In the spring of 1879, steamboats began putting Black families ashore on the Missouri River levees at Wyandotte, Kansas City and Atchison by the hundreds. Most had come from Mississippi and Louisiana between March and May, leaving behind sharecropping, the Black Codes and the violence of the Klan and the White League. The movement was called the Exodus, and the people in it Exodusters. Many arrived sick from yellow fever country, and most had almost nothing. At St. Louis, steamboat captains refused to carry thousands of them farther, and they waited there for months.
The river towns
The river towns were not ready. On May 8, 1879, Governor John St. John formed a relief association to find food, shelter and land for the newcomers, while Topeka's mayor, Michael C. Case, refused city money and said he would rather send them back South. Relief groups raised about $70,000, some $13,000 of it from England. The neighborhoods that grew up at the edges of Kansas towns got names like Tennessee Town and Mudtown, names the Kansas Historical Society reads as a measure of the welcome. Kansas counted 17,108 Black residents in 1870 and 43,107 in 1880.
Forty cents a day
Junius George Groves was one of the arrivals. He had been born enslaved in Kentucky in 1859, and he reached Kansas at about twenty with ninety cents in his pocket. Cheap labor was everywhere that year. After days of looking he found farm work at forty cents a day, and within three months he was earning seventy-five, the best wage for a hand in the neighborhood. The next season his employer let him farm nine acres on shares, a third of the crop to Groves, and he planted three acres in white potatoes, three in sweet potatoes and three in watermelons.
He married Matilda Stewart in 1880 with seventy-five cents in cash and borrowed money for the license. She went into the field beside him the day after the wedding, and Booker T. Washington, who interviewed them both, noticed that Groves always said "we" when he talked about the business. They cleared $125 that first year, bought a $50 lot in Kansas City, Kansas, and a cow, rented twenty acres, then sixty-six near Edwardsville in the Kaw Valley. By the end of 1884 they had $2,200 in the bank, and they put all of it down on eighty acres priced at $3,600. Neighbors told them they would lose it. One crop paid the land off.
The Potato King
When Washington wrote about them in The Negro in Business in 1907, the family owned 500 acres, with a private rail spur to the Union Pacific, apple, peach and pear orchards, a store in Edwardsville and as many as fifty hired hands, white and Black, in the busy season. Groves was known as the Potato King. Three of the children were at the Kansas Agricultural College. In the early 1900s he sold small tracts near Edwardsville to Black families, the settlement called Groves Center, and built a golf course for Black players. He died in Edwardsville in 1925, about a dozen miles up the Kaw from the levees where the boats of 1879 came in.