A Sorry Free State

The land between the bluffs and the river is sacred.

The old town of Quindaro, at the northern edge of Kansas City, Kansas, was a stop on the underground railroad, where slaves crossed the Missouri River and found freedom in Kansas.

Quindaro’s ruins rest uneasily in a forgotten neighborhood. Ten years ago, recognizing the site’s importance, activists rallied, and the city nixed plans to establish a landfill there. But since then, inept city officials, an obnoxious activist and a stubborn black church have been unable to work together. And they’re missing a chance to take advantage of a unique attraction at a time when black tourists spend tens of billions of dollars visiting historic sites across the United States.

Standing on the bluff, looking northeast over an industrial plain where the Missouri River flowed 150 years ago, it’s still easy to imagine slaves escaping into Kansas.

Some drifted downstream from Parkville in boats. Others walked the river in the dead of winter, when it was frozen solid.

“Literally, they walked on water,” says Jimmy Johnson, a teacher at Archbishop O’Hara High School whose great grandfather, a slave named George Washington, fled to Quindaro in 1862.

Records pertaining to the underground railroad are understandably sparse; most of the stories are passed down through families. But local historians have unearthed several enthralling accounts.

One was penned in the mid-1800s by Benjamin Franklin Mudge, a science professor at the Kansas State Agricultural College who harbored an escaped woman and her three children for several days. Mudge’s chronicle of one escape he abetted reads in part:

As their master lived almost in sight across the river he soon learned where they were. A week ago today (Thursday) a half-breed Indian sent me word that their master was coming after them that day. I knew that he would not dare to use force in the daytime, but thinking that he might come after dark I went over to Mr. Storrs and borrowed his gun. He loaded it with 13 buckshot.

Nobody appeared that day nor Friday nor Saturday. But Saturday night a little after midnight, I was aroused by a loud knocking at the door. I went to the door at the upper piazza and asked what they wanted.

There were three men on the steps. They said their master is here and ‘We have come for those blacks that ran away from the other side of the river.’

My only answer was, ‘You can’t have them.’

They then said, ‘We will have them for we’ve got enough men to tear the house down, so you had better let them go.’

I said, ‘That makes no difference. I am well-armed and ready for you. My two boys are here to help me.’

They said that they did not want to harm anyone but only wanted their slaves.

I told them in reply, ‘I don’t want to harm any one but if any man undertakes to enter my house in the night without my permission, he will be very likely to get hurt.’

They then concluded that they would go see the Captain.

The men didn’t come back until after Mudge had taken the fugitives to a former sheriff who lived in Franklin County. From there, they would go to Leavenworth, which was, Mudge writes, “full of contrabands.”

The home of Quindaro abolitionist Clarina Nichols was, as she puts it in her writings, “dedicated to emancipation without proclamation.” Nichols had an 8-foot-deep, 7-by-12-foot hiding space under a trapdoor in the floor. “One beautiful evening late in October ’61,” she writes, “as twilight was fading from the bluff, a hurried message came to me from our neighbor, Fielding Johnson. ‘You must hide Caroline. Fourteen slave hunters are camped on the Park — her master among them.'”

Caroline was lowered into the hideaway with comforters, a pillow and a chair, and Nichols put a washtub over the trap door. Caroline, however, spent an anguished night “trembling and almost paralyzed with fear of discovery” until 7 the next morning, when “the slave-hunters rode out of town into the interior. When evening fell again Caroline and another girl of whom the hunters were in pursuit found a safe conveyance to Leavenworth friends.”

Other escaped slaves would stand near the hillside cemetery “and pick off their masters with long-barreled rifles as they were coming across the river to get them,” according to a historical account published in the Wyandotte West newspaper. “If they missed and the master fell into the river, they would ambush him on land, and bury him in this cemetery.”

The city has been compiling a historical account of Quindaro for its landmark commission. Prepared by city planner Larry Hancks, it draws from numerous sources, including field work done by archaeologist Larry Schmits. According to their research, Quindaro, they say, was settled “to develop a profitable and safe port of entry into Kansas for free-state settlers, as the established river ports such as Atchison and Leavenworth were largely in pro-slavery hands.”

The land was owned by a mixed-race couple: Abelard and Nancy Brown Guthrie. Abelard was European, and Nancy was the daughter of a Wyandot chief. Her Wyandot name was Seh Quindaro, which settlers translated as “strength through union.” As early as 1844, the Guthries were offering shelter on their farm to escaping slaves, most of them crossing from Parkville. By day they hid outside the town, in shallow caves or wooded bluffs or in the barns of farmers. By night they were conducted toward Nebraska by way of Lawrence, Oskaloosa and Holton, in addition to Leavenworth. “Slave catchers roamed the area,” the report continues, “and even camped in Quindaro Park, in one documented instance kidnapping a young woman from a public road on the edge of town and taking her back to Missouri.”

When development of the town seemed inevitable in the mid-1850s, the Guthries sold their land to settlers. The first buildings went up in January of 1857. Residents selected town officers, founded a newspaper and graded land for streets near the waterfront. In October, a huge saw mill opened. By June of 1858 there were 100 buildings. The town was pro-abolition and pro-temperance — there was a small brewery, but the saloons were driven out.

The town’s fortunes, however, were fading as quickly as they had risen. A financial panic in 1857 dried up investment dollars. A two-year drought starting in 1859 dried up the land. In 1861 Kansas was admitted to the union as a free state, which rendered Quindaro’s political power — the only free port in the territory — null and void.

And then there was the Civil War. People were already clearing out of Quindaro by the time the great conflict started. According to a history of the state published in 1883, “When the Second Cavalry quartered themselves there at the commencement of the war, and handled the city so roughly, she gave up the ghost and is no more. The half a dozen buildings comprising the station of Quindaro are so desolate that they hardly could be honored with the name of settlement.”

Slaves, however, continued to escape out of Missouri during the war years. Many, like Johnson’s great-grandfather, George Washington, joined the Union Army. According to The Afro-American Community in Kansas City, Kansas, written by graduate student Susan Greenbaum, those who did not fight were at least better able to remain safely in the area. “Bounty hunters had become less bold, and freedmen were able to establish themselves in the border towns with less fear of being kidnapped,” Greenbaum writes.

A more-or-less permanent black community began to take hold on the bluff above the old town site, and after the war, more black families arrived. By 1870, the black population had risen to 2,120. Many, again like Washington, turned to farming.

What eventually became known as the Quindaro neighborhood became a fairly vibrant community in the following decades. One of its mainstays was Western University, begun as a school for the children of former slaves in the 1860s. In 1896, the school was taken over by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and led by the dynamic Reverend W.T. Vernon. Buoyed by a forty-year contract with the state that guaranteed support, Western flourished until 1939. But by World War II, when the state did not renew its contract, enrollment and financial contributions began to evaporate, and the school closed in 1944.

According to the report, in 1945 a former university building, Grant Hall, was converted into the blacks-only Douglass Hospital. In the years that followed, other university buildings were demolished and replaced with the Bryant Butler Nursing Home and the Primrose Villa, an apartment building for senior citizens. Douglass Hospital, the last remaining building from the old Western University, closed in 1978 and was torn down in 1980.

The bulk of the 56-acre site is owned by the AME Church, which owned the university; the rest is owned by the city, which acquired it as compensation for land taken by the federal government to build Interstate 635.

Little marks the site today. The neighborhood has become one of the poorest in Kansas City. Just down the street from the bluff overlooking the ruins is a bombed-out low-income apartment building, closed years ago. Similarly, the former Bryant Butler Nursing Home, one of the few remaining Western University buildings, now looks like something out of communist-era eastern Europe.

A 1911 statue of fierce abolitionist John Brown — who retaliated for Quantrell’s raid of Lawrence by killing pro-slavery settlers and was later caught and hanged for trying to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia — stands guard over the area.

Hundreds of sites across the eastern United States have a connection to the underground railroad, but most of them are individual structures such as houses or inns. There is nothing to match Quindaro.

“What you have in Quindaro is unlike almost anything I’ve seen in the country,” says Vincent DeForest, an official with the National Park Service, who lauds Quindaro’s archaeological significance. “Most people don’t associate the underground railroad with anything beyond the Mississippi.”

Steve Collins, a professor of sociology at Kansas City, Kansas, Community College, calls Quindaro “internationally significant — Africans and Europeans and Native Americans collaborating on the first human-rights project of the frontier.”

Kansas City, Kansas, is short on much of anything that could bear the label “internationally significant.” And with a boom in heritage tourism, especially among African-American travelers, Quindaro represents a chance for the city to capitalize on a unique attraction.

Figures compiled by the Travel Industry of America show that in 1996, African-Americans spent $38 billion on travel and tourism in the United States. Between 1997 and 1999, the number of black travelers increased 16 percent; in 1999, they took 69.6 million trips — 18 percent of them to historical sites or museums.

The movement to restore underground railroad sites across the country “is really more than just the history,” says Kevin Cottrell, president of the Michigan Street Preservation Corporation in Buffalo, New York, an organization that preserved the Michigan Street Baptist Church and important underground railroad site. “It is economic development of an area that harnesses history as a backdrop to bring people in to see a site.” And Quindaro is much more a part of Wyandotte County’s history than the heavily subsidized Kansas Speedway or a Nebraska Furniture Mart.

The road to the ruins is steep. In the mid-1990s, a path at the north end of 27th Street was made accessible for cars, but a lack of maintenance and continued drainage problems have left two deep ruts in the road. Nearby sit two rusted-out, cannibalized cars.

As the path opens up to flatter lands at the bottom of the bluff, the ground is overgrown with what Larry Schmits guesses is pigweed; during the summer, it can grow as high as 5 feet. Schmits lights up several cigarettes along the way, but he doesn’t seem winded by the tricky descent. The archeologist is used to this terrain, having led in the 1980s the only excavation of the Quindaro site — an effort, Schmits says, that was one of the biggest digs in the state of Kansas. Some observers referred to the site as the Pompeii of Kansas.

The largest of the visible foundations is the one for the Otis Webb Building (built by and named for the proprietor of a ferry that ran between Quindaro and Parkville), an 80-foot-long wall 7 or 8 feet high. In the mid-1990s, the city hired Schmits to stabilize some of the ruins. He put new mortar along the wall to shore it up; in other spots, old mortar has washed out. Beams prop up portions of the wall, and on the west end, two large segments have fallen apart within the last few years, Schmits estimates. About half a mile away stand the remains of the brewery: two walls shaped like jagged brick teeth. Beyond is the arched entrance to some subterranean chamber.

Farther along, the path climbs to the top of Quindaro Cemetery. From there you can see the signs of modern commerce — highways to the north and east and huge truck trailers parked in a giant staging area across the Missouri River, maybe two miles away. Train tracks run about 100 feet below the cemetery, right through the heart of where Quindaro once stood.

The two walls of the brewery will eventually fall down, Schmits says as he fingers a piece of blue-and-white ceramic he spotted on the ground. “Then how you do put it back together again?” he asks.

Schmits says that a “bare-bones” stabilization effort to secure the exposed ruins and backfill them with silt-clay, as well as provide lighting, paving and landscaping, would cost at least $340,000. A second phase would add public walkways and facilities and transform Quindaro into an “archaeological park” at a cost of $1.1 million. A last phase would turn the site into a full-fledged historical park, with a curator, staff, exhibits and maintenance — for $2.1 million plus undetermined annual costs. But those figures were put together in 1996; the site has deteriorated further since then, so the combined $3.5 million price tag would undoubtedly be higher.

“For historic preservation in this area, that’s a lot of money,” Schmits says. (By contrast, the Unified Government of Kansas City, Kansas, was able to come up with $158 million in bond financing for the Kansas Speedway and the Nebraska Furniture Mart.)

“I think the mayor and the commissioners will do everything they can to help make this project reach fruition,” says Unified Government spokesperson Don Denney. “It’s going to take an awful lot of money.”

Even at the federal level, talk of supporting the underground railroad restoration outpaces the financial commitment to do so. In 1998, Congress passed the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act, establishing a “network” of historical sites. But the lawmakers appropriated only a token $2.5 million for restoration efforts involving hundreds of sites across the country — and of that amount, it released a trifling $500,000. (And $250,000 of that was earmarked for the state of Delaware, the congressional delegation of which had led the charge for the legislation; that left only $250,000 for the rest of the country.)

Cathy Nelson, state coordinator of the Ohio Underground Railroad Association in Columbus, testified on behalf of the legislation but now feels foolish. “I thought that was a good thing. We were led like sheep, going back and forth to Congress,” she says. “Here we’ve got legislation but no money. I can spend $500,000 in my own county, let alone the whole country.”

But while Nelson and others aren’t able to get enough money to preserve and restore sites in their communities, millions of federal dollars have been flowing to Cincinnati for construction of the controversial National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. (Legislators in Cincinnati teamed with local religious leaders and corporations, then lobbied Congress for their own project independent of the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act.) “They don’t know anything about research,” says Harriett Price, a Maine activist who has worked on preserving sites in that state. “They’re spending a lot of money to put up something that will show well, and that’s the antithesis of the underground railroad.”

What’s more, that museum bills itself as a facility dedicated to freedom movements around the world, not just to the underground railroad, and it does no underground railroad research. “Why couldn’t the money be spent on preservation?” Nelson asks.

And why couldn’t some money be spent in Kansas City, Kansas?

For starters, the Unified Government doesn’t have much. It almost failed to obtain a modest $4,000 grant from the Kansas Historical Society to prepare an application to the National Register of Historic Places because it couldn’t even come up with the required matching funds.

“Our problem had always been, with our budget here, we couldn’t do it entirely in-house,” says Hancks. The city instead offered to provide in-kind services, and the state accepted.

Quindaro supporters will take whatever small signs of progress they can get. At the moment, they’re excited that the site was recently named to the Kansas State Register of Historic Places.

The application still needs more work before it goes to Washington, D.C. Dick Pankratz, of the Kansas State Historical Society, says it should be ready in about a month. Then the National Park Service will have 45 days to act. In all likelihood, Quindaro will then be named to the National Register, along with forty or fifty other underground railroad sites. Diane Miller, who coordinates underground railroad sites across the country for the park service, estimates about a dozen of those are national landmarks.

The effort to get Quindaro listed on the National Register looks like a sign that the city is thinking more seriously about doing something with the site.

But Schmits is doubtful of any real benefits. “Local folks … think that once this is on the National Register, the funding is going to sort of automatically come available,” says Schmits. “And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.”

Schmits’ skepticism is understandable, considering the city’s past efforts to do something — anything — at the site.

As early as 1993, Mike Swann, the assistant dean of the University of Kansas’ school of architecture, recapped a meeting with city officials in a memo warning that “unless the site is stabilized immediately, there will be no Quindaro to preserve.” The commission also advised that there needed to be a “clearly articulated” plan for the site.

In 1994, KCK appeared to be moving toward that goal. The city received an $111,000 grant from the Department of Transportation to stabilize the site and prepare a report on possible future development. Yet it wasn’t until 2001 that the city finally submitted its report. Part of the delay was caused by Schmits’ having been replaced a few years into the project. (The city was unhappy with his progress.) “In addition, it has drug out because it has lost momentum here,” says city engineer Bill Blackwell, who helped administer the grant project. “We’re a little short on staff resources in KCK to pursue it aggressively.”

But when the city finally submitted its report, the state, which administers the federal funds, rejected it. The grant required the city to draw up a master plan for the site, but what exactly constitutes such a plan is disputed. “For an architect planner, ‘master plan’ refers to a drawing, usually a single drawing that gives a concept of where you’re headed, but is short on detail,” Blackwell says. This is what the city submitted to the state. “It’s the conceptual level. What the archaeologists [at the State Historical Society] were describing has a great deal of detail. It’s almost analogous to construction plans.”

The city is waiting for the Kansas Department of Transportation to decide whose definition of “master plan” is correct. What if KDOT orders the city to prepare the more comprehensive plans the Historical Society wants?

“It’s a scary request from our point of view,” Blackwell says — one that could take years. “The whole thing should have been done in two and a half years, and it’s been eight or nine years.”

Meanwhile, amid the confusion, the city has also just missed an application deadline to be part of the Underground Network to Freedom, which would put it in line for a drop of that trickle of money. Since January 2001, the National Park Service has accepted applications for the network only three times: January and July 2001 and January 2002. Though there’s little money in the designation, Miller says, “it gives sites a legitimacy to apply for other grants.”

Hancks says he’s not even familiar with the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom legislation.

But Miller says someone in the city should have known about it. “I find it hard to believe he never heard of it at all,” Miller says. “We had a number of conversations with folks in the [state historic preservation] office.”

Unified Government Commissioner Nathan Barnes admits the city has “without the shadow of a doubt” been lax “But you have to have a champion, someone who can come in and take the bull by the horns. It’s not the total responsibility of the city itself,” Barnes says.

Unfortunately, Quindaro’s most passionate champion might have alienated all of his potential allies.

Marvin Robinson, who is black, was a Navy vet and aspiring public relations man when, in 1987, he read an article about the excavation of Civil War-era artifacts at Quindaro in preparation for a garbage dump that was planned by Browning-Ferris Industries. The AME Church had leased the land to BFI in the early 1980s; the city had approved the landfill, provided that BFI conduct an archaeological excavation of the site.

“Those niggers just crossed into hell,” he remembers thinking. He was furious at church leaders and city officials for selling out the site.

Robinson, along with lifelong Quindaro resident Jesse Hope and other neighbors, fought the proposed landfill. In 1991, the Kansas Legislature stepped in to prevent the dump. Litigation between BFI and the city, which subsequently pulled its support from the project, was settled in 1992.

The prevention of the landfill was the high point of efforts to save Quindaro, and people talk as though it just happened last year. But in the intervening decade, the activists haven’t been able to agree on anything. “The community came together to stop the landfill but not to forward the project,” says Fred Whitehead, who in the mid-1990s tried to complete a National Register application for Quindaro.

The abrasive Robinson doesn’t appear to have helped his own cause.

In 1993, former KCK Mayor Joseph Steineger named Robinson to chair a city underground railroad advisory commission. Together with the Quindaro Town Preservation Society, an organization founded by local resident Betty Roberts and graduate students from Kansas State University, the commission created several Quindaro design proposals. In 1995, Robinson recommended that the city grant the commission two more years of ad hoc status and allow it to partner with other area universities to ensure the “archaeological integrity” and the “fiscal longevity” of the site. The city council refused, Robinson says, and Steineger dissolved the commission.

In the early 1990s, Robinson had written a weekly column in KCK’s edition of The Call criticizing the city and BFI. He was also a regular and confrontational figure at city council meetings.

Robinson says he accused the members of the council, to their faces, of being in a secret sadism-and-masochism society, “experiencing orgasms in their little pants and panties” as they “tortured the poor black race into smithereens.” Robinson was mad not only at lack of progress on Quindaro but also at toxic industrial waste in the city’s urban core.

After that exchange, former City Councilwoman Veda Monday proposed to ban Robinson from future meetings; other council members seconded the motion. Though the ban has never been enforced, Robinson says he “welcomed them to defame me. I had a constitutional right to freedom of speech.”

Still, if Robinson’s tactics have often proven incendiary or just stupid, they have sometimes been sophisticated as well.

In 1995, Robinson approached Kirkpatrick Pettis, which provides bond financing for municipal projects, about the feasibility of issuing a bond to finance restoration of the ruins. Marty Nohe, a vice president with Kirkpatrick Pettis, did some research and found that under Kansas law a city could fund such a restoration if it used local legislation to levy taxes to repay the bond. But at a meeting with city officials, Nohe says, “It appeared to me there was no interest.” The matter was dropped.

Robinson has accumulated enough Quindaro papers and artifacts to fill 43 cubic feet of storage space. “We did everything we could to make the public aware of the site’s value and importance,” Robinson says. “I can’t go and put a gun up to anyone’s head.”

Robinson also fought Schmits’ efforts to stabilize the site.

“Some people who have been supportive of the site have rejected the idea of backfilling the site,” Schmits says. Robinson didn’t want Schmits to bury the foundations, though that would have been the best way to preserve them until all parties could agree on a permanent way to safely expose them. Backfilling, Robinson thought, was like burying the past.

Robinson might even have cost Schmits his job on the project. “Marvin took up a lot of Larry’s time,” says Harold Benoit, chief of KDOT’s Office of Engineering Support, which oversees the grant. “The time element involved in dealing with the public, especially Marvin, ate up a lot of the city’s report money.”

Schmits calls the relationship between the city and Robinson “real adversarial.”

KCK Community College professor Collins describes Robinson as a “free agent” responsible for keeping Quindaro on people’s minds. Still, he says, “everyone has somewhat mixed feelings about him. If Marvin is going to be at a particular place, people think over whether they want to show up or not.”

Robinson makes no apologies about the mantra he says he adopted from Fredrick Douglass: “Agitate, agitate, agitate.” He says it’s not his role “to make the people in the establishment feel good with warm fuzzies.

“I wish I had more charisma,” he adds, chuckling.

Still, he doesn’t think his style has burdened the process, and he says it doesn’t matter if no one likes him. “That’s irrelevant to what we’ve tried to do and where we’re trying to go. Why should everybody like one another?” he says. “We’re not going to bed.”

But they should be.

Ironically, the most obstinate partner in the effort to preserve Quindaro might be the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The AME Church was founded in Philadelphia in 1816 by Richard Allen, a former slave who operated a station on the underground railroad from the late eighteenth century until his death in 1831.

The First AME Church, located at State and 11th streets, represents the larger AME denomination, which has owned most of the land at Quindaro since 1877, when it took control of the old Freemen University, the predecessor to Western. But First AME is in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, some three miles southeast of Quindaro’s ravaged streets.

Before his Sunday sermon, the Reverend L.C. Drew prepares his notes. Young churchgoers are practicing their Bible verses in the next room. Books line the four walls of Drew’s cozy office, alongside framed photos of Jesse Jackson, Hilary and Bill Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore, with autographs thanking him for his support of the Democratic Party.

The First AME is a friendly place — visitors are welcome with open arms.

But when talk turns to Quindaro, the charismatic Drew becomes harsh.

“There’s going to be lawsuits if people aren’t careful,” he says. “Everyone is on their personal agenda. If you want to go through there, you have to go through the front door.” And Drew makes it very clear that the AME Church is the front door.

Robinson says the church banned him from visiting the ruins in 1997, though he ignored the decree.

Kerry Strahm, the director of the city’s convention bureau, tried to aid the restoration of Quindaro during the last three or four years, first by running a small ad in the Kansas City visitors’ guide, then by offering free spring tours of the ruins in 1999 and 2000. About forty people attended.

But last year the church asked Strahm to stop the tours. “They were going to take a year to stabilize the ruins,” he says. There was no longer any sense in running an ad, so Strahm pulled it and turned his focus elsewhere. “It seemed that every effort we made, we didn’t gain anything.”

Drew says the church cut off tours because it was concerned about possible vandalism or theft of the remains and by the liability if unannounced guests hurt themselves traipsing down to the ruins — although he cannot recall an incident when either has been a factor. He says he once required two hunters to sign a release before he let them on the property.

Drew does not pretend the church has been perfect in its handling of the land at Quindaro. The church once owned the bombed-out, low-lying Bryant Brothers home and the former apartment building for seniors. “The AME has not been a good shepherd,” says Drew. “We had Douglass Hospital. It doesn’t exist anymore. You have to wonder how we lost all this.”

The church has been conspicuously absent from official conversations about what to do with the site.

“We don’t know if they’re backers or not,” says city engineer Bill Blackwell, who has worked on Quindaro grant applications. “They never tipped their hand at all as to what they were interested in.”

But it sounds as if the church can’t even decide what it wants to do with its land.

Drew’s aide Doris Bailey, who lives in Quindaro, dreams of building an archive for the AME Church. But she refuses to talk about her plans “until there’s a hole dug, a building going up and an architect hired.”

Drew says he envisions a site to hold its own against the famous black town of Nicodemus, Kansas, which became a National Historic Site in 1996. Last year, more than 34,000 people visited the five restored buildings in Kansas’ first black settlement, founded in 1877 northwest of Hayes. “That’s what we want: to make this a tourist attraction and a learning center,” Drew says.

Last year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation offered the church $200,000 in preservation money — provided the church raise another $200,000 in matching funds. Drew’s wife, the Reverend Sylvia Drew, was responsible for trying to get the grant, but she died late last year, and the grant’s future is now uncertain.

Bailey and Drew declined to discuss how much the church has raised so far, what its timetable is or what it would do with the funds if it could acquire them. Neither is interested in accepting donations or help from other activists — in the church’s view, that would only give people a stronger sense of entitlement to land they do not own.

But Robinson doubts the church’s intentions. “If they were really interested in architecture and longevity, they would have made information available to the public,” he says.

“It’s a better step than anyone’s gotten, and that’s what everybody’s afraid of,” counters Bailey.

Drew is bemused by people who are talking about plans to redevelop or preserve land his church owns. “If we want to do nothing with the property, that’s our prerogative to do that. It belongs to us. If we have to get ugly about it, we will.”

Quindaro’s likely designation to the National Register could galvanize stakeholders to agree on a plan for its future and pursue funding. Or, like the landfill victory ten years ago, the designation could simply lead to continued complacency. But one of these days, there isn’t going to be anything left to bother with.

It’s to the point where Jimmy Johnson, the great grandson of a fleeing slave for whom Quindaro meant everything, is thinking about recruiting students from his school to help restore the ruins.

“It’s better than checking the temperature of french fries at Hardees,” he says.