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Today, a few blocks east of downtown Lawrence, a new public monument is emerging, tying our city and state to one of the most dramatic and critical chapters of American history. The monument enshrines the highest ground on Lawrence's old East Side as an important regional historic site. The 1860s Murphy-Bromelsick house has been relocated to Hobbs Park, as a tribute to the vernacular architectural scale of the surrounding residential and industrial district, the oldest in the city. The park is the home-site of Pennsylvania newspaper publisher John Speer, an unparalleled hero of the free-state cause in the battle over Kansas statehood. Speer, his presses, allies and adversaries made "Bleeding Kansas" the birthplace of what became the battlefield struggle that put an end to the scourge of legal slavery in America.
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Speer was a driving force in Lawrence's founding, and an important influence throughout the years of political and military struggle which expelled violent pro-slavery Missourians from the territory. Most famed for his repudiation of the gag laws of the fraudulently elected territorial legislature of 1855, he later rose as a leader of the city's stunning resurrection, following the August 1863 sacking and massacre at the hands of Confederate irregulars, led by William C. Quantrill. An insolent and activist opponent of slavery, Speer was a missed target of the dawn assault. But among the 200 men and boys murdered that sweltering morning were his and wife Elizabeth's two eldest teenage sons.
In 2003, alongside a plan developing for a federally-designated National Heritage Area across much of NE Kansas, the memorial and surrounding park site stand to gain recognition as a locus of the social, economic and military history which spans the first century of this community’s storied past. Hobbs Park saw John Speer’s farmstead, repeated military encampments, and an execution on the day of the massacre. For the same seventy years that the German Bromelsick family owned the relocated brick and stone cottage, a magnificent Quaker church adorned the hilltop. An ambitious railroad endeavor, landmark canneries, German POW camps, a classic baseball stadium, and an eclectic multi-racial working-class residential district adds to the mix. A new museum inside the reconstructed interior of the Murphy-Bromelsick house will interpret these layers of history, while projecting a strong, unvarnished perspective of the forces which made Kansas a free, non-slave-holding state.
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As icon and artifact, the new monument will help reawaken a public awareness of Lawrence's roots in the drama of our American historical experience. Through the museum, markers at the site, and media materials which focus on narratives of the era, the monument will showcase the tenacity and courage of the people who built our state, defeated the slave system, and preserved the Union. We'll remind residents, visitors, and especially our young, that we are stewards of a hard-won legacy of freedom, human dignity and civil rights.
Through sites like the Hobbs Park Memorial, and a new National Heritage Area -- the meaning and significance of our Kansas legacy will be protected, interpreted and promoted, to the cultural, ecological and economic benefit of Douglas County and the entire region.
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Please contact us for more information: Hobbs Park Memorial Fund Phone 785.749.7394 |
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