Dunlap, a ghost town in Morris Country, Kansas - Travel Photos by Galen R Frysinger, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Dunlap

A Ghost town of Morris County, Kansas

Baptist Church

A weather-beaten Baptist church and a well-kept, half-acre cemetery are all that remain of Pap Singleton’s black community.
Dunlap, a tiny town in southeast Morris County — population 100 or less — was home to more than 300 black residents at the turn of the century — “exodusters” who left the post-Civil War South looking for new land, a new life.

The settlement’s black history exists only in traces — in the cemetery proper, a few wayward gravestones scattered elsewhere and the old church, barren but for a dilapidated piano and a dusty pine pew. The last black resident, London Harness, died in 1993.
“It’s a sad story but people move on,” said Joseph Hickey, an Emporia State University professor who wrote an article about the community in 1991. “People move into cities. People go where they can be successful.”

Like most of the dozen or so black colonies that dotted the Kansas plains after the Civil War, Dunlap’s community died. But the history is still there, albeit slowly fading as its historians get older. Juanita and Ervin Eldred and Melvin Whitaker are a few of the remaining residents who are trying to pass Dunlap’s ethnic history down to the next generation. “It’s something I wished I would have gotten into when my folks were still alive,” Whitaker said as he walked through the cemetery. “Like most, I got interested in our history too late.”
However, the trio still remember when black residents lived north of the tracks in Dunlap, their Emancipation Day parties and their all-night dances at the White Elephant Hall.

There were colored kids in high school every year I was there,” Juanita Eldred, 75, said. Her interest in the town’s history was piqued in the 1980s after learning more information about her parents during that time period. She has researched both black and white history in the area through old newspaper articles, pictures and books.

Confederate soldier

“There is a lot of history here —some that people don’t even know about,” Juanita Eldred said, adding sometime, she hoped, future generations would still know of Dunlap’s vivid past.

Dunlap’s history

Charles Blue, who died in 1903, was a cook in the Union army during the Civil War. Fred Thompson, also an Union soldier, was a bugler. He died in 1921. Names, some scratched into pieces of flint stones in the Dunlap cemetery, tell part of the history of the community.
These men, former slaves, served in the war that was fought for their freedom. Then, once the war was over, they, along with more than 20,000 Southern blacks, fled the war-torn South, trying to escape poverty and oppression by moving into Kansas, their land of milk and honey.
“It was a place of hope, the Southern black view of Kansas,” Hickey said. “It was the land of John Brown with a better economy
to live in.”

Cook with the Wisconsin Cavalry

Dunlap, incorporated in 1875 by Joseph Dunlap, is guarded by the Neosho River and Rock Creek valleys. The area, once part of the Kansa Indian Reservation, was cheap and came on the market after the tribe was moved to Oklahoma. Just the spot Benjamin “Pap” Singleton wanted to put 300 black exodusters. Born into slavery in 1809, Singleton grew up in Nashville, Tenn., eventually escaping to Canada. When the Civil War was over, Singleton went back to Nashville, where he started the Tennessee Real Estate & Homestead Association, which he organized to help blacks purchase farms. Land in Tennessee was expensive, so Singleton turned his eyes to Kansas. In 1878, three years after starting his first black colony in Kansas, Singleton founded the Dunlap Colony. About 300
exodusters followed Singleton to Dunlap — a white community of about 200 families. They built homes in different areas around the community, one in Dunlap itself, two in Lyon County and one seven miles north of the community. Colonists made down payments on 40- and 80-acre plots at a cost of $1 to $2 an acre, Whitaker said.

“They were laborers, carpenters, some of them farmed,” he said. “They worked hard to try to make it in this area.” It didn’t take long for them to make the new land home. Methodist and Baptist churches were erected, homes were built and a cemetery for blacks was placed a half-mile from the white one, he said.

some have been abused

In 1880, with the help of the Associate Presbyterian Synod of North America and the Freedmen’s Aid Association of Dunlap, “The Freedmen’s Academy of Kansas” formed. Its mission was “to educate the colored youth for teaching, for business management, for mechanical industries, for an honorable social life, and to encourage settlement of destitute colored families of the cities on cheap lands in the country.” Upon completion of the academy, a student would be ready to attend freshman classes at a university. Settling in a white community didn’t come without consequences. Andrew Atchison, was the founder and manager of the Freedmen's Academy of Kansas located here during the 1880s

‘Whites had some hostility toward black residents in the late 1800s, including making them attend different schools and sometimes not letting them come into the town’s businesses, Hickey said. White folks were scared that blacks would take over the town, he said, thus ruining Dunlap’s economic future.

family plot

“Dunlap’s tiny rural community saw it as a threat,” Hickey said of the mass exodus of blacks into the community during that time period. That event changed Dunlap for a brief period of time.” Segregation subsided by the time Ervin Eldred was a child.. While prejudice was rampant throughout America in the 1930s, in Dunlap, blacks were going to the same school as whites, eating at the same tables, drinking from the same fountains and even attending the same churches after the black churches closed down.

photo of Mrs. Givens

Eldred said he remembers his father hiring black residents to help with wheat threshing. They were treated equally, he said. They sat at the same table with the rest of the family to eat dinner. He said he remembers black and white Dunlap High School students going into restaurants outside of Dunlap, where the black students were asked to leave because of their color. “They wouldn't go for that.” he said of the white students. "If their friends weren’t. going to get served. then they weren’t staying:

Traces of a community

For 86 years of his life, London Harness lived on the same plot of land he grew up on, the land his grandparents purchased during the Great Exodus of 1879. He was a living trace of Dunlap’s black history, Hickey said. Hickey would take classes to the Harness farm to meet, Lindon and his wife, Anna, who died in 1986. Dunlap, a place that hundreds of black settlers once called home, 1ost its last black resident on April 27, 1993.

a bugler

“He is the last of the connection", Hickey said. I went to his funeral and met the family.” The Black community began to taper off by the end of the 19th century. The Feedmen's Academy closed by 1890. The last. Emancipation Day was in 1931 and the churches closed shortly after.

Company D, U. S. Army

By 1930, fewer than 100 blacks lived in the Dunlap area, and that number dwindled quickly. “They didn't want to stay in a place like Dunlap,” Whitaker said. "They wanted to be in big places, like Chicago — places they could get a good job, make a living.” The main reason for leaving was they couldn’t make a living off small acres of !and. White farmers were bigger and more prosperous. Only a few such as Harness, staved to try to make it work.

London Harness and his wife, a more recent burial

Harness was the final link to the past, the last to represent the generation of exodusters who made Dunlap their home. He was the last black to he buried in Dunlap Black cemetery His stone newer than most, could be the last marker to be placed there. Nearly 200 black residents are buried in Dunlap’s cemetery, Many not marked by stone or rock. “My grandparents are buried here." Harness was once quoted as saving. “I’ve helped bury many of my friends in this cemetery”. And that cemetery still stands, Whitaker said, as proof of Dunlap’s rich history.