Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Last week was the 161st anniversary of the 1863 raid of Lawrence, Kansas, home to many free-state and abolitionist leaders. In the early hours of Friday, August 21, 1863, Confederate guerilla chief William Clarke Quantrill and 400 of his men rode into town, taking it by surprise. They ransacked homes, looted stores, set fire to homes and businesses, and killed close to 190 men and boys. The focus of this post is just one of the many personal stories from that awful day.

Frederick and Amelia Read were living and working in Lawrence at the time of the Raid. Frederick (1831-1901) immigrated to Lawrence from New York in 1857. It’s possible that he came as a member of one of the last parties of settlers sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Society, whose mission was to ensure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state (i.e. one that did not allow slavery). Frederick Read owned and operated a dry goods business for several years. After the Civil War, his wife Amelia (1834-1892) was an agent for the Wheeler & Wilson sewing machine company, working out of the family’s store.

At the time of the Raid, Frederick and Amelia were very likely grieving the deaths of their two young daughters. In researching this post, I found the following article in the Lawrence Republican on May 3, 1860: “In this city, on Monday morning, April 30th, ADDIE L., only child of F.W. & Amelia A. Read, aged one year, eleven months and twenty-two days.” I also found, in the Complete Tombstone Census of Douglas County, Kansas, this record of the couple’s second loss: “Died at the residence of Levi Gates in West Lawrence, August 30, 1862, Freddy Rockwell Read, only child of F.W. and Amelia A. Read, aged eleven months.” Both Freddy and Addie were buried in Pioneer Cemetery, now located on the University of Kansas campus. The location of their graves is unknown.

Only the Reads’ youngest child – their son Lathrop – survived to adulthood.

Almost exactly one year after Freddy’s death, the Reads experienced significant losses during Quantrill’s Raid. Frederick escaped physical harm, but raiders looted and burned his store. Amelia was somehow able to save the family’s house from being set on fire, but she couldn’t stop the raiders from robbing the home.

There are multiple published descriptions of the Reads’ home during the Raid. One can be found in The Lawrence Massacre by a Band of Missouri Ruffians Under Quantrell [sic], published in 1865 by J. S. Boughton. Spencer Research Library has a copy of the volume; it’s also available online. Note that this account mentions daughter Addie by name, but it was her sister Freddy who had “died a few months before.”

The residence of F. W. Read was probably visited by more squads than any other place, as it is situated in the heart of the city. Seven different bands called there that morning…The next squad were for stealing, after demanding as they all did fire arms at first, they wanted money next and then helped themselves to whatever they could find. They found in the back side of a bureau drawer a little box containing a pair of gold and coral armlets [elsewhere described as bracelets] used to loop up the dress at the shoulder of their little girl Addie who had died a few months before. Mrs. Read begged very hard that he would please not take them as they had been her little dead child’s and she wanted them to remember her by, the brute replied with an oath “Damn your dead baby, she’ll never need them again.”

The heartbreaking story of the bracelets and the ambrotype below were the inspiration for this post. The ambrotype is part of Spencer’s Leonard Hollmann Photograph Collection. It’s identified as a post-mortem image of Freddy Rockwell Read, likely because it’s accompanied by a copy of the child’s obituary (quoted above). However, given the information I found while researching this post, I now believe that is incorrect.

The child in the ambrotype looks to be about two years old, the age Addie was when she died. Thus, I believe the child in the ambrotype has been previously misidentified and is the Reads’ oldest child Addie. It’s still unclear who the bracelets belonged to.

Kathy Lafferty
Public Services

Caitlin Klepper
Head of Public Services

Spencer Research Library and the Gordon Parks Center have collaborated to create a pop-up display and small exhibition on the life, journey, and friendship of Gordon Parks and Langston Hughes.

The Gordon Parks Center in Fort Scott, with support from Humanities Kansas, curated an exhibition in 2023 exploring the connections between these two Kansas artistic luminaries and their local connections to the state.

This collaborative effort is inspired in part by a call by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) to highlight “African Americans and the Arts” in 2024. Working across collections and institutions, we have an opportunity to take a closer look at the varied histories and lives of African American artists.

Oftentimes, when we think of Black artistic movements, we often think of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What is easy to overlook is the strong Kansas connection to both movements. Likewise, when we think of Kansas art and artists, it is easy to think of pastoral landscapes that capture the natural beauty of the prairie landscape and poetic descriptions of wildflowers and controlled burns. The linking of Kansas artists to these larger artistic movements that give rise to underrepresented voices in the world of arts and letters is not always so apparent. One of the most famous artists of the state is John Steuart Curry, the hand behind the Tragic Prelude mural painted in the rotunda of the capitol building in Topeka. But, did you know that another work by Curry, The Fugitive, was featured in an exhibition titled An Art Commentary on Lynching in 1935? Of the 38 artists whose work was included in the New York exhibition, Curry’s work was used on the cover of the exhibition catalog, designed to bring attention to the need for a nationwide anti-lynching law.

Two of the most recognized artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement have roots in Kansas. This is no coincidence. Kansas in the early 20th century fostered a certain creative intelligence in these young men that would translate to and be understood by a large audience. Both Hughes and Parks grew up in working class families. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, just across the state line from Baxter Springs, Kansas. Before his first birthday, he was living between Topeka and Lawrence. Locally, he attended Pinckney School and lived on Alabama Street in West Lawrence (now referred to as Old West Lawrence). He worked for a time as a newsie, selling the Saturday Evening Post and briefly the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper published out of Girard, Kansas. He stopped delivering the Appeal after being told by the local editor of the former that the latter would get him into trouble. His introduction to the social issues discussed in the Appeal would shape a sense of solidarity with working class folks. Fifty miles away from Hughes’ birthplace is the childhood home of Gordon Parks, born in Fort Scott, Kansas, where his father was a tenant farmer. While Hughes was an only child, Parks was the youngest of fifteen.

Both Parks’ and Hughes’ earliest writings were inspired by memories of their Kansas childhoods and drew upon stories about people they knew. Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter, is based on his upbringing in Lawrence. In his first autobiography, The Big Sea, he reflected on the ideas that would become Not Without Laughter. He wanted to write about a typical Black family in the Midwest and about people he had known in Kansas. Yet, he felt like his family and upbringing was not typical. “I gave myself aunts that I didn’t have, modeled after other children’s aunts whom I had known,” Hughes wrote. “But I put in a real cyclone that had blown my grandmother’s front porch away.”

Parks drew on his own childhood while writing his first novel, The Learning Tree. Though set in the fictional town of Cherokee Flats with fictional characters, it closely resembled Fort Scott. When Parks later directed a film based on the story, he shot it on location in Fort Scott.

Kansas was not without racial bigotry. Both Hughes and Parks talked openly about being the subject of ridicule and name-calling and feeling fearful of violence. Despite the unpleasant realities faced during their childhoods, Kansas remained an important part of their lives. In Half Past Autumn, a retrospective of Parks’ work, he calls the state his touchstone:

“I looked back to the heaven and hell of Kansas and asked some questions…My memories gave me some straight talk. The important thing is not so much what you suffered or didn’t suffer, but how you put that learning to use.”

“There had been infinitely beautiful things to celebrate – golden twilights, dawns, rivers aglow in sunlight, moons climbing over Poppa’s barns, orange autumns, trees bending under storms and silent snow. But marring the beauty was the graveyard where, even in death, whites lay rigidly from Blacks. Twenty-odd years had passed when, with these things lying in my memory, I returned to Kansas and went by horseback to lock them firmly with my camera. Spring was wrapped around the prairies. Nothing much has changed – certainly not the graveyard.”

Langston Hughes returned to visit Lawrence after many years as well. Later in life, he was invited to speak at the University of Kansas, which he had visited as a small child. During one of his return visits, Hughes donated a collection of personal books and manuscripts to KU Libraries.

Throughout this summer, Spencer Library will feature a panel-display exhibit from the Gordon Parks Center accompanied with archival materials from the Kansas Collection to tell the stories of Langston Hughes and Gordon Parks and show the impact of their time growing up in Kansas on their life and careers. Their cultural expression through visual art, performing arts, literature, films, and music preserves our history, retells our stories for the next generation, and inspires our futures.

The exhibition will be on display through August 16, 2024, in the reception area of Spencer Research Library. The library and exhibit are free and open to everyone. You can visit our website to plan your visit.

Phil Cunningham
Kansas Collection Curator

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created this series to provide a lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique items at Spencer. “That’s Distinctive!” is meant to show that the library has something for everyone regardless of interest. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, you can leave a comment at the bottom of this page. All collections, including those highlighted on the blog, are available for members of the public to explore in the Reading Room during regular hours.

This week on That’s Distinctive! I am sharing an item from our artificial portraits collection. Artificial collections contain smaller collections that have been grouped and stored together based on some similarity. Oftentimes, items in artificial collections do not come to the library together. Per the finding aid for the portraits collection, “many of the purchases were selected by Spencer Research Library’s Kansas Collection photo archivist during the 1980s and 1990s. The collection consists of real photographic postcards, lithographic print postcards, cabinet cards, cartes de visite, mounted and unmounted prints, glass plate negatives, and other visually-based formats of individuals, couples, and groups posed formally, often in photographic studios.” The items date from approximately 1868 to 1986.

The portrait shared today is of John Brown (May 9, 1800-December 2, 1859). Brown was an American abolitionist who, according to PBS, “could not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery.” Throughout his life, Brown settled in many various states, held numerous jobs, and fathered twenty children. He “first reach[ed] national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas,” notes Wikipedia. For example, “in May 1856, Brown and his sons killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre, a response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces.” In 1859, Brown was “captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry.”

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

The Todd Family Photographs collection consists of thirty-seven photographic reproductions donated by Loretta Estelle Carraher. They depict three generations of her family, the Todds.

After they were freed from enslavement to a family in Platte County, Missouri, Adam and America Todd moved to Kansas with the Payne family, also freed from slavery. They raised six children, settling first in Leavenworth and then moving to Oskaloosa. Adam Todd died at the age of 98. America Todd died in 1920.

Below are a few images from the collection for you to enjoy.

Kathy Lafferty
Public Services

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week on That’s Distinctive! I am sharing a glimpse into the activities of a Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, school in the early twentieth century via a 1918 scrapbook of photographs. Although the scrapbook is titled “eighth-grade class snapshots,” some images include other grades such as fifth and seventh. Other photos show the inside of the classrooms. There are also class portraits throughout the scrapbook. In the back of the book is a May 1918 copy of the City School Monitor, which was “edited and published by the pupils of the City School.” The one included in the book is volume 2, number 3, and it includes “local school news.” Some topics covered are student illnesses, teacher departures, and new students. One notable topic is the small comment that “Willie Ellis, who was a member of the fourth grade, was struck by lightning while fishing near Buck Creek May 4th.”

Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, is nestled in the heart of the Flint Hills in Chase County. With a population of approximately 850 people, Cottonwood Falls is the largest “city” in Chase County. Though small, the town boasts art galleries, antique shops, a historical museum, and many dining experiences. It is also home to “the oldest consecutively utilized courthouse west of the Mississippi.”

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services