A cook at Deerfield School serves students birthday cake in celebration of Lawrence's 149th birthday Thursday in the school cafeteria. Those who enjoyed the cake on Thursday are second-graders, from left, Stephen Fulton, Abby Schletzbaum and Hannah McCauley. (See more on the celebration in Friday's Journal-World.)

Exactly 149 years ago today, a group of men met to establish a town constitution and assembly for a small settlement on the banks of the Kansas River.

Nearly three weeks later, they met again and discarded several town names, including Yankee Town, New Boston and Wakarusa, the Kaw Indian word for “hip-deep” or “crotch-deep” water. They eventually settled on “Lawrence,” in honor of Amos Lawrence, a free state supporter and booster of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which first settled the region.

Now, nearly 150 years later, Lawrence has boomed from an anti-slavery village of about 200, with men emerging from their tents to gather around a campfire for meals, to a bustling city of more than 80,000.

Lawrence’s rich history will be the focus of a year of events during the next year surrounding the city’s sesquicentennial. Clenece Hills, president of the Lawrence Sesquicentennial Commission, said her organization’s goal was to connect the city’s past with its present and future.

“I think it’s important for us to have benchmarks in our lives,” Hills said. “It’s more than a day. It’s a chance for Lawrence to enjoy its history, and also look ahead to its future.”

The Sesquicentennial Commission has been meeting since January 2000 to plan the year’s worth of events. The Lawrence City Commission earmarked $128,000 in guest taxes over the past four years for sesquicentennial events.

Though most of the big events are planned and in the works, many of the details have yet to be determined.

Some projects are already under way. A group of master gardeners from Lawrence has started planting a Heritage Garden near the Murphy-Bromelsick house in Hobbs Park, 10th and Delaware streets. And an 1854 map of Lawrence is being designed and will be distributed to Lawrence school teachers and available for sale in December.

One of the biggest projects, a Sesquicentennial Plaza on city-leased land near Clinton Dam, has been designed. The plaza would be about 160 feet in diameter and include a timeline of Lawrence history. It also would have an area where presentations about Lawrence history could be made.

Mary Lynn Stuart plants a Spiraea vanhouttei near the Murphy-Bromelsick House in Hobbs Park, East 10th and Delaware streets. The planting project is one of the preparations for next year's sesquicentennial celebration.

Hills said fund-raising would begin soon on the project, which will cost about $400,000 to complete. She compared it to Centennial Park, at Sixth Street and Rockledge Road, the project completed for the city’s 100th birthday in 1954.

Birthday weekend

Plans call for the plaza’s groundbreaking to be Sept. 19, 2004, part of a weekend of activities surrounding the sesquicentennial.

The weekend is scheduled to kick off with a parade Sept. 18 downtown.

“It’ll be a pretty fancy parade,” Hills said.

It will be followed by a festival of some type in South Park, but details of that event are yet to be determined.

¢Lawrence Sesquicentennial Celebration¢Quantrill and Lawrence’s early history

Also tentatively in the works for the weekend are a community church service and a pep rally for Lawrence public schools.

But Hills and other members of the Sesquicentennial Commission are hoping to broaden the events beyond the birthday weekend.

Other activities

The Kansas Humanities Council is organizing a Bleeding Kansas Chautauqua, with “living histories” of well-known figures from the 1850s and 1860s, from June 25-29, 2004.

And the commission has earmarked $20,000 to distribute to community organizations that want to present programs related to the 150th birthday. Guidelines for applying for the money will be announced Oct. 1, with an announcement of grants on Jan. 29, 2004 — Kansas Day. No more than $2,000 will be given to each organization.

Some community groups already have started their birthday celebration. The Lawrence Preservation Alliance last week released its 2004 calendar, which features historical photos of Lawrence.

“We spent a lot of hours up at Spencer Research Library, at the Watkins Museum of History and the Kansas State Historical Society to find photos to represent Lawrence’s 150 years,” said Carol Francis, a Preservation Alliance board member. “I think it’s always time to know something about your past and the struggles people have had. Things happen and you think they’re unique, but Lawrence has always struggled with one thing or another.”

Katie Armitage, a local historian, said she expected Lawrence’s history to be a focus for many conversations in the next year.

“The roots of the community are tremendously important,” Armitage said. “It was a time when the focus of the nation was turning out here, to what became Lawrence and the Kansas territory. The Kansas territory was the first battleground on the most divisive issue of the time.”