Martin reported on Quindaro’s role in helping enslaved people escape to freedom, and the dream of turning the National Commemorative Site into a historic tourist attraction. Nearby, the Quindaro Underground Railroad Museum is in the Vernon Multipurpose Center, a former elementary school designated a Kansas State Historical Site in 2004. The area was also the home of Western University, which was founded in 1857 as the first HBCU west of the Mississippi River and closed in 1943. There’s an overlook and audio tour of the area, with restricted access to the ruins (where townsite foundations still remain) and the old cemetery, sitting high on a bluff overlooking the Kansas River. The neighborhood is still called Quindaro. It was a ferry boat crossing and a stop on the Underground Railroad, but the town didn’t last long, diminishing even before the Civil War. Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library The ruins of the Old Quindaro townsite and cemetery sit high on a bluff overlooking the Kansas River.įounded in 1856 by abolitionists from the East Coast, free Black people, and members of the Wyandot tribe, Quindaro is perhaps the most quintessential of the Kansas City region’s vanished towns. Though perhaps only remnants and scattered memories remain, we’ve selected a handful of nearby ghost towns whose heritages inspire curiosity. In “Ghost Towns of Kansas,” published as a traveler’s guide in two volumes in 19, he estimated that if each of these communities had survived, you couldn’t travel 12 miles through Kansas without coming to a town - a much different reality than the clear skies and open spaces experienced in most of Kansas today.

However, research by Daniel Fitzgerald of the Kansas Historical Society includes over 6,000 “dead towns” in Kansas. Some places that qualify as ghost towns may have 100 residents or more.Īccording to the website Ghost Towns of America, there are 21 ghost towns in Missouri (10 of which are within 25 miles of Kansas City) and 308 in Kansas (20 within 25 miles of Lawrence). Generally, the term ghost (or dead or extinct) town is a place that was once thriving but has since changed in some essential elements: the population decreased, the town annexed, buildings destroyed through fire, flood, blight or eminent domain. Not necessarily all ghost towns are empty shells.

Map of ghost towns of missouri