Like a good Kansan from 150 years ago, Chautauqua went to church Sunday morning.

Most of the weekend’s Bleeding Kansas Chautauqua events had been presented with a secular tone until Sunday morning, when “Pastor Cordley Remembers” was presented at Plymouth Congregational Church.

The speech was set in 1904, 50 years after the church at 925 Vt. was founded. The Rev. Richard Cordley and his wife, Mary, were outspoken abolitionists and leaders in the Free State Movement.

About 400 people came for the speeches of the pair, portrayed by Harold and Donna Riehm, of Lawrence, during the morning worship service at the church, Lawrence’s oldest.

Richard Cordley, three years out of college, migrated in 1857 from Michigan to Kansas. He and his congregation of four came when people questioned the fate of Lawrence amid continuous pro- and anti-slavery raids.

“It was not a good time to live in Lawrence, Kansas,” he said.

But as an abolitionist, he helped funnel anti-slavery recruits into Lawrence to overturn the territory’s pro-slavery constitution.

He and his wife housed a fugitive slave and ushered her north into freedom. Cordley went on to preach emancipation in the name of God — even in Kansas City, Mo., in slave territory.

The pair escaped Quantrill’s Raiders, but their house was burned to the ground.

Donna Riehm, right, a member of Plymouth Congregational Church, portrays Mary Cordley, wife of the Rev. Richard Cordley, a longtime pastor at Plymouth, as she relates the story of the founding of the church. The story Sunday at Plymouth was part of the Lawrence Chautauqua, as well as an early event in the sesquicentennial of Plymouth's founding.

“I want to be remembered as an abolitionist, because that’s what brought me to Lawrence, Kansas,” Riehm said, closing his character’s speech.

Event weathers rain

Meanwhile, Sunday’s rains only slightly hindered Chautauqua plans.

Regional artisans canceled an afternoon demonstration at the Chautauqua tent in South Park. They would have been sewing, molding pottery, making brooms and lace, carving wood and spinning yarn with vintage equipment, said Debbie White, manager of the Lawrence Visitor Center.

“We didn’t want them to have that damaged because it was a little soggy in the park,” White said.

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All other events, including a west Lawrence tour on a horse-drawn trolley and a tour of Oak Hill Cemetery, proceeded as planned.

“They went, and they were full,” White said.

The events culminated Sunday night when more than 500 people gathered in the tent to watch Diane Eickhoff portray Clarina Nichols, an outspoken Kansas woman who opposed slavery and alcohol and argued for women’s right to vote.

Family affair

Eickhoff, a teacher, author and historian, spoke as if she were Nichols addressing an audience in 1861.

Eickhoff’s performance held a special meaning for two of Nichols’ descendants who were in the audience. Nichols’ great-great-granddaughter Norma Jean Palmer, Bonner Springs, and great-great-great-granddaughter Janice Parker, Spring, Texas, were watching Eickhoff’s portrayal for the first time. Both had seen some of the research that had been done on Nichols’ by Parker’s mother, Jaunita Johnson.

“I had seen some of Clarina’s writings, but to read it is sort of difficult to follow,” said Parker, 46, who was accompanied by her 10-year-old son, Brett. “It’s great to hear the story one-on-one. It was like watching a movie and she (Eickhoff) made it seem more real.”

Palmer, 79, enjoyed the performance, but admitted it was strange watching someone portray a distant relative. “I thought she was great,” she said of Eickhoff. “She did a very good job.”

Parker brought with her a broach she inherited — one that Nichols wore much of the time. The broach, which is at least 170 years old, was worn during the performance by Eickhoff.

‘Better have an escort’

David Dickerson, the actor who will portray Sen. David Rice Atchison at the Chautauqua tent this evening, is hoping his pro-slavery border ruffian won’t be booed off the stage in decidedly abolitionist Lawrence.

“Atchison was not a loved figure in this particular area at all,” he said Sunday afternoon at a children’s workshop. “My fellow scholars kid me, they say: ‘You better have an escort Monday night.'”

Only one child — and a handful of adults — tiptoed across South Park’s wet grass Sunday afternoon for Dickerson’s “Important Places and Faces” lesson in the Chautauqua tent.

Atchison’s plight opposed that of the Free Staters, Dickerson said. The Kansas-Nebraska Act would allow Kansas to vote by popular sovereignty on whether to allow slavery.

When that act passed in May 1854, Atchison could smell the blood of a civil war brewing.

“He would say to you, ‘If you want to go to war, make Kansas a free state,'” Dickerson said.

So while people like Richard Cordley migrated to Lawrence to beef up Free State forces, Atchison led hundreds of Missourians into Lawrence for elections on the state’s fate with slavery.

“The man at the poll wasn’t going to look at these tough-looking dudes and say, ‘Where are you from?'” Dickerson said.

Atchison’s followers even founded a town in Kansas, a few more than 50 miles north of Lawrence, in his name.

Lincoln lore a draw

With such a small audience, Dickerson’s knowledge of his character wasn’t tested as readily as was Richard Johnson’s of Abraham Lincoln.

More than 60 people gathered Sunday afternoon at the Lawrence Visitor Center for Johnson’s “Lincoln Lore,” and nearly all of them had a hand in grilling the speaker.

They stumped him, too.

He couldn’t answer who’d spoken before Lincoln at Gettysburg, nor why Lincoln’s left hand is clenched in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“This is the great thing about this kind of workshop,” said Johnson, an American history professor at California State Polytechnic University. “I’m surrounded by experts.”

With only today and Tuesday left of the five-day festival, organizers are preparing for the emotional shock of ending a project they’ve spent more than three years planning.

“I think it’s going to be very difficult to have it end,” said Ruth Madell, budget director for the Kansas Humanities Council.

White, of the Visitor Center, said crowds had exceeded her expectations.

“We’re very pleased with the crowds and the involvement with the community,” she said. “All the tours have been sold out; crowds have been larger than what we expected.”