The cake and party favors aren’t ordered yet, but plans for Lawrence’s 150th birthday party are beginning to come together.

The city’s sesquicentennial officially Sept. 8, 2004 will be cause for a year’s worth of celebrations.

“We need to make sure we have a party and that we leave a presence,” said Clenece Hills, president of the Lawrence Sesquicentennial Commission’s board of directors. “We hope most of all that all people have a wonderful celebratory time in 2004 and that we leave something to see and touch for a long, long time.”

At first, commission members had, as Hills put it, “grandiose” plans for a major project comparable to Centennial Park, which was dedicated for Lawrence’s 100th birthday. Ideas for the 150th version included a new Farmer’s Market with an outdoor performance area and an abolitionist museum.

But now, those plans have been scaled back, though the abolitionist museum is being pursued by another city committee.

The front-runner for a major project now appears to be a memorial for the New England Emigrant Aid Co., the first group to settle Lawrence. A possible site would be the city land east of the Clinton Lake dam.

“It would be a place where we could have a wall or some sort of site where we could list the names of all those people, because a lot of them still have descendants in Douglas County,” Hills said.

The memorial is one of many ideas for 2004 being considered by committee members. They’re trying to pare their list of projects to begin fund-raising. Hills said more than $150,000 likely will be needed, with some money probably coming from the Lawrence City Commission.

Big celebrations

The Festivals Committee, co-chaired by Ann Evans, director of the Lawrence Arts Center, and Mary Doveton, artistic managing director of Lawrence Community Theatre, is planning several events for the weekend of Sept. 18, 2004.

On Sept. 18 a Saturday there will be a parade downtown. That night, a formal gala will include a performance of “Quantrill’s Raid,” a musical presentation by Charles Hoag, professor of music and dance at Kansas University. Another possibility is the Lawrence City Band playing John Philip Sousa’s “A Salute to Kansas.”

The next night, the performances will be repeated in a family setting.

Other possibilities:

l Commissioning a city march or city anthem that could be performed by local groups.

l Commissioning a sculpture or mural based on Lawrence’s history.

l Holding a Read Across Lawrence program similar to the one earlier this year for the celebration of Langston Hughes’ 100th birthday.

l Starting a mural in which community members would include photographs of their first family member who moved to Lawrence.

Focus on history

The Education Committee, chaired by Bruce Flanders, director of the Lawrence Public Library, is looking to spread the word about the city’s history.

The group wants to create a chronology of Lawrence history on the Sesquicentennial Commission’s Web site, www.lawrence150.org, or on other sites.

“We’ll work with Lawrence historians to create, decade-by-decade, over 150 years what they think are the most important historical and social events in Lawrence,” Flanders said.

The committee wants to create a book of Lawrence history for school children. Another possibility would be a bibliography of all printed and Internet-based historical information about Lawrence.

Other ideas

The Heritage Committee, chaired by Paul Stuewe, a teacher at Lawrence High School, also is working on a variety of projects for 2004.

One is a map that will show how Lawrence has grown over time, including streets, schools, parks and buildings.

Another is a garden at Hobbs Park, Ninth and Pennsylvania streets, where the 1850s-era Murphy-Bromelsick House already has been located as a memorial to abolitionist and newspaper publisher John Speer.

The committee also has discussed bringing a copy of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to Lawrence during part of 2004.