Lawrence

The hotel the posse fired on in 1856 was not yet the Eldridge. The New England Emigrant Aid Company had built it as the Free State Hotel, a way station for antislavery settlers, and on May 21, 1856, Douglas County sheriff Samuel J. Jones and a large proslavery party burned it. Shalor Eldridge, an antislavery man, then built a new hotel and named it the Eldridge House. Quantrill's raiders burned that one on August 21, 1863. Eldridge began a third, finished in 1866, and the present building is its 1925 rebuilding.

What the plaque says

Lawrence Lawrence was established in 1854 by the Emigrant Aid Company, a New England organization formed to prevent the new Kansas territory from becoming a slave state. When the first legislature enacted the so- called Bogus Laws with severe penalties for opposing slavery Lawrence was the center of Free-State resistance. Free-State newspapers here fur- ther antagonized Proslavery officers. Late in 1855 1500 Proslavery men gathered to attack the town. Free-State men came to its defense, among them John Brown. Bloodshed was averted by a "Peace treaty." The next spring, however, a "sheriff's posse" of several hundred Missourians burned houses, destroyed two newspaper Presses and fired a cannon into the Eldridge Hotel on the pretext that it was an Abolition fort. During the Civil War Lawrence was a haven for runaway slaves and was held responsible for Union raids into Missouri. On August 21, 1863, Quantrill and a band of guerrillas ravaged the town and killed nearly 150 men. Monuments to these victims and other historical mark- ers may be seen in the city. Lawrence is the home of the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Institute. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Watkins Museum of History — 0.7 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 — 2.3 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• Lawrence and the Old Trails — 6.3 mi
• Lecompton Capital of Kansas Territory — 8.3 mi
• Kansa Indians — 8.7 mi
• Baldwin — 14 mi