Bluestem in the Flint Hills / Beecher Bibles

The church on the Beecher Bibles face still stands at Wabaunsee, a town named for the Potawatomi leader Wabaunsee. Church member Robert Banks built it of local limestone over four years, finishing in 1862, with a gable roof and a wooden bell tower. Inside, stoves along the walls fed one central brick chimney, and the room was divided down the middle into men's and women's sides. The town faded after the Civil War, when the county seat went to Alma and the railroad was built north of the river; 104 people lived there in 2020.

What the plaque says

Bluestem in the Flint Hills "Texas shipped up the horns," Kansas cowmen used to say, "and we put the bodies under them." They meant that bony steers from Texas grew fat in the Bluestem pastures of Kansas. Stockmen drove their herds here along the old cattle trails, arriving by late April. The animals would graze and gain weight during May and June, then get shipped off to the Kansas City stockyards in July and August. This yearly cycle began in the 1870s and by the late 19th century, cattle were shipped by rail. For thousands of years prior to that, the great bison herds roamed these acres. Their grazing and migration, along with periodic prairie fires shaped the ecology of the region. Eventually hunters drove the bison nearly to extinction. The Flint Hills extends from here to Oklahoma in a north-south strip approximately 60 miles in width. In the 1920s the Kansas Board of Agriculture began pushing a second name, "Bluestem pasture," as a marketing vehicle. This area remains one of North America's most fertile grazing belts. Erected by the State of Kansas Beecher Bibles In 1856 free-state colonists from Connecticut joined with earlier settlers to found the town of Wabaunsee, 15 miles northwest of here. Brooklyn abolitionist and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher helped raise funds to supply the settlers with the new Sharps repeating rifle for their defense during the sometimes-violent era of "Bleeding Kansas." According to an 1856 New York Tribune article, Beecher "believed that the Sharps rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slave- holders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles." Beecher's congregation also supplied the colonists with Bibles, perhaps leading to the widespread use of the term "Beecher Bibles" to describe the rifles. Wabaunsee residents soon became involved in the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people to freedom in Canada. Between 1860 and 1862 the community completed the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The nearby Mount Mitchell Heritage Prairie today interprets the history of this community. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park — 24 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.
• Prairie Peoples Park (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) — 24 mi
  The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's powwow grounds west of Mayetta, on the reservation the band held when most Potawatomi in Kansas took allotments and the promise of citizenship.
• Flint Hills Discovery Center — 25 mi
  Manhattan's city-run museum of the tallgrass prairie, opened in 2012 at the edge of downtown, and the place to have the Flint Hills explained before driving into them.

More markers nearby

• Historical Kansas — steps away
• St. Marys — 9.6 mi
• The Vieux Crossing — 12 mi
• Louis Vieux — 15 mi