Mt. Oread-a hill of history
By Jerry Kern
Mt. Oread—the Gibraltar of Kansas.
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A Gibraltar because of its imposing prominence above the surrounding landscape, and because the first state university in the Midwest Plains region, which would become a Gibraltar in its own right, was to be built on Oread's limestone. How did its name and the mound itself come to be?
Eastern Kansas, unlike the rest of the state, is not flat and level, but is comprised of a series of rolling hills and sharp ridges. In Northeast Kansas, especially, swift-running rivers have left valleys and formed sharp bluffs where the hard limestone resisted the advances of the turbulent waters.
TWO RIVERS, the Kaw and the Wakarusa, are responsible for the formation of Mt. Oread. Coming together at a moderate angle, they left wide valleys behind, but, encountering hard strata, they formed a ridge dividing the two valleys which in places rise abruptly several hundred feet above the floor below.
From this promontory, Monchonsia, chief of the Kanza tribe, may have viewed the great flood of 1844 which transformed the region into a vast inland sea. Later, he probably also saw the caravans as they moved west along the Oregon Trail during the Gold Rush of 1849.
ONE branch of this famous trail passed over the very ground which is now a part of the university campus. Old Fraser Hall was about two-fifths of a mile east of the trail. A ceremony dedicating an Oregon Trail marker on campus was made April 17, 1954.
This ridge runs roughly east and west. However, at its eastern extremity, the ridge turns north, forming a promontory only a half mile from the Kaw.
Even after the Gold Rush days, pioneers continued to travel west, and many envied the fertile valleys below Mt. Oread. But the United States government had reserved this land for the Indians "as long as the grass should grow and the water should run." Mt. Oread and the surrounding area had been part of the Shawnee Reservation since 1825. Originally, this region had been part of the Osage domain with Kanza territory just across the river.
HOWEVER, THE GRASS stopped growing and the water stopped running for, in 1854, the land was given to the white man. The first to settle was a band of 30 New Englanders who came Aug. 1, 1854, and camped that first night on the promontory.
C. H. Branscombe of Boston, on tour of the territory a few weeks earlier in the summer, selected this spot as one of "peculiar loveliness" for the town site.
Thus Lawrence was born, and the promontory on which these settlers camped the first night received its name that same night. They called it Mt. Oread after Mount Oread School in Worcester, Mass., which, like the present university, occupied a commanding site overlooking its town.
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