Overland Trails

Gardner carries the name of a Massachusetts governor whose party soon split over slavery. Henry J. Gardner, a Boston dry goods merchant, broke with the Whigs in 1854 over their support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, joined the nativist Know Nothings and won the governorship in that year's landslide, serving from 1855 to 1858. His legislature passed one of the strictest personal liberty laws, aimed at the Fugitive Slave Act, over his veto. Emigrants mostly from Massachusetts founded this Free-State town in 1857 and named it for him.

What the plaque says

Overland Trails Here US-56 lies directly on the route of the Oregon- California and Santa Fe trails. Nearby, the trails branched. On a rough sign pointing northwest were the words, "Road to Oregon." Another marker directed travelers southwest along the road to Santa Fe. Between 1840 and 1870 thousands of settlers, miners, and soldiers plodded the 2,000 miles of the Oregon- California Trail from the "jumping off" towns on the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Diseases such as cholera and smallpox were the travelers' greatest enemies. Unknown thousands of emigrants died from disease, as did many of the Indians through whose lands they traveled. The Santa Fe Trail was famous as a freight route between Missouri and New Mexico. Pack trains undertook the difficult journey as early as 1821, following rivers and earlier Indian trails. By 1825 large wagon trains were carrying tons of goods both east and west. US-56 generally follows the old trail route southwestward across Kansas some 500 miles, nearly two-thirds of the trail's total length. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Haskell Cultural Center and Museum — 19 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.
• Watkins Museum of History — 19 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.
• John Brown Museum State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The log cabin of Samuel and Florella Adair at Osawatomie, Oberlin-trained abolitionists whose home was an Underground Railroad station and the headquarters of Florella's half brother, John Brown.
• Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Three brick buildings in Fairway from the manual labor school the Methodist church ran for Shawnee and other Native children from 1839, which the Shawnee Tribe now calls by its plain name, a boarding school.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Black Jack — 11 mi
• Baldwin — 13 mi
• Lawrence and the Old Trails — 18 mi
• Shawnee Friends Mission — 19 mi