official research paper, I do try to find documentation for my work. I also want it to be readable and more informal, so while I will attribute direct quotes from sources, I don’t footnote every individual fact, especially if they are commonly known or what you should have learned in high school history classes. But here are a few key sources for much of the material:

"We waked up stark mad Abolitionists", excerpted from Stark Mad Abolitionists by Robert K Sutton https://www.salon.com/2017/08/05/we-waked-up-stark-mad-abolitionists/

Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border by Donald Gilmore https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/6NCEb-2SU-4C

Philanthropy and The New England Emigrant Aid Company, 1854-1900 by Courtney Buchkoski  https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=historydiss

Albert Dwight Searl: A Free-State Surveyor in Bloody Kansas https://blogs.lib.ku.edu/spencer/tag/maps/ A History of the Kansas Crusade by Eli Thayer https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_History_of_the_Kansas_Crusade/CbFLAAAAMAAJ History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryant campaign of 1896 by James Ford Rhodes https://www.google.com/books/edition/1850_1854/HgXVAAAAMAAJ

Abolitionist Persuasion: The Varied Lenses of 19th Century Abolitionist Writings compiled by Sean Robertson https://www.juniorhistorians.com/uploads/7/3/3/6/7336905/amazing_grace_anthology.pdf

The Slave Catcher’s Riot https://www.worcestermag.com/2008/02/28/the-slave-catcher39s-riot

[misteruniqueness]

To “C” or not to “C”

My original post about the name Pinckney was created to talk mostly about the school that bears the name and how it came to be, and then to discuss how the name ended up in Lawrence in the first place as an afterthought.

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

I added more and more to that post as I discovered more, until the “afterthought” became the focus. At the same time, information coming out in the local paper and other sources has muddied the waters around this story and likely left the impression that the case for William Pinkney as the namesake for the street is not nearly as strong as it is.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Slavery as a tension in the American body politic has existed literally since the nation’s founding, but it ebbed and flowed in importance and passion among its citizens. But two events very near to the founding of Lawrence brought the issue to the forefront of political life and kept it there until the end of the Civil War: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The first radically extended the reach of Slave power into the communities of Northern free states, and the second removed the lid - the Missouri Compromise - that had held the expansion of slavery in check since 1820. To the abolitionists and anti-slavery activists of the mid-19th century, it seemed that the slave power was on the precipice of becoming even more dominant in American life.

It was under these circumstances that various aid groups sprung up in abolitionist hotspots throughout the northern states in an effort to encourage anti-slavery settlers to emigrate to Kansas and beat back the slave power in the newly opened territories. Lawrence was founded by the efforts of one of them: the New England Emigrant Aid Company (né Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company). It was the “ethical investing” of its day, intended to foster abolitionist communities that would keep Kansas free and provide a profit to its shareholders.

To that end, the towns that were founded by the Company didn’t evolve haphazardly like some of America’s earliest colonial settlements did; they were planned and plotted, so that lots could be marked and ownership clearly delineated. Lawrence was no different. A. D. Searl, arriving with the second group of Society settlers in September 1854, officially surveyed the town site that would become Lawrence. That survey would provide the basis for the first known map of Lawrence, Kansas, and the one that spells the street “Pinkney”.

The Street Names

Thomas Webb was the Secretary of the MEAC/NEEAC from its inception and through the end of its active period in Kansas settlement in 1861. He was, in essence, the only active employee of the MEAC/NEEAC and ran its day-to-day business. It was he who, upon receiving Searl’s original map of Lawrence, arranged for it to be published and who named the streets. The Emigrant Aid Company was creating publications to encourage more people to make the move to Kansas and Webb noted in a letter dated Dec. 21, 1854 and published in the Lawrence newspaper that the Company sponsored, the Kansas Herald of Freedom, on January 20, 1855 that “The plot of Lawrence City will be completed by the lithographer tomorrow”

Critically, Webb also tells us the following about how the streets would be named: “The naming of the streets devolved on me, and the names selected, I hope, will prove acceptable. The reasons which influenced me in making the selection shall be hereafter given.”

In a letter published a week later, using language that would be repeated in Company pamphlets produced to encourage emigration to Kansas, the ‘reason’ for the street names is given: “The streets running east and west are named in honor of distinguished men, who have done something in the sacred cause of liberty.”

So far as what I have been able to find via online archives, no further explanation for the individual names on the east/west streets of Lawrence has surfaced. But it does seem unlikely that a community named exclusively by an educated anti-slavery activist would contain the name of the architect of the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 drew its authority from. Especially when Webb skipped naming streets after the most known and broadly admired Americans (Washington, Jefferson, etc.) and went with far more obscure names that line up with contributions to anti-slavery. William Dane (namesake of 2nd St.), for example, drafted an amendment to the Northwest Ordinance during the first Continental Congress that banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. There are still dozens of letters and writings of Webb and other town founders from those first years of Lawrence on microfilm in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society yet to be examined that might yet shed light on this.

Pinkney or Pinckney

Much has been made of the spelling of Pinkney Street in the earliest map as a mistake, because post-civil war maps all show the street spelled with a C. But I believe there are three key elements being overlooked: 

Broader historical evidence

Who William Pinkney was and what his name meant to anti-slavery and abolitionist groups in 1854

How quickly the makeup of the Lawrence’s citizens changed in the years after its founding

More than maps

With important early official maps missing due to the destruction of records caused by Quantrill’s raid, there are other clues that can provide help. First is the original City Directory from 1855, recording the owners of lots in the newly plotted town. Pages 5 & 6 contain the names of the owners of lots on “Pinkney Street” 

There is also the 1869 “Bird’s Eye” map of Lawrence, which still has the street spelled as Pinkney. 

Second, and stronger, are business listings and other announcements with addresses printed in the Lawrence newspapers of the time. Newspapers are spotty between 1855 and 1865, (there are several large gaps in the online archives.) The earliest listing of Pinkney Street is an advertisement for Dr. C.E. Milner, who had an office on the corner of Pinkney & Tennessee. Beginning in July of 1857, he placed an ad that would run regularly in the Lawrence Republican, unchanged until late December 1858, when the spelling switched to “Pinckney Street.” This appears to be an editorial decision by the Lawrence Republican, as other mentions of the street in their municipal reporting also changed to “Pinckney.” At the same time, Lawrence’s oldest paper, the Herald of Freedom (later the Kansas State Journal) used “Pinkney” exclusively until late 1862, when in a few editions the reporting would spell it “Pinckney” while ads placed by the city for bids on street work would spell it “Pinkney.” The Kansas Weekly Tribune began publishing in January 1863 and used “Pinkney” in all reporting and property listings, save two, until it was destroyed in Quantrill’s Raid. Oddly, the emergence of a more consistent use of “Pinckney” in most papers began just a few months before the raid in the spring and summer of 1863. By 1864 only the Kansas State Journal continued to use “Pinkney” (and only in property listings), and by 1865 the “Pinkney” without a “c” seems to have all but disappeared.

Third, and most importantly, are Thomas Webb’s own writings about Lawrence that mention the street. Remember, the MEAC/NEEAC was set up as a corporation and expected to make a profit from the businesses it operated and the properties it owned in the territory. To that end, Webb corresponded on three separate occasions in 1858 and 1859 with the Company’s business agent in Lawrence about properties on Pinkney Street, never once spelling it with a “c”:

The properties are also mentioned in the Company’s annual report in May of 1858. In this, as well as in the agent’s responses to Webb, the street is never spelled with a c.

William Pinkney’s speech

One of the things about the way history comes down to us is how it necessarily must be cropped and condensed to the essence of the story. But just because figures and events don’t make the cut of the “commonly understood” draft of history doesn’t mean they were without influence. William Pinkney - or more importantly, his 1789 speech to the Maryland House of Delegates - had an impact on the abolitionist movement and was often referenced in anti-slavery speeches and texts in the 1850’s.

The speech itself was made in opposition to a bill that prevented the manumission of slaves upon their owner’s death. But Pinkney used the opportunity to call into question the practice of slavery on moral grounds, and in doing so made clear that black people were equal in their basic humanity to whites. The speech was quickly turned into a pamphlet that remained in circulation in abolitionist circles until the Civil War. In 1854, a writer in the North American Review reminded readers of how Pinkney’s speech tackled the absurdity of slavery directly, something that had been lost after decades of proslavery propaganda: “It is curious at this present time, when we are so familiar with anti-slavery appeals directed to the reason, the imagination, and the sympathies, to go back to the infancy of the cause, and read his exceedingly elementary argument on the ills of slavery.” (Find a copy of the speech here)

A long section of Pinkney’s speech was read into the Congressional record in 1856 by Indiana congressman Samuel Brenton on the floor of the House of Representatives, as a response to the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate. It had been entered into the record in previous decades as well in earlier slavery debates. The Company’s own Lawrence paper, the Herald of Freedom, printed an article on April 21, 1855 that led with the following: “The great Pinkney proclaimed but plain and simple truths, when he stated, in the Legislature of Maryland, that Slavery was contrary to the eternal principles of natural justice, and that the most fruitful soil must ever wither beneath the touch of the unpaid slave.”

Finally, The importance of this speech to the abolitionist movement is reflected in a popular biography of William Pinkney that was published in 1853.  It appears to have been written specifically to combat the influence of the pamphlet in the abolitionist world. The author of the biography, William Pinkney’s nephew, was himself a southern sympathizer and sought to keep the elder Pinkney from being a source of inspiration for abolitionists. The nephew attempted to elevate Pinkney’s speech in the Senate in favor of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 as his crowning achievement. (The Missouri Compromise speech isn’t a defense of slavery as much as a defense of a state to decide the question for itself, but it clearly marked a turn from his anti-slavery youth.) In the introduction to the book, the the nephew writes: “I shall dwell upon this, because the views of Mr. Pinkney have been singularly misconstrued and misrepresented on the floor of the American Senate. He has been identified with modern abolitionism.”

A different town

Probably the most important thing to remember about the town of Lawrence is just how quickly it changed from a community founded on a political cause to a center of commerce for an agrarian region. No more than 2,000 settlers came to all of northeast Kansas as a direct result of NEEAC efforts in the mid-1850s, and likely a third soon returned east. The NEEAC itself dissolved their holdings and direct involvement with Kansas settlements in 1861 upon Kansas entering the Union a free state.

The early population of several hundred politically motivated settlers was quickly diluted by farmers coming from across the Ohio valley, meaning the original abolitionists were vastly outnumbered even at the time of Quantrill’s raid in 1863, when the town’s population stood at 3,000. By the mid-1870s the population would grow to 8,000. It is unlikely that many of them were educated at all, much less steeped in abolitionist writing and thought. Those who did have some education would much more likely have associated Pinkney street with a Revolutionary War general and signer of the Constitution - Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

This ties into something that was in the Lawrence Journal World about the official city maps made sometime after Quantrill’s raid - that new maps had to be made after the originals were destroyed. The LJW article quotes Douglas County Registrar of Deeds Kent Brown that the earliest map the county holds lists the street as “Pinckney” and that the map has notations that it is a “copy” of the original plat of Lawrence; the original having been destroyed in Quantrill’s raid. His thinking is that the copy would have been made as quickly as possible after the raid as official information would be needed for legal purposes in the aftermath of such a catastrophe.

Now, remember something I wrote earlier, about the emergence of the spelling “Pinckney” in addresses and other notifications? It really began in earnest 1864. If there is a moment in time where a misspelling occurred, this is likely it. As fewer and fewer people in Lawrence remain who knew the real spelling or the reason for it and the literal corporate sponsor of Lawrence itself completely gone, the new “official” spelling - the product of an accident - takes over, slowly blotting William Pinkney’s name from Lawrence’s history. -David Unekis, Jan 24, 2021

[misteruniqueness]

Ghosts of the past

UPDATE: Be sure to check the update at the end, with new evidence that the street was named for William Pinkney (no “c” in the middle of the name) who delivered what would become an influential anti-slavery speech in 1789.

This is a special piece because I wanted to add a bit (well, a lot) to the conversation surrounding the name of the Pinckney neighborhood and Pinckney elementary school

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

First: I don’t personally feel that the name must stay. I understand completely those who are are horrified by it, and I also know how strong sentiment and nostalgia can be for others, and how the name that has next to no connotations prior can be hard to simply release. At the same time, we re-examine and realign our cultural and historical priorities constantly in this country; for reasons important and mundane. (The names on the east-west streets were removed for convenience, essentially.) It’s 2020 and it’s OK to be updating our lists of people we want to bestow honors upon.

But more importantly, based on the history of the community and its earliest schools, it is highly unlikely that the school was ever deliberately named until well after it was built. Most likely its informal name was simply formalized. To me, what that means is we as a community have an opportunity to make a conscious decision about what message we want to send.

To see how Pinckney Elementary ended up with its current name, you have to look back to the time its first iteration was built. Lawrence had undergone a population boom in the immediate post-Civil War years, growing to over 8,000 people after having only had a population of 3,000 at the time of Quantrill’s raid. (It would take another 50 years to add the next 5,000.) Small schools were being expanded and new ones were being built between 1865 and 1873, and with one exception, they were known by the streets they were located on: Quincy (between Vermont and Massachusetts on what is now 11th street), New York (between what is now 9th & 10th streets), Vermont (between what is now 6th & 7th streets), and Pinckney (between Mississippi & Illinois on what is now 6th street). Only Central, located at Warren (9th) and Kentucky, wasn’t.

Multiple newspaper articles about their construction, opening and operations from the time note no special effort at naming, and when discussing them nearly always included “street” in the name. Quincy, Vermont and Central were closed and torn down over time, but Pinckney and New York remain, having formally taken on the names of their places streets in the process.

Of course, the sad truth about life in Lawrence at that time was that there was no need to subtly signal racist intent when one could simply do it openly. It is hard now to square the thought that the people of a town founded on the premise of combating slavery could be openly and casually racist, but it was pretty much the way things were. When looking for common uses of the school names in the papers, I came across this letter in response to an editorial comment regarding African American children at the then-segregated Vermont street school. This was barely eight years after the town had been burned to the ground for its opposition to slavery:

Yet all of this does beg the question - why would a town founded on anti-slavery even have a street honoring a prominent slaveholder from South Carolina in the first place? As far as is known, the answer lies with the man solely responsible for giving Lawrence the names for all of its original streets: Dr. Thomas Webb.

The first photo on this post is from the town plat produced by the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company (progenitor to the New England Emigrant Aid Company) in 1854. A. D. Searl had traveled to Lawrence in 1854 to survey and lay out the community on behalf of the MEAC (The MEAC was of one of several interests that had claims on property in what would become Lawrence.) Upon his return, a map was produced, to be sold to additional investors and parties expecting to travel to Lawrence to settle.

The Kansas Herald of Freedom on January 20, 1855, prints a notice from Dr. Webb, who wrote: “The plot of Lawrence City will be completed by the lithographer tomorrow [...] The naming of the streets devolved on me, and the names selected, I hope, will prove acceptable. The reasons which influenced me in making the selection shall be hereafter given.” A followup article in the Herald a week later described the map itself:

“Thirteen of the streets in the eastern part of the city are named after the thirteen original States. The balance of the streets west of Massachusetts street are named after the remaining nineteen states, in the order in which they were admitted into the Union [...] The streets running east and west are named in honor of distinguished men, who have done something in the cause of liberty.” The Kansas Free State, a paper sponsored by competing anti-slavery interests, was not impressed by the street names, noting in its Jan 24th edition: “The streets running North to South are called by the names of the States; those running East to West by the names of distinguished persons. We regret the bad taste displayed in the system of naming the streets and the parks, but in every other respects we decidedly fancy the plan of the city”

As far as I have been able to dig up from the newspapers of the time and some digitized letters in online archives, Thomas Webb never gave the full names of those being honored or his specific reasons. Pinckney in particular sticks out. UPDATE: I removed the discussion of why a Pinckney may have been honored. Please see the updated information as to a “Pinkney” who the street may be honoring below.

Here is a link to a Lawrenceian’s blog post speculating on the names (although he missed Elliot St and a few others at the south end of the map). I have a few quibbles but we are both in agreement that nobody knows who the hell Berkeley Street was supposed to be named after.

Here is a list of the street names as originally given and their current numbered iteration:

Mason Street (would be “Zero” street today, no road was ever designated there) Jay Street (would be 1st Street today, no road was ever designated there) Dane: 2nd Street Reed: 3rd Street Eliot: 4th Street Penn: 5th Street Pinkney: 6th Street Winthrop: 7th Street Henry: 8th Street Warren: 9th Street Berkeley (on other pre-1913 maps this street is spelled “Berkley”): 10th Street Quincy: 11th Street Hancock: 12th Street Lee: 13th Street Adams: 14th Street Morris: 15th Street Prescott: 16th Street

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that the 1854 map of Lawrence spells the name of the street “Pinkney”, with no “c”. The maps & articles have for so long said Pinckney that I just assumed the original was a mistake. But now I don't think it is! 

I went back and did some more digging and the story got really fascinating. I think there are very, very solid reasons to believe that the street was named for William Pinkney, based on the strength of an abolitionist speech (and subsequent pamphlet that was produced and circulated) in the Maryland legislature in 1789. It's a really odd story, actually, and ties into a biography of William Pinkney that was in circulation at the time.

But first, the street name. It appears that most people in Lawrence never really knew if the name was with or without a "c". Newspapers are spotty between 1855 and 1868, (there are several years without digitized copies in the online archives.) But the first mention of "Pinckney Street" is in 1863, by 1865 the spelling with a "c" is outpacing the spellings without, including for city bidding notices and business addresses in ads. "Pinkney" continues to be seen in addresses until about 1872 when it seems to disappear completely. On maps, the 1869 "birds eye" view still has "Pinkney", 

but the 1873 ward (for voting) map has it as "Pinckney", 

as do the Sanborn fire maps starting in 1883. Whatever the intentions of Dr. Webb, the street seems to have locked in with the spelling of "Pinckney" in the early 1870s.

As for why I think the street was meant to honor William Pinkney: I found an 'advertorial' on the front page of the April 21, 1855 Herald of Freedom from one of the anti-slavery emigration aid groups, that led with the following: "The great Pinkney proclaimed but plain and simple truths, when he stated, in the Legislature of Maryland, that Slavery was contrary to the eternal principles of natural justice, and that the most fruitful soil must ever wither beneath the touch of the unpaid slave.”

This led me, by searching pieces of that phrase, on a bit of a winding journey to find out what role, if any, William Pinkney played in the abolitionist movement. Here's the condensed version:  Pinkney spoke against a proposed law in Maryland in 1789 that would bar manumission of slaves. While addressing the particulars of the bill, he more broadly condemned slavery in eloquent terms. His speech was reproduced as a pamphlet, "Speech of William Pinkney Esq. in the House of Delegates of Maryland".

This pamphlet appears to have been both known and influential in the anti-slavery movement in the 1850s. After the caning of Charles Sumner in the US Senate in 1856, Indiana congressman Samuel Brenton read a long stretch of it on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The importance of this speech to the abolitionist movement is reflected in a popular biography of William Pinkney that was published in 1853.  It appears to have been written specifically to combat the influence of the pamphlet in the abolitionist world. The author, Pinkney's nephew, was himself a southern sympathizer and sought to keep the elder Pinkney from being a source of inspiration for abolitionists. The nephew attempted to elevate Pinkney's speech in the Senate in favor of the Missouri Compromise as his crowning achievement. (The Missouri Compromise speech isn't a defense of slavery as much as a defense of a state to decide the question for itself, but it clearly marked a turn from his anti-slavery speech in 1789.) In the introduction to the book, the author writes: “I shall dwell upon this, because the views of Mr. Pinckney have been singularly misconstrued and misrepresented on the floor of the American Senate. He has been identified with modern abolitionism.”

In April 1854, The North American Review was unimpressed with the attempts to denigrate the speech and described the speech and reminds the readers of how it tackles the absurdity of slavery directly, something that had been lost after decades of proslavery propaganda: “It is curious at this present time, when we are so familiar with anti-slavery appeals directed to the reason, the imagination, and the sympathies, to go back to the infancy of the cause, and read his exceedingly elementary argument on the ills of slavery.” 

Ironically, the 1789 speech itself cannot be accessed in its entirety online as it is behind an academic login. But in the whole, I think this makes a strong argument that the street was never intended to honor any Pinckney with a “c”, but William Pinckney, a person seen as providing a powerful abolitionist argument to deploy when debating slavery.

Finally, one last note about the state streets east of Massachusetts. While those streets west of it are the states after the original colonies, in the order of entry to the Union, it has always been Lawrence lore that the ones to the east were “messed up” when the city was laid out. But as noted above, they were laid out ‘out of order’ from the beginning. Most likely the creator of the map used a fudge to get a result he wanted, but - there is always the possibility it was the mid-19th century equivalent of an epic troll.

Dr. Webb clearly wanted Massachusetts Street to be the main business street in the new town as a nod to the New England anti-slavery roots of the most prominent town backers. If he had done full ratification order from east to west, Rhode Island would have been the main business street of Lawrence, and Massachusetts would’ve been where Delaware is now. Several prominent slave states would’ve been in the blocks just east of the main business district.

I believe Webb developed a kludge to make Mass Street central to the town: east of it, the streets honoring the original 13 states would be in geographical order, (almost) north to south. The exception was New Hampshire, technically farther north than Massachusetts, but again, the desire to make Massachusetts the main street meant a small adjustment was needed. Here’s where the trolling part comes in. East of Delaware street, the town was never laid out at all; it wouldn’t formally develop in that direction until the 20th century. For decades after its founding, there wouldn’t be streets named after the original slave states - the ones from which the majority of political agitation over keeping slavery was emanating. (And yes I know that Delaware was a slave state, but slavery power was vestigial there). By the 1880s, a railroad easement all but blocked continued eastern development of the town for years, and around 13th street and going south a drainage ran along what would be Maryland street (though it wasn’t included like the others more central to the town on the 1854 map). I think Dr. Webb saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and he took it.

[misteruniqueness]

“Swim if you must, but don’t go near the river.”

With Memorial Day weekend being the traditional kick off for summertime swimming, here’s a quick look back at Kaw Beach, where Lawrenceians beat the heat almost 100 years ago.

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

On July 11th, 1917, The Lawrence Journal-World reported on the emergence of a new sandbar just west of the Kansas River bridge, and just to the north of the intersection of Fifth and Tennessee streets, after recent high water had subsided:

“The new ‘swimmin’ hole’ is at the foot of Tennessee and Ohio Streets along the large sandbar left by the recent high water. The bar is out fifteen or twenty yards from the south shore with  a swig current to a twenty foot depth intervening. Once the bar is reached the bathers may wade to the north shore without reaching a depth greater than five and a half feet. This section north of the bar has been thoroughly explored by swimmers recently and the bottom in nearly all places.

“Many Swimmers visited the place last night and its popularity is shown by their efforts to get a larger crowd there tonight. It is said it is possible to wade more than one half mile in one direction without varying the depth more than a little. The current is almost negligible, making it safe for persons who cannot swim”

It isn’t entirely clear why the bathers were encouraged to access the sandbar from the south side rather than the north. The approach from the south required boats to safely reach the beach, and after two people nearly drowned on July 13th trying to swim to it, calls for a safer method arose, and a committee was quickly formed to raise funds for a pontoon crossing. By the 16th the money was raised and by the 23rd the bridge was constructed and in use.

The beach’s popularity soon spawned other problems - thefts of bathers’ personal items were reported the very day after the bridge opened. By July 27th, the city had hired Billy Gillette (“said to be the best swimmer in Lawrence”) as a lifeguard and had stationed police at the access point at Fifth and Tennessee to guard against theft. Other improvements were added as the summer progressed. An article on September 5th, 1917 noted that the beach had reopened after a drop in the river level and that  “the diving apparatus and rafts will be moved out soon.” At the conclusion of the season, plans were made to take the extra money raised to make improvements for 1918. 

The 1918 swimming season would open on June 20th to semi-official fanfare, with proclamations, the Lawrence City Band playing and the Daughters of the American Revolution selling hamburgers and ice cream from a stand. New changing facilities for men and women were set up, and a clothing checkstand was established. Articles throughout the summer detailed the growing popularity of the beach, but articles also tracked a problem that would contribute to the beach’s downfall - the expense of running it. The previous year’s expenses had been covered by donations, but costs were higher in 1918, mostly owing to people who had donated labor the previous year wanting to be paid. Despite the popularity of the Kaw Beach - reported on a few occasions to be more than 500 people a day - donations failed to keep up with costs.

By May of 1919, the volunteers who had run the beach the previous two years were asking the city to take it over:

As of late June, the beach still hadn’t opened, partly due to the city not having funds to take on management, and partly due to river conditions. Finally, on July 14th the city announced it had taken over the beach, but noted that a ten cent charge to use the bridge to the beach would be collected in order to cover operating costs. According to Lawrence’s mayor at the time, George Kreek, “The voluntary contribution system of meeting the expenses proved a failure last summer and this seems to be the only way out right now,” but assurances were given that the city would have funds in its budget in 1920 to run the beach for free.

On July 16th, Kaw Beach opened to the public for the 1919 season. The pontoon bridge was moved from the end of Tennessee Street to the end of Ohio Street, and extended to a total length of 200 feet. A little over a week later the city decided to experiment with no fee on certain evenings to see  “whether or not the ten cent charge for use of the bridge has had anything to do with the falling off in attendance.”

But there was another factor that may have finally tipped the scales against swimming in the Kaw: germs.  As a backdrop, it helps to remember that the biggest contagion in modern times, the 1918 influenza pandemic, had just swept the globe. Even before the beach management issue was solved, the city’s health officer, Dr. A. W. Clark, drew a connection between the unsanitary conditions of the Kansas River and another disease: typhoid. From the July 12, 1919 Lawrence Journal-World:

Two days later, an anonymous letter to the editor  called Dr. Clark’s conclusions into question, noting that there had been no reported cases of Typhoid connected to the Kaw Beach swimmers the past two years, but that Potter’s Lake and other private pools had had “numerous cases of skin disease, and sore eyes” in that time. Dr. Clark shot back in his own editorial on July 17th, noting scientific errors in the anonymous letter and clarifying just what Topeka was putting in the river: “a conservative estimate shows that Topeka sewers discharge 9,912 gallons of urine and 6,212 pounds of feces, and that amount … goes over our dam every day in the year about 25 hours after leaving Topeka.” The very next day the Lawrence Journal-World reported the results of water quality tests:

The rest of the 1919 season passed without incident (albeit with lower numbers), but it appears that all those involved had decided it wasn’t worth putting effort into opening Kaw Beach the following year. The Journal-World reported on June 5th, 1920 that, “so far this spring, no organization has come forward with a project to bridge the channel to the shallows lying near the bend in the Kaw above the dam.” The paper made no mention of the previous year’s promise by the mayor to have money available for running Kaw Beach, only saying that “some time ago Mayor George Kreeck mentioned before the Boy Scot Council the proposition of fixing up the old reservoir at the water works for a swimming pool.”

And that seemed to be the end of it. Although it is likely individuals continued to utilize the area to swim, what had been a hugely popular summer excursion for thousands of residents just stopped. Only one other mention of the beach appeared in the local paper over the next two years. On May 8th, 1922, a small editorial noted that the beach had emerged again after recent high water. “It is possible that the city bathing resort of a few years ago may be used again if the summer turns out to be a hot one.” But again, no one came forward to organize it.

5th and Tennessee: once Lawrence’s most popular summer hangout

The Kansas river, prior to the levee system being built, was much wider and shallower than it is now, and early maps and aerial photographs show its channel much closer to the Union Pacific railroad tracks on the south side. From the corner of Fifth and Tennessee streets, the river was generally no more than fifty feet away. Today, the channel has settled a few hundred feet north and east from where it ran in the first part of the 20th century. That and the century-plus buildup of slit from the slowing of the river current by the Bowersock dam have colluded to completely erase all physical evidence of the time when the intersection of Fifth and Tennessee was Lawrence’s hottest summer hangout.

The only two photos I have found of Kaw Beach both have no sand anywhere to be found. Newspaper reports at the time explain why: the Bowersock would frequently add sideboards to the dam as the summer wore on to increase the water flow to the dam’s turbines, resulting in the beach being covered by about a foot of water.

TRIVIA BONUSES

Basic Trivia: The man who assured the university and broader community that Potter’s Lake was safe to swim in? Dr. James Naismith.

Bar Trivia: There were no drownings reported throughout the operation of Kaw Beach, That didn’t stop rumors from spreading, which the J-W tut-tutted:

Showing Off Trivia: The city first declined to take on operation of the beach in 1917 because they believed that they only had jurisdiction to the edge of the river; they would need the War Department’s (the precursor to the Defense Department) permission because the Kansas River was considered a navigable river:  

LFK Trivia: That anonymous letter published in the Lawrence Daily Journal-World on July 14th, 1918 questioning the validity of Dr. Clark’s warning about river water quality? It was signed “Nux Vomica”

#Lawrence Kansas #lfk #larryville 

[misteruniqueness]

What’s in a name?

The Vermont Street Station is one of those places that I’d had on my list of “I should look in to that” subjects for a long time. It’s a nondescript little office building in the 800 block of Vermont street that bears an evocative name. (Well, it’s evocative if you’re like me, anyway.)  No railroad tracks ever ran near that spot (nor were any ever planned). So why the “Station” name in an otherwise nondescript office plaza? I’d long suspected the spot - if not the building itself - had an interesting past…

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Turns out, not so much.

The “Station” name always had me envisioning the location as the original spot of an important community business, like a stagecoach station or fire station, from Lawrence’s early history. But it turns out there is a much more prosaic reason it’s called Vermont Street Station: it was a gas station.

According to old city directories, 827 and 829 Vermont - the heart of the lots now occupied by the office building - were vacant as late as 1930, and bookended by the DC Farmer Feed Barn at 823 Vermont and the Albert L Dimery restaurant at 831. The Skelly Oil Co. and Service Station, with it’s distinctive setback design and terracotta roof tile accent, would be built in the next year, covering all four lots. The site was still the Skelly Goodyear gas station (along with an auto parts business) until 1973. In 1974, there was no business listed, and in 1975 a dentist (Jerry Nossaman) and two optometrists (Charles Pohl and Grant Gwinner) were in the location. 1976 would be the first time the name “Vermont Street Station” was used for the structure now standing at 823-831 Vermont. Other than a addition to the east side of the horseshoe shape, the footprint of the building is the same as it was in 1931.

Check out the working Vermont Street Station aerial slider at thenagains.com

So - it turns out this particular nomenclature cigar is just a cigar. This isn’t the first story idea I’ve chased down for this blog that just sort of fizzled out.  But it is still a good example of how often the physical world we live in now is still defined by those who came before us. 

Then and now slider of the Vermont Street Station at thenagains.com 

[misteruniqueness]

Always Be Closing

Why does the intersection of 23rd and Massachusetts have two hulking stone monuments, each topped with a heavy metal doublecross light fixture?

The Breezedale monuments are the only evidence left of an aggressive period of suburban development between 1900 and 1910 for a town that wouldn’t exist for decades.

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Lawrence in the early part of the 20th century was not a growing community. Census figures show  a modest increase in population from 1900 (10,682) to 1910 (12,374) that stopped dead in its tracks by 1920 (12,456). At the same time, developers of the era expected big growth in the community, judging by the number of subdivisions and additions that were registered in Lawrence between 1901 and 1919. 29 were recorded in that time frame. The next twenty years would only see seven added to the books.

Most of what seemed to be occurring was speculation. The papers of that era are filled with advertisements extolling the up-to-date attributes of the latest developments (“Granitoid sidewalks! Paved roads! City water and sewage!) along with what must have been the sure fire sales tactic of the era: boasting about how many lots you’ve sold and warning about how quickly the remaining will go.

From the Lawrence Daily World, July 24, 1909

Charles E. Sutton, with stints as a businessman back east and a farmer in western Kansas already under his belt, moved to Lawrence in 1906 to farm and raise livestock to sell. By 1909 he had gotten into the real estate game, purchasing land south of the city limits, platting an addition he would call Breezedale and registering it with the county on May 12, 1909.

Prior to 1900, the city of Lawrence all but ended at what is now 13th Street to the south, Louisiana Street to the west and Delaware Street to the east. Any home within those boundaries was within a few minutes walk of the central business district along Massachusetts Street, or KU. Additions had been platted and a few roads graded in areas outside those boundaries, but very few homes were built as the distance to the city’s core services was just too great. Industrial jobs of the time were at the river’s edge, commercial ones along three or so blocks of Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire stretching south from the river, and this was still a time of daily trips to the grocer and the butcher. Anything past the informal boundaries of the city meant a walk of more than 15 minutes, and at the mercy of the weather.

The Breezedale addition was more than double that distance. At two miles south of the Kansas River bridge on Massachusetts Street, residents would need a half an hour to walk from their homes to the heart of downtown. So what made it - and the other real estate developments of the time well south of the tradition city edges - suddenly so attractive to developers?

That one thing that every modern, up-to-date 20th century town simply had to have: An electric streetcar line. With an electric streetcar, a trip from the farthest southern reaches of Massachusetts street to the Bowersock Opera house was a mere ten minutes - and covered to boot! That kind of public transit meant that the boundaries of town could expand beyond the distance you could comfortably walk.

Lawrence had a horse drawn streetcar line as late as 1899, but it was shut down as part of the first of the city’s decade of failed dalliances with electric streetcar promoters. Over the years at least three official franchises were awarded and revoked, while several other promoters would proffer schemes to civic leaders but never gained official acceptance.

By 1908, it seemed that a suitably financed operation was finally going to make good on the promise. Local developers, led by the Hosford Investment company, had been buying up land or otherwise representing landowners to create new subdivisions south of 13th Street as early as 1907, but the pace quickly picked up in 1908, with larger ads (and the accompanying “news” articles that were strangely identical in tone and enthusiasm describing the business acumen of the developers and the inevitable, can’t-miss increases in the value of the property.)

By the time Charles Sutton brought Breezedale to market in 1909, the streetcar line was set to run all the way to 23rd Street, the electric streetcars were being shipped to Lawrence and a full on gold rush was happening. New real estate companies were appearing, and all of them were taking out huge ads in the local papers. According to a page one article in the Lawrence Daily Journal on August 9, 1909, 521 new lots south of the city limits (19th Street at the time) were platted and put up for sale. More were just inside the city line, or to the west and south of the KU campus. Yet the population of Lawrence had barely increased.

Sutton had enormous faith in his development though, and took the unusual step of building five houses on the grounds before he had any buyers (one of them he would give to his daughters as a residence.) The usual method was simply to sell the lots and leave the owners to build as they pleased. But by the end of the summer, Sutton seemed to have gotten frustrated by the pace of sales and he dumped his original brokers, the Hosford Investment company, and switched to McQuarry-McNeill, a company that had only set up shop that summer.

McQuarry-McNeill  then poured on the marketing. Huge ads extolling the thoroughly modern conditions and the soon-to-arrive streetcar lines, along with automobile rides to see the property; planted stories in the papers; and a final ace, something no other development would have: a gateway.

Article in the Lawrence Daily World, August 14, 1909

All of the other developments underway were essentially plugged into the existing grid of the city, meaning there really was no way to define them. But Breezedale had only one way in or out. Which meant it could have a ceremonial gateway, a fad that had been popping up in other cities around the country at that time.

The original plans called for much more than what currently exists. Blueprints were officially displayed at the McQuarry-McNeill offices in Merchant’s Bank: “It will have two handsome columns on each side of the roadway with a stone slab running across the arch with the word ‘Breezedale’ on it. The ornamental archway will cost $1500,” according to an article in the Lawrence Daily World on August 19, 1909.

The streetcar finally began running in September of 1909, and a front page article from the Lawrence Daily Journal on September 22nd was sure that the best was yet to come: “It will be but a matter of a few years until all the south side land is covered with residences. The natural growth rate of the city at the same rate of the last two years will mean that every lot in the south side additions will be needed in three years and with street cars and business, Lawrence is sure to grow faster than it has the past few years.” The very last line of the article admonished readers, “You must buy now.”

So what happened? How did we end up with the low benches and lights instead? The development boom appears to have fizzled shortly after the hype of the electric streetcars passed. By 1910, the real estate ads were back to a few columns by a few inches, down from regularly taking up an entire page of the paper in the summer of 1909, and by 1911 the ads were even less prominent, taking up only a few inches in a typeset column. People had been encouraged to buy the home lots as an investment, assured that they would quickly double in value or more. Yet there was never anyone to actually build homes on them. By my own rough estimate, it would have taken an influx of 3,000 people in 1909 to build homes on all of the empty lots that became available in that year alone.

Mentions of the Breezedale arch in the Lawrence papers stop after the initial articles and ads in August and September of 1909. I suspect that once the selling cooled down towards the end of that year, the developers saw no need to spend any more money on the arch, and modified it to the structures we see today. A 1912 publication from the Lawrence Journal celebrating Lawrence’s progress in the 50 years since Quantrill’s raid featured an advertorial for Charles Sutton, and showed his five model homes sitting by themselves, no other homes built three years after the opening of the development - the timeframe that the Daily Journal assured its readers would see that all the lots would have homes. In the end, it would be decades before Breezedale would be fully built out.

In 2008, the Breezedale addition and the five original houses would be added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2015, after years of neglect, the monuments themselves would be restored - to their 1912 version that is. Perhaps someday some old blueprints will come down from a dusty storage trunk in an attic, and reveal what could’ve been on the south side of 23rd and Massachusetts.

East side monument in 2013, with the bench removed, a passageway cut through, the large column leaning and all five light fixtures broken.

TRIVIA BONUSES

Basic Trivia: The electric streetcar line, so important to the development of south Lawrence 100 years ago, built a storage barn for its cars near 18th and Massachusetts. That barn still exists today as the On the Rocks liquor store. The garage openings for the cars are still visible in the side of the building.

Bar Trivia: The “granitoid sidewalks” so prominently advertised as a feature of the Breezedale development are a kind of concrete with large pebbles of granitic rock mixed in. At the time, it was considered a more attractive, more upscale type of cement. There are no extant granitoid sidewalks in Breezedale, and it is likely they were just another unfulfilled sales promise.

Showing Off Trivia: The original cost estimate for building the full archway in 1909 was $1,500. The cost to restore the much smaller monuments in 2013 was $55,000.

LFK Trivia: The lots platted and sold during the development frenzy of the early part of the century were still mostly empty even a decade later. According to the 1922 School Survey of Lawrence, Kansas, “It is an interesting fact that Lawrence is only about 50% occupied. Not more than one-half of all the lots in the city are occupied.”

A note on sources: Although I don’t treat this blog like an official research paper, I do try to find documentation for my work. I also want it to be readable and more informal, so while I will attribute direct quotes from sources, I don’t footnote every individual fact. Three key sources of information are: the Breezedale National Historic Register Registration Form, The Breezedale Monuments Restoration TEP Application Form, and the City of Lawrence’s Horizon 2020 Historic Preservation Plan Element.

But most of the information came from digging through Lawrence newspapers of the era. By going to the Kansas Historical Society’s Kansas Digital Newspapers site, anyone with a valid Kansas driver’s license can access hundreds of pre-1923 newspapers from across the state, and search by keywords.  

Lastly, I’ve called the east-west streets by their current numerical designations rather than the names they were at the time in order to avoid confusion about the locations.

[misteruniqueness]

Then and Now

I’ve got several stories I’ve been noodling around with, finding out where they are going to take me and trying to shape them into more than just a list of interesting factoids.

Part of that process has led me to seek out old maps of Lawrence to get a better sense of what was here, how past leaders and developers expected Lawrence to expand, etc. One great resource has been the Lawrence Library’s Helen Osma Local History Collection, with a number of local histories, directories, and maps. My favorite, stored in the flat files, is the 1902 survey of Douglas County.

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It’s a detailed survey of the commercial/legal land descriptions of the entire county, every parcel, every township, every city (including some that weren’t much more than the fevered hopes of a few native son town-boosters). The biggest map is for Lawrence, which covers several folios (and has the original names of Lawrence’s now-numbered East-West streets).

One thing to note is that it is a document intended to show where legal property lines are. The streets look enormous because they reflect the easement all the way to individual property lots. (If you live in the older neighborhoods in Lawrence and have had your property lines marked, this is why “your” yard only stretches a few feet from your porch.) It’s also important to note that the city was nowhere near this big in 1902: while the land had been divided and platted, most of the lots shown on the map had no homes or businesses yet. Twenty years after the publication of this map, according to the 1922 School Survey of Lawrence, Kansas, “It is an interesting fact that Lawrence is only about 50% occupied. Not more than one-half of all the lots in the city are occupied.”

Still, the property boundaries are accurate, and certain landmarks such as the railroads, the river and dam very accurately placed, so I wanted to create a then and now photo slider with a current aerial map to really highlight the changes.

Unfortunately, I can’t find one that works on tumblr, so I had to create a quick wordpress blog in order to get a place to host them.

Click here for the full map: http://thenagains.com/2016/01/02/lawrence-kansas-map-from-1902-douglas-county-atlas-compared-to-2016/

and here for a close up detail of the river and downtown (seen above):  http://thenagains.com/2016/01/03/detail-of-downtown-lawrence-1902-map-and-2016-overlay/

You’ll note on the downtown map that the biggest difference is the river channel shifting east - based on the 1902 location it is easy to see how there was once a “swimming beach” near 5th and Tennessee. Despite the massive flood that was to come only a later, you can see that the area immediately east of the north end of the bridge had been lost to the river sometime prior, while later maps and aerial photography show the river basin northwest of downtown didn’t shift eastward until after a flood in 1935 at the earliest. 

The scans I made of the original folios are fairly high resolution (300 dpi) and the assembled map is more than 10,000 pixels wide. There are still a few gaps due to scanning issues I had, and I did some very minor work in photoshop to match edges, especially between separate pages. If anyone would like a copy of the original hi-res scans, please feel free to contact me.

@lawrencepubliclibrary

[misteruniqueness]

Original brick street and stone curb, 300 block of Indiana. They all used to look like these. #lfk #lawrence #larryville

[misteruniqueness]

“The water supply on the truck was soon exhausted.”

A Teepee Junction extra: the fire of 1938.

On September 19, 1938, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the restaurant at the Indian Village complex:

view of the northwest corner, looking southeast

The fire quickly consumed the entire structure:

view of the northeast corner, looking southwest

Frank McDonald vowed to rebuild, and rebuild he did, enlarging the structure and enclosing two of the teepee corners along the south, creating the footprint of the structure that is there today:

1948 photo of Tepee Junction restaurant building via Raymond Stone

One interesting note: the swastikas, traditional symbols in Hopi and Navajo culture, that were part of the buildings original decorative paintings (visible in the 1938 photos), disappeared sometime around WWII and have never been restored.

Here’s the full story from the September 19, 1938 Lawrence Journal-World:

Special thanks to everyone in the “You know you’re from Lawrence, Kansas if...” Facebook group for the constant stream of amazing pictures and information! 

[misteruniqueness]

Another great day in LFK

[misteruniqueness]

Great day in LFK

[misteruniqueness]

"Beer can be served and a respectable atmosphere preserved.”

What do you do when your dream of a chain of specialty service stations from here to the west coast disappears into the maw of the Great Depression almost as soon as you’ve broken ground? You turn to beer. (Literally.)

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Lawrence’s iconic piece of American roadside kitsch was built nearly 90 years ago by then-Haskell athletic director Frank W. McDonald. McDonald first began at Haskell as an assistant football coach in 1920, hired as part of efforts to bring attention and fame to the school through football (as had worked for the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania with coach Pop Warner and star athlete Jim Thorpe). McDonald had a flair for promotion, engineering several successful east coast football barnstorming tours in the mid-twenties for Haskell’s team, where he saw firsthand the fascination city dwellers had for all things “Indian.”

!n 1928, while still at Haskell, McDonald would apply his promotional acumen for all things “Indian” with a new business venture: Lawrence’s first motel. Having purchased land north of Lawrence where a confluence of major roadways was planned, he came up with the idea for a motor court consisting of a large central concrete teepee/service station and sixteen small teepees for travelers to stay in. But this was only the first step: he partnered with Sinclair Oil to build a series of these “Indian Villages” across the West, located about a day’s travel from each other near Indian reservations and staffed with Native Americans.

Frank McDonald’s original Indian Village promotional brochure. Via the Kansas State Historical Society.

It would be a few years yet before McDonald would build the main service station/teepee structure. Formal plans were revealed in a January 14, 1930 article of the Lawrence Journal-World for a 40 foot tall building with a store on the first floor and a small apartment on the second. Ultimately, several Haskell students (many associated with the football team) helped design and build the structure, and were responsible for decorating and painting it. A few even worked there while wearing “traditional” garb. 

via the Lawrence Journal-World http://bit.ly/1DWFoA9

The main service station teepee opened on May 30, 1930, to much fanfare. McDonald even placed a self-congratulatory ad in the paper the next day:

A few months later the curio shop and barbeque were completed, forming what would be the bulk of the business. The Great Depression was already unfolding, and Sinclair Oil had already pulled out of the arrangement (notably, the station served Conoco gasoline when it opened), dashing McDonald’s dream of a nationwide chain. And while two or three smaller teepee cabins were built by 1931, they aren’t mentioned in reports about damage suffered by Indian Village structures during a 1935 flood and don’t appear in photos at the time. The motel chain was not to be.

Cabins prior to the 1935 flood

But a new opportunity was just around the corner for Frank McDonald and his Indian Village. Prohibition was on the way to ending after the 1932 elections, and at some point in 1933, he secured what was claimed to be the first beer distributorship in Kansas (he and his descendants would own the Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Lawrence until 1999). He constructed a beer garden and dance hall between the existing restaurant and service station and opened it to the public on August 10, 1933:

The Indian Village restaurant building would eventually expand (after a 1938 fire, the area at the back, including the southwest and southeast teepee corners, was expanded and enclosed) and would find enduring success as a place for parties and gatherings over the years. The main teepee continued on as simply an unusual gas station - no Native Americans would staff it after the initial summer and the costumes were dropped as well. The massive flood in 1951 inundated the reception hall and the teepee, but once the water receded and cleanup was completed, receptions and parties resumed and the gas station reopened. The only visible change was a line on the teepee marking the height of the floodwaters. The Indian Village name was lost around this time as well. Its status as a navigational landmark at the convergence of two major highways eroded the various names that different operators had given it, and by the 1950’s it simply became “Teepee Junction” to Lawrenceians.

In 1979, the teepee briefly took on a new life as a place for art pottery. The service station had closed in the mid-1970’s and the teepee sat empty. At the time, recently retired KU ceramics professor Bill Bracker and his wife Anne were looking for a spot to construct a powerful kiln that could handle the kind of firings they wanted to do. The McDonald family still owned the property, but Frank McDonald’s daughter-in-law, Barbara, was an artist who had taken classes at KU from Bill. The property was perfect for the kiln, and the Brackers rented the teepee itself as their storefront to sell the pottery they were making, eventually adding direct sales of ceramics supplies and clays. By 1985, the business had grown too big for the teepee itself and moved to a warehouse less than a mile away. Barbara McDonald continued using the building as a private pottery studio for several more years.

The building received a complete makeover in 2008 inside and out. (Anne Bracker said when her business was there in the 1980s, fine silt from the 1951 flood would still come floating out of the walls every time a heavy truck rumbled by on the highway.) The external decorations were repainted by Lawrence artist Joanne Renfro to look as they did the day it opened. But while the upstairs apartment has been intermittently occupied over the years, the inside of the teepee building has remained closed to the public since the Brackers closed their studio showcase.

Special thanks to Anne W Bracker of Bracker’s Good Earth Clays for sharing her memories of the Indian Village Teepee

For a deeper look at the complex cultural issues involved in the creation of the Indian Village, see Keith Sculle’s 1991 article in Kansas History magazine https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1991spring_sculle.pdf

Trivia Bonuses

Basic Trivia: The “traditional garb” worn by the Haskell students employed at the Indian Village that first summer were made from scratch by Frank McDonald’s wife.

Bar trivia: Frank McDonald sought and received a patent on his design for the main teepee building. Design patent 82442 was granted on Nov. 4, 1930.

Showing off trivia: About that beer distributorship: yes, prohibition didn’t officially end until December of 1933. But on March 22, 1933, an amendment to the Volstead Act, known as the Cullen–Harrison Act, was signed into law by FDR allowing the manufacture and sale of 3.2% beer. This made 3.2 beer legal under the federal statute that enabled enforcement of the 18th Amendment, but once the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th, states were allowed to decide if they wanted to stay dry, which Kansas did, emphatically, in a statewide referendum in 1934. This technically made even 3.2 beer illegal again in Kansas. 3.2 beer would not return as a legal product in Kansas until 1937, and it is unclear if McDonald operated his distributorship (and the beer garden at Indian Village) during this time.

LFK Trivia: A scene from the 1988 movie “Kansas” starring Matt Dillon and (in a small role) Kyra Sedgwick was filmed at the teepee. The film’s set decorators had spiffed up and added gas pumps to make it appear to be a working gas station. Kevin Bacon slipped into town while the scene was being filmed in order to surprise his then-girlfriend Sedgwick.

Cindy Bracker and Anne M Bracker with Matt Dillon at the teepee during the filming of “Kansas”

[misteruniqueness]

Our library can beat up your library

The Lawrence Public Library underwent a complete rebuild between 2013 and 2014 as a result of a voter-approved $18 million renovation initiative. And although plans revealed shortly after the 2010 vote showed what looked like a completely new structure, the old library wasn’t exactly disappearing, either.

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

When construction got underway in earnest in 2013 the library was quickly gutted and reduced to a shell, with the thick concrete columns and roof the only thing left standing. And then the demolition stopped.

It was quickly apparent that the bones of the original structure would be retained, as the new library rose around the old one. But why? Unlike the other projects downtown with concerns about historic structures (like the Borders store at 7th and New Hampshire in the late nineties), the architects were not required to retain the original facade. And walking around the new interior of the library, you can see the old structure, but only if you know what you’re looking for. It’s integrated in a way that doesn’t draw attention. So why didn’t the demolition crews finish the job? Why go to the effort to leave the old library structure intact in the first place?

It turns out the old library was just too strong to knock down. According to Jay Holley, one of the architects at Gould Evans who helped to design the new library, it was actually cost prohibitive to tear it down completely. “Early estimates were performed and they indicated that it would have cost more to build a new structure than working with the existing.”

The old library was built almost entirely out of reinforced concrete, which was likely an economical option at the time, but would be unusual today. “if a building the size of the library was built in the last twenty years, you’d normally find a steel building where the engineers had designed down to the most economical members possible that still achieve their best practices safety factors, with a steel roof deck and not a concrete one,” said Holley. “So you wouldn’t find the ‘reserve capacity’ that a low concrete structure like the library has. That we were able to add on to the library like we did is of a reflection of the tremendous bearing capacity of concrete and the construction type once common at that scale but now rare.”

That ‘reserve capacity’ - and a very deep foundation - also meant that the architects and had the freedom to design a chunk of the new structure to hang off the old using cantilevers:

image via the Lawrence Public Library

The final design is a far cry from the plans envisioned by developers when the idea of a new library was first proposed in 2006. Check out an LJW gallery of designs. With a much more modest budget (anywhere from one third to one half the cost of the 2006 proposals) designers like Holley leaned in to the challenge that the old library presented. “Retaining the existing structure imposed an array of significant constraints on the project – we had an existing concrete frame to design around, after all – but as with many design exercises the ‘limits’ were also an integral part of the solution, and working within and around those limits added a layer of richness to the completed library.”

Original concrete pillars along the south side entryway of the new Lawrence public Library.

TRIVIA BONUSES

Basic Trivia: The renovation added an additional 20,000 square feet to the library, bringing the total to 65,000 square feet.

Bar Trivia: The original library cost $1,575,000 in 1972.

Showing Off Trivia: When it opened in 1972, the original library on the site was the largest municipal building in Lawrence.

LFK Trivia: Behold the library you could have had, Lawrence:

via the Lawrence Journal-World, June 9, 2006

The only option from the original proposals in 2006 that was not tied to private development, it called for spending $48 million to build a 140,000 square foot library on the location of the current one. For comparison, the newly-built city rec facility at Rock Chalk Park is 181,000 square feet.

Special thanks to Jay Holley at Gould Evans for his invaluable help in putting together this story.

[misteruniqueness]

Once and Future House of the Future

Everyone in Lawrence comes across it eventually. Perhaps you were avoiding traffic on 19th or 23rd streets. Or just idly driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood on your way to see friends in a new house. Whatever the reason, at some point you are driving down 21st street, passing block after block of non-descript low-slung dwellings thrown up in the post-WWII housing boom. And then, there it is: the Double Hyperbolic House.

It almost seems like a joke out of a Men In Black movie - an alien landing craft hidden in plain sight as a suburban home. Yet had its inventor's vision gained acceptance, this home would be exactly the opposite - just another house amidst a sea of like examples.

Come read this post and all the others on the new blog location - truelawrence.com

The idea for the home sprang from the mind of Donald Dean, a civil engineering professor at KU. In the mid-1950's, paraboloid buildings by Felix Candela in Mexico were gaining international attention for their modern design and for their unique structural advantages. Hyperbolic paraboloids are stronger and use less materials than a traditional roof, and can even be self-supporting, negating the need for load bearing walls. However, these structures in Mexico were being built with concrete. The mathematical theory undergirding the engineering dictated that paraboloids could only maintain their structural integrity if they were a shell - a single solid piece, as concrete construction allowed. But the labor costs of using concrete in America were so much higher that they cancelled the economic advantages of using less material.

Professor Dean looked for a way to create a hyperbolic paraboloid with cheaper building materials and a less labor-intensive building process. His innovation was to construct the parabola shape using a lattice of wood. He theorized that a hyperbolic paraboloid built in this fashion would perform identically to one that was a solid shell, but he still had to put his ideas to the test.

In the spring of 1956, Dean, along with William Strode, an associate professor of architectural engineering at KU, engaged engineering students in a project to demonstrate the feasibility of the design. As part of the school's engineering expo, they constructed a 20' x 40' model of the roof in front of Lindley Hall.

Around the same time, Dean began construction of a full scale, 40' x 80' double hyperbolic paraboloid that would be his home at the corner of 21st and Alabama. It was a testament to the confidence he had in his design that he had completed and moved into his home before he and his students conducted practical engineering load tests on the lattice construction shell that was still standing on the KU campus in the spring of 1957.

(photo from the Lawrence Journal-World, 06/23/1956)

According to newspaper articles of the time. the house attracted positive and negative attention from the get go. On August 26, 1956, the Kansas CIty Star quoted unnamed sources praising the design, writing "some called it the first innovation in home building in the previous 50 years. Others referred to it as a fantastic departure from the conventional." But the Lawrence Journal-World's article later that fall about the home's completion was headlined "Controversial House Occupied" and led with this sentence: "A local architectural creation has created something of a furor among Lawrence residents in the last few months." It goes on to quote Prof. Dean's exasperation with the critics: "We have had so many people commenting on the low corners and the awkward space caused by them that we started judging them by the vehemence of their comments." Noting that those spaces were mostly used for storage, he continued "we answer the critics by saying that few people walk into their kitchen cabinets."

The floor plan of the home at the time it was built was open, with some moveable walls. Due to the self-supporting roof, none of the interior walls are permanent or load bearing, as in traditional construction. An architecture student at KU at the time, Allen Long, helped design the interior floor plan, although in a University Daily Kansan article in the fall of 1956, Prof. Dean admitted, "I'm not sure if this is the best floor plan, but we were in such a hurry to begin construction that we didn't waste too much time with the small details."

The Deans in their newly built “dream home” (photo from the Lawrence Journal-World, 11/23/1956)

On the big details, Dean was always certain. Despite its dramatic appearance, he always stressed the practicality of the design. It was cheaper to build than traditional structures (according to a February 1957 article in Forbes magazine, the cost of the home partly furnished was $18,000, while a similarly-sized and furnished home built with traditional methods cost $36,000), offered greater flexibility in interior design, and was more economical to heat and cool. So why didn't the idea take off? Why aren't gently curving roofs found all throughout the suburban housing developments that exploded around American cities in the 1950's?

Part of it might be explained by the personality of its inventor. Donald Dean was first and foremost an engineer. From his public statements, he seemed to view the double hyperbolic paraboloid as the solution to a practical problem, and that the aesthetics of the design - positive or negative - were irrelevant. Although from the outside the home appears to be part and parcel of what is now called Mid-Century Modern, the home’s interior had more in common with what was termed “up-to-date” furnishings and layout at the time. Nor did Dean promote the idea like a star architect intent on selling a vision to clients. Despite a smattering of attention from the national press, there was no organized effort directed at architects or the homebuilding trades to sell them on the benefits of the design.

Location may have played a part as well. Had the home been built someplace like southern California, where the population was more open to new building ideas and a climate more suited to an open design, it might have seen more success. Finally, just getting financing to build something that was such a radical departure from the ordinary might have been a challenge. According to local real estate agent Tom Harper, a founder of the architectural advocacy group Lawrence Modern, "It can be difficult to get a loan on a different style of home. It's harder to judge how it will sell or resell when you have nothing to compare it to."

Newspapers during the construction of the house tending to refer to the structure as a "dream home" for the Deans, but it turned out that being an associate professor at KU wasn't his dream job. Dean left Lawrence in the summer of 1960 for a position at the University of Delaware. His Double Hyperbolic Paraboloid House would pass through several owners, with improvements to the roof covering and ceiling in the late 1980s being the only major changes over the years.

As it nears sixty years old, the house still stands out as fresh and futuristic - and it should be surprising and delighting Lawrencians who stumble upon it for generations to come, thanks to the efforts of Tom Harper and the Lawrence Modern advocacy group. Together with the current owners, Randy and Kathleen Masten, they spearheaded the work to have it placed on the local, state and national registers of historic places, designations it would receive in 2007.  

Links: A gallery of the Double Hyperbolic House exterior and interior on Flickr via Lawrence Modern. Read the original engineering bulletin about the creation of the hyperbolic paraboloid, with more pictures of the original test structure.

Special thanks to Tom Harper and Lawrence Modern for providing a treasure trove of documentation about the Double Hyperbolic Paraboloid House and Dr. Dean. The mission of Lawrence Modern is to raise awareness of midcentury and modern architecture in Lawrence and promote its preservation to ensure that future generations of Lawrencians will have significant examples to appreciate and/or to live in. Learn more at the Lawrence Modern website.

TRIVIA BONUSES

Basic Trivia: Engineering students at KU built the test structure on campus and were hired by Dean to construct the roof of his home as well.

Bar Trivia: The home at 21st and Alabama is the only residential home Dr. Dean ever built with a double hyperbolic paraboloid design. He spent the rest of his career creating infrastructure, such as bridges and towers.

Showing Off Trivia: The original test structure was not destroyed, at least it wasn’t supposed to be. Don Trent, a student graduating with a degree in architecture that year, had it cut into eight pieces and shipped to Kansas City where he planned on incorporating it into a home he had designed:

There is no indication it was ever built (if anyone knows him, please ask him to contact me. I’d love to find out what happened.)

LFK Trivia: The home is the first example of a residential Mid-Century design in Kansas to be added to the National Register of Historic Places