Lawrence and the Old Trails

The second school the board names began as something else. It opened in Lawrence in 1884 as the United States Indian Industrial Training School, with 22 students in grades one through five, where boys were taught tailoring, wagon making, blacksmithing, harness making and farming, and girls cooking, sewing and homemaking. It took the name of Dudley C. Haskell, the Kansas congressman who chaired the Committee on Indian Affairs and brought it to Lawrence. One of the first large off-reservation boarding schools for Indian students, it became a junior college in 1970 and Haskell Indian Nations University in 1993.

What the plaque says

Lawrence and the Old Trails Between Lawrence and Topeka, the Kansas turnpike passes near the route of the old Oregon-California Trail, traveled in the 1800s by explorers, missionaries, soldiers, emigrants in search of land, and forty-niners in search of gold. Fifteen miles south of here was the Santa Fe Trail, which for more than 50 years served mainly as a trail of trade and commerce. From the Missouri River it was some 2,000 miles to Oregon and California and around 800 to Santa Fe, following trails established centuries earlier by Native Americans. Tribes living in this area during the 1800s included the Delaware, Kaw, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Wyandot. Travelers often stopped in Lawrence after its establishment in 1854. The town became famous as a free-state headquarters in the territorial fight over slavery, with some of its more prominent citizens helping to transport slaves to freedom along the underground railroad. Proslavery men responded in 1856 by sacking the town and destroying the newspaper office. Lawrence underwent its greatest trial in 1863 when Confederate guerillas led by William C. Quantrill burned the town and killed more than 150 men and boys. Lawrence soon rebuilt, and today is home to the University of Kansas and the Haskell Indian Nations University. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Watkins Museum of History — 6.5 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.
• Haskell Cultural Center and Museum — 7.5 mi
  Haskell Indian Nations University's own museum in Lawrence, built of cypress logs in 2002 to tell the truth about the federal boarding school the university grew out of.

More markers nearby

• Lawrence — 6.3 mi
• Kansa Indians — 12 mi
• Lecompton Capital of Kansas Territory — 14 mi
• Kansas Indian Reservations — 16 mi