THE RISE AND FALL OF SUMNER Excerpted from "Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1911-1912", Edited by Geo. W. Martin, Secretary. Vol XII., State Printing Office, Topeka, Kansas 1912, pages 434-437. submitted by Teresa Lindquist (merope@radix.net); (copyright) 2001 by Teresa Lindquist ----------------------------------------------------------------------- KSGENWEB INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In keeping with the KSGenWeb policy of providing free information on the Internet, this data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other gain. Copying of the files within by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- THE RISE AND FALL OF SUMNER.(15) Three miles south of Atchison, Kan., is the site of a dead city, whose streets once were filled with the clamor of busy traffic and echoed to the tread of thousands of oxen and mules that in the pioneer days of the Great West transported the products of the East across the Great American Desert to the Rocky Mountains. It was a city in which for a few years twenty-five hundred men and women and children lived and labored and loved, in which many lofty aspirations were born, and in which several young men began careers that became historical. This city was located on what the early French voyagers called the "Grand Detour" of the Missouri river. No more rugged and picturesque site for a city or one more inaccessible and with more unpropitious environments could have been selected. It was literally built in and on the everlasting hills, covered with a primeval forest so dense that the shadows chased the sunbeams away. It sprang into existence so suddenly and imperceptibly it might almost have been considered a creation of the magician's wand. It was named Sumner in honor of the great Massachusetts senator. Its official motto was "Pro lege et grege" (for the law and the people). This would, in the light of subsequent events, have been more suggestive: "I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening." SumnerÕs first citizens came mostly from Massachusetts, and were imbued with the spirit of creed and cant, self-reliance and fanaticism that could have been born only on Plymouth Rock. They had come to the frontier to make Kansas a free state and to build a city, within whose walls all previous conditions of slavery should be disregarded and where all men born should be regarded equal. The time--1856--was auspicious. Kansas was both a great political and military battle-field, upon which the question of the institution of slavery was to be settled for all time. The growth of Sumner was phenomenal. A lithograph printed in 1857 shows streets of stately buildings, imposing seats of learning, church spires that pierced the clouds, elegant hotels and theaters, the river full of floating palaces, its levee lined with bales and barrels of merchandise, and the white smoke from numerous factories hanging over the city like a banner of peace and prosperity. To one who in that day approached Sumner from the east and saw it across the river, which like a burnished mirror reflected its glories, it did indeed present an imposing aspect. One day the steamboat Duncan S. Carter landed at Sumner. On its hurricane deck was John J. Ingalls, then only twenty-four years old. As his eye swept the horizon his prophetic soul uttered these words: "Behold the home of the future senator from Kansas." Here the young college graduate, who since that day became the senator from Kansas, lived and dreamed until Sumner's star had set and Atchison's sun had risen, and then he moved to Atchison, bringing with him Sumner's official seal and the key to his hotel. Here lived that afterwards brilliant author and journalist, Albert D. Richardson, whose tragic death some years ago in the counting room of the New York Tribune is well remembered. His "Beyond the Mississippi" is to this day the most fascinating account ever written of the boundless We t [sic]. Here lived the nine-year-old Minnie Hauk, who was one day to become a renowned prima donna and charm two continents with her voice, and who was to wed the Count Wartegg. Minnie was born in poverty and cradled in adversity. Her mother was a poor washerwoman in Sumner. Here lived John E. Remsburg, the now noted author, lecturer and freethinker. Mr. Remsburg has probably delivered more lectures in the last thirty years than any man in America. He is now the leader of the Free-thought Federation of America. Here Walter A. Wood, the big manufacturer of agricultural implements, lived and made and mended wagons. Here Lovejoy, "the Yankee preacher," preached and prayed. Here lived "Brother" and "Sister" Newcomb, from whom has descended a long line of zealous and eminent Methodists. Here was born Paul Hull, the well-known Chicago journalist. And Sumner was the city that the Rev. Pardee Butler lifted up his hands and blessed and prophesied would grow big and wax fat when the "upper landing" would sleep in a dishonored and forgotten grave, as he floated by it on his raft, clad in tar and feathers. The "upper landing" was the opprobrious title conferred by Sumner upon Atchison. The two towns were bitter enemies. Sumner was "abolitionist"; Atchison was "border ruffian." In Atchison the "nigger" was a slave; in Sumner he was a fetich. It was in Atchison that the "abolition preacher," Pardee Butler, was tarred and feathered and set adrift on a raft in the river. He survived the tortures of his coat of degradation and the "chuck-holes" of the Missouri river and lived to become a prohibition fanatic and a Democratic presidential elector. (16) Jonathan Lang. alias "Shang" the hero of Senator Ingalls' "Catfish Aristocracy," and the "last mayor of Sumner," lived and died in Sumner. When all his IoveIy companions had faded and gone "Shang" still pined on the stem. The senator's description of this type of a vanished race is unique: "To the most minute observer his age was a question of the gravest doubt. He might have been thirty; he might have been a century, with no violation of the probabilities. His hair was a sandy sorrel, something like a Rembrandt interior, and strayed around his freckled scalp like the top layer of a hayrick in a tornado. His eyes were two ulcers, half filled with pale-blue starch, A thin, sharp nose projected above a lipless mouth that seemed always upon the point of breaking into the most grievous lamentations, and never opened save to take whisky and tobacco in and let oaths and saliva out. A long, slender neck, yellow and wrinkled after the manner of a lizard's belly, bore this dome of thought upon its summit, itself projecting from a miscellaneous assortment of gent's furnishing goods, which covered a frame of unearthly longitude and unspeakable emaciation. Thorns and thongs supplied the place of buttons upon the costume of this Brummel of the bottom, coarsely patched beyond recognition of the original fabric. The coat had been constructed for a giant, the pants for a pigmy. They were too long in the waist and too short in the leg, and flapped loosely around his shrunk shanks high above the point where his fearful feet were partially concealed by mismated shoes that permitted his great toes to peer from their gaping integuments, like the heads of two snakes of a novel species and uncommon fetor. This princely phenomenon was topped with a hat which had neither band nor brim nor crown: "If that could shape be called which shape had none'." "His voice was high, shrill and querulous, and his manner an odd mixture of fawning servility and apprehensive effrontery at the sight of a damned Yankee abolitionist,' whom he hated and feared next to a negro who was not a slave." The only error in the senator's description of "Shang" is that "Shang" was "abolitionist" himself, and "fit to free the nigger." "Shang" continued to live in Sumner until every house, save his miserable hut, had vanished like the baseless fabric of a vision. He claimed and was proud of the title, "the last mayor of Sumner." He died a few years ago, and a little later lightning struck his cabin and it was devoured by flames. And thus passed away the last relic of Sumner. In the flood tide of SumnerÕs prosperity, 1856 to 1859--for before that it was nothing, after that nothing--it had ambition to become the county seat of the newly organized county of Atchison. J. P. Wheeler, president of the Sumner Town Company, was a member of the lower house of the territorial legislature, and he "logrolled" a bill through that body conferring upon Sumner the title of county seat, but the Atchison "gang" finally succeeded in getting the bill killed in the senate. Subsequently==October, 1858--there was an election to settle the vexed question of a county seat. Atchison won; Sumner lost. About this time Atchison secured its first railroad. The smoke from the locomotive engines drifted to Sumner and enveloped it like a pall. The decadence was at hand, and Sumner's race to extinction and oblivion was rapid. One day there was an exodus of citizens; the houses were torn down and the timbers thereof carted away, and foundation stones were dug up and carried hence. Successive summers' rains and winters' snows furrowed streets and alleys beyond recognition and filled foundation excavations to the level, and ere long a tangled mass of briers and brambles hid away the last vestige of the once busy, ambitious city. The forest, again unvexed by ax or saw, asserted his dominion once more, and to-day, beneath the shadow cast by mighty oaks and sighing cottonwoods, Sumner lies dead and forgotten. === NOTE 15.--This article was written by H. Clay Park, an old citizen of Atchison. Mr. Park was editor and part owner of the Atchison Patriot from 1875 to 1890. NOTE 16.--Rev. Pardee Butler was placed on a raft at Atchison, August 17, 1855, branded on the forehead with the letter R [rogue] in black paint, and sent down the river. A member of the mob, one Ira Norris, said to Mr. Butler: "N-e-ow, Mr. Butler, I want to advise you as a friend, and for your own good--when you get away, just keep away." In Mr. Butler's own words, "We parted under a mutual pledge: I pledged myself that if my life was spared I would come back to Atchison, and they pledged themselves that if I did come back they would hang me." True to his word. he returned to Atchison in November, 1855, but was not molested in any way. In April of the following year he came back again, however, and was at once seized by a mob, and this time tarred and feathered. He was stripped to the waist, his body covered with a coat of tar, and, for lack of feathers, cotton was applied. He was then put into his buggy, his clothes tossed in beside him, and again with threats of hanging if he returned, he was allowed to depart. The raft on which Mr. Butler was sent down the river was made of two logs; one sound, the other rotten. At the end of the raft a small sapling was placed, from which floated a flag bearing this inscription around a picture of a white man riding at full gallop, on horseback, with a negro behind him: "Greeley to the rescue; I have a nigger. The Rev. Mr. Butler, agent for the underground railroad." The Historical Society has a facsimile of this flag in its museum; the original is owned by the Butler family.