Tour remembers Dunlap’s past
Special to The Gazette
Monday, April 6, 2009
Reconnections III is convening a special event April 17 and 18 celebrating the Exoduster heritage of Dunlap. A workshop in Manhattan will be followed by a bus tour of the area.
The black Exodus to the Dunlap area in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s was an attempt to escape the persecution former slaves were experiencing in the South. Kansas was viewed as the promised land, and former Kaw Indian Reservation land was available for settlement. Seminars informing about the Exodus will be held April 17 at K-State University in the Student Union. Saturday will feature a bus tour of the Dunlap area pointing out sites of black history and a banquet at the Holiday Inn in Manhattan.
The free seminars April 17 will be led by Jim Sharp of Manhattan who recently published a book titled “Black Settlers on the Kaw Indian Reservation”; Don Nelson who has authored a book about his grandfather, the Presbyterian missionary who was principal of the Dunlap Freedmen’s Academy; Ustaine Talley, a descendant of Dunlap Exodusters; Iona Moore of Emporia, whose grandfather patented the Fulghem fences of the Flint Hills; Deborah Dandridge and Phil Beard of Lawrence; Bill Alspaw of Council Grove who restored the Raglan/Bailey Cemetery and others. These seminars will begin at 9 a.m.
The April 18 bus tour will begin in Manhattan at 9 a.m., but local residents can board the bus in Council Grove at the Last Chance Store on west Main Street at 9:45.
Led by Alspaw and Jan Huston, the tour will include a viewing of the store, visits to the Kaw Memorial, the Raglan-Bailey Cemetery, the black cemetery of Dunlap, sites in Dunlap where the Academy was located and where various churches and homes were located, lunch at the Dunlap United Methodist Church, passing by the site of “The Colony,” and the homestead of the first black residents of Morris County, Charles and Jennie Singleton Harness.
The tour costs $25, and reservations should be made by calling (620) 443-5214 by April 13.
Saturday night’s banquet speaker will be Gary Entz of McPherson College who has written extensively about Pap Singleton and the colonies he founded in Kansas. Nat Fitz, president of the Votaw Colony Museum and initiator of the Reconnection conferences, will also make remarks. Preregistration fee for the banquet is $30 payable to the Votaw Colony Museum and sent to Rev. Tisa Anders, 12187 W. New Mexico Place, Lakewood, CO. 80228.
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