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University Daily Kansan
Monday. April 17, 1961
Emigrant Company Founded Lawrence
On a torrid August day in 1854, a weary band of men, after traveling for months from their homes in Boston, ended their trek. It was a point "miles above the Wakarusia, one of the southern tributaries of the Kansas River, and about 35 miles from the mouth of the latter stream."
Their purpose: to establish a stronghold of free state settlers in the Kansas Territory.
The group: The New England Emigrant Aid Company.
THE PLACE: Wakarusa Settlement; later to be named for the man who financed the venture—Amos A. Lawrence.
The company, founded by a member of the Massachusetts legislature, gained support and finances from anti-slavery elements of the East.
The "pioneer group" raced to the unsettled country to gain a foothold so that when the necessary vote on statehood came, it would be a predominately free state population.
The second and largest wave of emigrants arrived in the territory one year later, in September 1855, to find a "town" of several mud huts and one large hay tent—The Free State Hotel. This served as the company boarding house until it was destroyed by fire several months later.
The New England Emigrant Aid Company also financed and built the towns of Topeka, Hampden, Manhattan, Wabonsee, and Osawatomie. Farmers were provided with steam mills, saw mills, grist mills, implements and machinery with funds from the company's treasury.
By July 1855, a crude form of legislature was functioning which had started from the Lawrence Assn. Soon the governing body, officially known as the Shawnee Legislature, met regularly at Pawnee and later at the Shawnee Mission near the territorial border.
DURING THE BORDER skirmishes and open battles between the pro-slavers of Missouri and anti-slavers of Kansas, the Emigrant Aid Company tried to stay as neutral as possible. Its aims were neither to mix in politics nor to be solely a philanthropical society.
As its title indicated, its chief purpose was to stress the commercial settling of the Territory. It did this by organizing and financing
passage from the East for those eager to settle the West, advising townships and young settlements as to administrative and political structures, and acting as the publicity agent for the new territory.
A number of other emigrant aid groups attempted to follow the pattern of the New England Company but were never quite as successful. Between 1854 and 1856, seven groups of settlers were sent out by the American Settlement Company of New York City, the New York Kansas League, and the Kansas Emigrant Aid Society of Northern Ohio.
Life on the plains was rugged and every year brought new crises in addition to the strife over slavery. A report from the treasurer of the Company on May 29, 1860 tells of the hardships of surviving in the drought, wind and heat that the farmers faced;
"... For four months no rain fell in large parts of the territory and the energy of the river towns, where some moisture had saved part of the crop, was necessarily devoted to transporting food to the interior . . . where the hunger amounted to starvation."
IN 1860 MANY people left Kansas in despair because their harvests were not increasing enough to enable them to pay their debts. The average yield brought $1,832; sales were $5,157. Taxes, however, were $1,446—nearly as much as the rent. Preparations for the coming war against slavery in 1861, put an end to all regional sorrows—now everyone struggled for survival.
As their undertaking neared completion with the now constant influx of settlers, the Company, now a corporation, was auctioned off. A group of six persons bought it for $16,150, which just paid its debts. Attempts had been made previously to turn the company into a land company to parcel and sell the land it had received in grants. But this was outside the interests or function of the company and thus its sale.
ITS EXISTENCE had been sparked by a crusading spirit and not as a financial enterprise. At the end of eight years, its job was done and the progress to which it had so greatly contributed swept it up into oblivion.
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