Battle of Hickory Point

The boy born a quarter mile west grew up to paint Kansas for the country. John Steuart Curry, born near Dunavant on November 14, 1897, saw his 1928 Baptism in Kansas bought by the Whitney Museum. In June 1937 a group of newspaper editors began a movement to commission his Statehouse murals, and he worked as the public watched, amid criticism of his subjects. When his request to remove some Italian marble was refused, he quit in summer 1942 and never signed the murals, Tragic Prelude with John Brown among them. He is buried at Winchester, Kansas.

What the plaque says

Battle of Hickory Point In September, 1856, a band of Proslavery men sacked Grasshopper Falls (Valley Valls) and terrorized the vicinity. On the 13th, the Free-State leader James H. Lane with a small company besieged a party of raiders in log buildings at Hickory Point, about one-half mile west of this marker. Unable to dislodge them, Lane sent to Lawrence for artillery and reinforcements. Col. James A. Harvey responded next day only to find that Lane had raised the siege and departed. "Sacramento," historic Mexican War cannon, was fired into the buildings with little effect, and men pushing up a burning hayrack were shot in the legs. The skirmish ended in an armistice, celebrated, it is said, over a considerable quantity of whisky. Casualties were one Proslavery man killed and four wounded, and five Free-State men injured. At his family's farm home one-fourth mile west of this marker artist John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) was born and spent his boyhood years. In 1940 he painted his famed murals in the Kansas statehouse at Topeka.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum — 20 mi
  A hangar at Atchison's airport built around Muriel, a 1935 Lockheed Electra 10-E of the model Earhart vanished in, saved from scrap, restored over three decades and brought to her birthplace in 2016.
• Watkins Museum of History — 24 mi
  Douglas County's free museum in J. B. Watkins's 1888 bank and mortgage building on Massachusetts Street, a red-brick fortune built on Kansas farm loans and given to the city by his widow.
• Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park — 27 mi
  Monroe Elementary in Topeka, one of four grade schools the city kept for Black children, now the museum of the case that thirteen Topeka families brought and the Supreme Court decided in 1954.

More markers nearby

• Historic Fort Leavenworth — 15 mi
• Kansa Indians — 16 mi
• Mormon Grove: The City That Disappeared — 19 mi
• Atchison — 20 mi