MOUND CITY ? Four short cement posts mark the partially shaded Ross plot in the Woodland Cemetery. A single stone with only the family’s last name identifies it.

James “Whitfield” Ross is buried here, along with his wife and a son. He farmed in the area for years before spending the final two decades of his life in Olathe.

Before he was a farmer, Ross was a slave and a soldier. He joined the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers in 1862 and was with his regiment when it became the first unit of black troops to fight in the Civil War.

This year marks the 140th anniversary of the 1st Kansas Colored’s recruitment and its first battle, as well as Ross’ escape from slavery and enlistment in the unit.

Historians and some of Ross’ descendants were to honor both Ross and his storied unit with a Saturday ceremony at the cemetery and a marker on his grave.

“It gives us a chance to reflect,” said Anyatika Timmons-Lee, a local historian who also works at the Mine Creek Battlefield, a state historical site from the Civil War. “For me, it’s kind of like a family reunion.”

Another ceremony honoring the 1st Kansas Colored is scheduled for Aug. 2, two days before the 140th anniversary of its recruitment. Organizers have chosen to hold it at Lane’s Barbeque in Topeka, a restaurant owned by descendants of James Lane, one of the state’s first two U.S. senators, who helped form the 1st Kansas.

‘A proud time’

The 1st Kansas Colored’s story is better known than that of Ross, because of efforts over the past five years to publicize the unit’s history. The state even plans to honor the unit with a mural at the Statehouse.

Lane, an abolitionist, conceived the idea of recruiting black troops in his state. He once declared, “I would like to see every traitor who has to die, die by the hand of his own slave.”

Members joined the unit even before President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in states fighting the Union as of Jan. 1, 1863.

The unit’s first job was clearing out bushwhackers in western Missouri and northeastern Oklahoma. On Oct. 28 and 29, it engaged Confederates at Island Mound, near Butler, Mo.

That was 10 months before a more famous black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, the subject of the 1989 film, “Glory,” made an assault on a fort in South Carolina.

Other battles followed in Arkansas and Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory. Officers who watched or commanded the unit praised it. After one battle in 1863, a general said the regiment fought with “valor that is unsurpassed.”

“It truly was a proud time,” said the Rev. Enois Scroggins, a Wichita minister who portrays the 1st Kansas Colored’s chaplain in re-enactments. “The African-Americans who contributed so much to the cause were proud people.”

Ross joined the unit early and rose to the rank of corporal after it was brought into the regular Union army as the 79th Regiment of Colored Troops.

Keeping Ross’ memory alive

Born near Vicksburg, Miss., about 1835, Ross was sold as a slave seven times before ending up with a master in Tipton, Mo. In 1862, he escaped and, while on the run, fell in with a column of Union soldiers on its way to Topeka. Once in the Kansas capital, he joined the 1st Kansas Colored.

He married in 1868 after settling on a farm north of Topeka. He moved his family to the Mound City area in 1886 and farmed there until 1902, when he moved to Olathe. That year, his 22-year-old son, Ulysses Frank, died following a fever.

Besides farming, Ross also worked as a stonecutter and even helped quarry some of the stone used to build the state Capitol.

Among the descendants keeping his memory alive is Ross’ great-granddaughter Mary Brooks, a reading teacher at Topeka’s Quinton Heights Elementary School who chuckles at how other teachers have been impressed by the history she relates.

“They didn’t know I had that much history in my background,” she said.

Mound City also has a good deal of Civil War and pre-war history itself.

Timmons-Lee noted that the community once known as Sugar Mound was on the western route of the Underground Railroad, which moved escaped slaves through free states and into Canada.

Some of the graves of former slaves and other black residents of Mound City remain unmarked. Ola May Earnest, curator of the Linn County Museum, hoped Saturday’s ceremony would encourage more families to mark their ancestors’ graves.

“This is historical territory,” she said.