Shawnee Friends Mission

Johnson County's missionaries and agents were nearly all proslavery in the 1850s, and Andreas's 1883 History of the State of Kansas names the Friends as the principal exception. Jeremiah Hadley, superintendent of the Quaker mission, and his three sons were almost the only antislavery people in the county. John Lockhart, a young man living at the mission with them, was elected to represent the county under the free-state Topeka Constitution. In its account of 1856 the history tells of border ruffians riding to the mission, threatening to kill Hadley and taking six horses, a mule and Levi Woodard's carriage.

What the plaque says

Shawnee Friends Mission In 1825 the Federal government began moving Eastern Indians to new lands west of the Mississippi. This sign is on a 2,500 square mile tract assigned to the Shawnees. With this tribe came Methodist, Baptist and Quaker missionaries. One mile east and a little north the Quakers erected buildings in 1836 and opened a school the following year. Indian students, who lived at the mission received elementary schooling, religious instruction and training in agriculture and domestic arts. Highest recorded enrollment was 76. In later years the school was attended mainly by Indian orphans. The mission operated almost continuously until 1869. A marker designates the site of the main building which was torn down in 1917. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site — 4.2 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.
• Quindaro Townsite — 9.7 mi
  The wooded ruins of a free-state river port built on a Wyandot woman's land in 1857, a crossing for people escaping slavery in Missouri and later the home of Western University.

More markers nearby

• Delaware Crossing and the Grinter Ferry — 5.2 mi
• This Gateway to Kansas — 8.2 mi
• Kansas Indian Reservations — 11 mi
• Overland Trails — 19 mi