Quindaro Townsite

In 1856 a town company of Wyandot leaders and New England Emigrant Aid Company men set out to build a free-state landing on the Missouri, a rival to the proslavery ports upriver and down. They bought the land allotment of Nancy Quindaro Brown Guthrie, a Wyandot woman married to the company's vice president, Abelard Guthrie, and named the town for her. Building began in January 1857 at a rock ledge, and within a year the town had about 100 buildings, many of stone.

With Missouri across the river, Quindaro became a crossing for people escaping slavery. Clarina Nichols, an associate editor of the town's antislavery paper, later wrote of an October evening in 1861 when a neighbor warned her that fourteen slave hunters were camped nearby, and she lowered a woman named Caroline into a cistern for the night. The town, about 600 people at its peak, went bust before the war. After the war freed people settled on the bluff, where a school for the children of former slaves, begun in 1862, grew into Western University, often described as the first Black school west of the Mississippi. It closed in 1943.

In the late 1980s a proposed landfill forced an archaeological survey that found a cistern, three wells and the foundations of 22 buildings, and public outcry stopped the dump. Congress named the Quindaro Townsite National Commemorative Site in 2019. An overlook on North 27th Street looks down on the ruins, and the marble John Brown statue from the Western University years stands at 27th and Sewell Avenue.