Hobbs Park Memorial

John Speer

John Speer was a journalistic giant. He was born in 1817 in western Pennsylvania, to a family that imbued him with a sense that political struggle might be a focus for a life; his ancestors had resisted the persecutions of the English, in their native Scotland. Speer was influenced mightily by the anti-slavery movement in New England in the 1830s, a movement that ultimately provoked a group of Boston abolitionists to dispatch 129 settlers to the Kansas frontier in 1854, when the territory was opened for settlement by the federal government. The principle of popular sovereignty, – a vote of the people -- would determine whether the new territories would be free or slave.

Speer's Kansas Pioneer, the first antislavery paper in the state, was established Oct. 15, 1854. Speer grew famous for his repudiation of the gag laws of the first legislature ever elected -- fraudulently, as it turned out -- in the Kansas Territory.

Thanks to Speer, and others, Kansas entered the Union as a non-slave-holding state at the end of January 1861, as both North and South mobilized for war.

Printers on the Kansas Daily Tribune 1866
BACK ROW: S.T. Lilley, Ed P. Harris, John Speer (editor), Gard G. Sawyer, Houston Nesbit
FRONT ROW: H.S. Dodge, James E. Lambdin, Charles N. Ela, G.W. Hollingworth, George H. Potts

In August 1863, when Confederate irregulars led by William C. Quantrill burned Lawrence, they missed killing Speer. But among the 200 men and boys murdered that early summer morning were the two eldest teen-age sons of John and spouse Elizabeth.

By now, Speer was editing the Kansas Weekly Tribune. His newspaper destroyed, his apprenticed children gone, he nonetheless printed an edition at Topeka four days later, writing:
"Lawrence is not to 'wink out.' We have a glorious record, and a destiny.... There is no possibility of mistaking that.... As soon as the dead were decently buried, evidences of enterprise began.... Our town ... will rise from its ashes in a space of time which will astonish even Quantrell himself."

Speer had a hand in almost every aspect of community life in Lawrence's first 30 years, as one of a handful of founders and leaders of the seat of the anti-slavery cause in Kansas. Once he left, in 1883 -- he spent another twenty years helping other fledgling communities through their growing pains – ending up in Garden City, near the Colorado border.

When he died, in Denver, in 1906, near his 89th birthday, eulogists promised a monument. Until the Hobbs Park Memorial, there was none.

Speer Family
John Speer (back row, 5th from left), Elizabeth Speer (John’s wife is seated center in black)

Group of Early Kansas Pioneers
L to R: Dr. Thomas Still, Dr. A.J. Still (both of Baldwin), John Speer (of Garden City) and Major Jas. B. Abbott (of DeSoto)

Kansas State Historical Society Reading Room ~1890c
L to R: John Speer (seated), Dr. Smith, Miss Zu Adams, Mrs. Esmeralda Lasher (seated)

Kansas Daily Tribune Building
fourth building from the left

Read John Speer’s Obituary Here

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