Pastor Hollis has chosen as the target neighborhood for our church that part of Topeka north from the old channel of Soldier Creek to 62nd, with east and west boundaries as wide as the city limits north of the river. This is still quite a large area, with more than 30,000 people in it, and we are obviously going to need to work with other churches to reach it. (Everyone presently involved with the work at Faith agrees that we need to seek the participation of other churches as soon as practicable, though we have had only brief opportunities to discuss the details of this. Contact with other churches is certainly welcomed!)
Several pieces of history I have already discovered are of particular interest, showing the existence of a real spiritual North-South boundary line at the Kansas River. Even from the earliest territorial days, there has been recurrent enmity between the area where North Topeka now lies and Topeka south of the river. The Kansas-Nebraska act was enacted in 1854, and represented a cowardly compromise on the part of the anti-slavery congressmen who voted for it. It created the Kansas and Nebraska Territories out of what had formerly been a "permanent" Indian territory. It further made Nebraska into a free territory, and left the decision whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state for later decision by the voters of Kansas. Everyone in Congress actually expected that Kansas slave-state neighbor Missouri would win that subsequent election, but congressmen with large abolitionist constituencies were left free to go home and tell their voters that they had not created any new slave states. It represented cowardly politics at its worst.
However, the Massachusetts Legislature did not agree to cede Kansas to Missouri. In its 1854 session, that body created the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, which had as its declared purpose the support of free-state emigrants to Kansas and free state towns in Kansas. The Topeka Town Association was founded in December 1854 by a group of nine free-staters. One of them, Charles Robinson, who was later to become the first Governor of the State of Kansas, was a general agent of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society. At least two of the founders of Topeka were involved in the Underground Railroad.
By contrast, the area north of the Kansas River was slave-state country. During the territorial period, the county line was the river all the way across. So the present area of North Topeka and northern Shawnee County was in Calhoun County, the county seat of which was Calhoun(1), a now-defunct town which sat about where Grantville now sits. (Shawnee County acquired its present boundaries in 1869, at which time the remainder of Calhoun County became Jackson County). There were three other pro-slavery communities that also lay in what is now northern Shawnee County. According to Giles, Indianola was two miles north of the river on the military road from Riley to Leavenworth. That would place it at about the intersection of U.S. 24 and Kansas Avenue, or a little north of there (if I'm right about the path of the military road). However, a majority of the contemporaneous published maps place Indianola on the north bank of Soldier Creek at its confluence with Half Day Creek(2), that is, about half a mile southeast of the present intersection of Button Road and 35th Street N, and one map places it farther south than Giles, where the old channel of soldier creek turns from southeast to northeast (i.e., about the location of the former Central Ave. bridge over the creek)(3). Rochester, which was also called Kansasopolis, was near the present corner of Rochester and Menninger Roads(4). And then there was Rossville, the only one of these towns still in existence, founded in 1853 as an Indian trading post but also in pro-slavery Calhoun County.
From the Fall of 1856 through part of 1857, Topeka and Lawrence were under siege. Shipments of supplies bound for free state communities in Kansas were not allowed to pass through Missouri, and all shipping headed for Topeka and Lawrence (some did get through surreptitiously or through Nebraska) were frequently raided. Moreover, both Lawrence and Topeka suffered raids launched from neighboring slave state communities and retaliated with raids of their own. Men from Indianola participated in at least one violent raid on Topeka and Topeka men retaliated with a raid on Indianola. These raids were not of the same magnitude as the "sack of Lawrence," but there were injuries and at least one death in Topeka.
Until 1860, the tracts for the first mile north of the river were reserved for the half-breed descendants of White Plume, who had been one of the principal chiefs of the Kansa Indians at the time of the 1829 treaty which gave the later Topeka townsite to the United States government. In 1860, Congress authorized White Plume's descendants to sell their land, and Julia Gonvil sold her land around Papan's Ferry to white settlers. By 1867, a town called Eugenia had sprung up on that land, which was on the west side of old North Topeka (in the area around where Eugene St. once met the river). The eastern part of old North Topeka started to be settled after the first permanent bridge across the river was completed on Kansas Avenue in 1865 (an earlier bridge, opened in May 1858, had been cheaply constructed and washed away in a flood in July 1858). Eugenia was annexed by Topeka in 1867, even though it was still in Calhoun County, and the rest of old North Topeka apparently became Topeka's First Ward after Shawnee County was given the southern portion of Calhoun County in 1869.
However, in 1872, the citizens of North Topeka elected Maj. D.M. Adams to represent them in the legislature. Maj. Adams sponsored a bill to separate North Topeka from Topeka as a separate city, but this bill failed. Obviously, many in old North Topeka didn't want to be a part of Topeka even at this early date.
Now, jump forward four years. In 1876, the radical Reconstruction of the old Confederacy was falling apart. Voters in the northern states had been worn down by years of violence and the need to maintain an occupying army in the South. The 1876 presidential election turned on 20 electoral votes from states in which the validity of the elections was disputed. Congress, narrowly controlled by the Republicans, awarded the election to the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, but the Democrats objected and threatened to withhold recognition of the President. At the last minute, a compromise was reached in which the Democrats permitted Hayes to become president in return for an agreement to remove all Federal troops from the South and leave the government of the southern states entirely to southern whites. As far as the rights of southern blacks were concerned, the "Compromise of 1877" was really the "Surrender of 1877." It led to 80 years of often-violent oppression of southern blacks.
Some black leaders in the south had seen this coming, and had scouted out areas of the northern states and territories as possible targets for migration and settlement. In 1877, some of these black leaders in Tennessee, northern Alabama and northern Mississippi started preaching that Kansas, with its free-state heritage and vast tracts of land ready for homesteading, was the "promised land." By 1878, a mass migration to Kansas had begun. (Historians have dubbed this migration the "Exodus.") At least 50,000, and possibly as many as 100,000, poor black people from the deep south headed for Kansas between late 1877 and 1881. Most of them passed through Topeka or Lawrence, and many remained here. The population of Topeka in December 1877 was 8,496; by December 1882, it was 21,562. Much of the increase was Exodus blacks ("Exodusters")—and this doesn't include the even larger numbers who passed through, staying here for only a few weeks or a few months.
The problem was that nobody already in Topeka wanted these new people here. The local white community certainly didn't want them. And the native black community didn't welcome them, either, fearing they would compete for the already quite limited economic opportunities available to black people in Topeka. So the incoming stream of poor Exodusters was sent to a facility which would today be called a refugee camp (although it was given the euphemisms "hospital" and "barracks" at the time). The best descriptions of the location of that refugee camp place it on the south edge of North Topeka, in the river bottom just south of the Union Pacific Railroad depot, although other description appear to place it north of old North Topeka, in the river bottom near the confluence of Soldier Creek. Most of the people who went through this camp ultimately left Topeka, but those who stayed mostly settled in three areas of town. One of these areas was in North Topeka, and included the area immediately around the Union Pacific depot. The new poor, black residents of this area even formed an short-lived unincorporated town called Redmonsville, which was soon absorbed by Topeka. The area of Exoduster settlement ultimately grew to include both Redmonsville and the eastern and southern parts of old North Topeka, from about Quincy St. east and Gordon St. south, an area to which some contemporary accounts refer as "up in the sands". The other two main areas of Exoduster settlement were south of the river, in old East Topeka (the old 4th St. slum area) and Tennesseetown. Thus, Topeka exported its human "problem" to North Topeka during the Exodus.
Now, jump forward to the mid-20th Century. I've heard from several oral history sources that, in the 1940's and 1950's, North Topeka was the "bad neighborhood" of town, one of the main centers of vice for the whole city. Sometime in the '50s, the city fathers tried to crack down on vice in North Topeka. One result of this crackdown was a period in which gangs from North Topeka came across the river to vandalize property and sometimes to beat up those who opposed them. Apparently the crackdown ultimately succeeded, for the most part, but not without bloodshed—something somewhat parallel to the raids between Indianola and Topeka a century earlier. (And in both situations, North Topeka was morally on the wrong side of the issue!)
These are preliminary results from an investigation which has only begun. Much more remains to be discovered. However, even these observations go a long way toward explaining a barrier that has long stood in the way of unified action of the churches in Topeka. North Topeka really does have a completely different spiritual atmosphere than the rest of the city, and one that is often hostile, for reasons firmly rooted in the city's history.
Race relations in Topeka before 1915
(1) Calhoun was the county seat according to Giles' 1885 history of Topeka. Maps published by E.B. Whitman Co. (1856) and MacLean & Lawrence (1857) attest to the existence of Calhoun, but show Indianola as the county seat. The Surveyor General's 1857 map doesn't show Calhoun at all. All of these maps are available online from the Wichita State University Ablah Library Special Collections department's collection of digitized Kansas maps.
(2) Surveyor General (1857); MacLean & Lawrence (1857); S.C. Griggs & Co. (1870); Warner & Beers (1872); Gray's Atlas Map of Kansas (1873).
(3) E.B. Whitman (1856), but the route of Soldier Creek is inaccurate on this map, as the inflections in its course are generally shown farther west than their true locations.
(4) E.B. Whitman (1856), and description in Giles.