An environmental cleanup recently completed at Black Jack Battlefield near Baldwin City resulted in the removal of 500 tons of trash and about 2,000 tires, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

The cost of the cleanup was about $18,500, KDHE spokesman Mike Heideman said. KDHE paid for the cleanup because the trash and tires were in dump sites deemed a health hazard.

The battlefield is thought by many to have been the site of the first armed clash between abolitionists under John Brown and pro-slavery forces. It took place on June 2, 1856, as a prelude to the Civil War.

“Our cleanup doesn’t really have anything to do with a historic site designation,” Heideman said. “We were just simply there as part of our environmental mission.”

The dumping had gone on for decades before current environmental restrictions were put in place, battlefield supporters and KDHE experts have said. Residential and industrial trash had accumulated, according to KDHE.

While the KDHE cleanup is finished, there are still some smaller pieces of trash to be picked up and that process will go on for some time, said Kerry Altenbernd, a member of the Black Jack Battlefield Trust.

Also last month, a group of researchers conducted a second archeological survey of the battlefield in an attempt to find artifacts such as bullets and equipment. Little of significance was found, trust members said.

Both searches were led by Douglas Scott, adjunct anthropology professor at the University of Nebraska. Scott, who has conducted similar searches at battlefields around the world, couldn’t be reached for comment last week.

The battlefield was scoured by metal detector clubs in the 1970s, Altenbernd said. “It appears that if anything is left it is few and far between or buried too deep to do anything with,” he said.

Scott, however, is finding out where those clubs found artifacts, which will help him in preparing an archeological report about the battle, Altenbernd said.

“We’re getting the history, just not the artifacts,” he said.