photo by: Bremen Keasey

Kerry Altenbernd, a John Brown-portrayer and president of the Guardians of Grover Barn, hopes to realize a goal to fully preserve the structure which was a stop on the Underground Railroad and visited by a group of freedom seeking slaves led by John Brown.

Just off Lawrence Avenue, in an area north of Holcom Sports Complex, one building stands out from the mostly residential neighborhood — a two-story limestone barn that was built before Kansas was even a state.

The Grover Barn at 2819 Stone Barn Terrace was built in 1858 by Joel and Emily Grover, abolitionists who moved to Kansas from New England in hope of helping Kansas enter the U.S. as a free state. It is currently used by Lawrence’s Parks, Recreation and Culture department, and was a city fire station from 1983 to 2006, But in the 19th century, it served as a very different kind of station.

It was a stop on the Underground Railroad, the loose network of people and places that helped escaped slaves from the South on their way to freedom, and it protected a group of 12 former slaves who were being helped by the famed abolitionist John Brown.

Many people don’t know about Lawrence’s connections to the Underground Railroad, though. Kerry Altenbernd says Kansas has been ignored in the history of the Underground Railroad for a long time, and that many people have a bias “that nothing happened out here.”

Altenbernd leads a group called the Guardians of the Grover Barn, which has worked since 2017 to protect the structure and highlight its role in the Underground Railroad. Altenbernd said there was a movement in 2006 to get the city to turn it into a museum, but it went nowhere.

“It was filled up with all kinds of stuff,” Altenbernd said. “It was kind of like the city’s attic.”

Although the site is still closed to the public and serves as storage, the quest to get further recognition for the Grover Barn took a big step forward recently. As part of the Parks, Recreation and Culture department’s master plan, which was recently approved by the City Commission, one goal for the city is to “explore developing the historic Grover Barn building into an arts and culture site.”

Altenbernd said this was welcome news in the group’s quest to further protect the barn’s legacy and teach more people about Kansas’s often overlooked role in the Underground Railroad.

“It’s a long way off but it’s exciting progress,” Altenbernd said.

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The barn’s story, like many of Lawrence’s early stories, starts with the New England Emigrant Aid Company.

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act would allow the citizens of those western territories to decide through popular vote whether they wanted to become a free state or a slave state. The New England Emigrant Aid Company was started by abolitionists in Massachusetts to encourage opponents of slavery to travel to Kansas in order to live there and vote in the territory’s election.

Altenbernd said Joel Grover was a part of the second group of “Free Staters” sent to Kansas by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and he got a plot of land about three miles outside of the main town of Lawrence. Along with trying to develop his farm, Grover served in the Free State Militia, and was eventually joined by Emily Grover, his wife, who helped prepare cartridges for the militia.

By 1858, Grover had written about the first developments on his barn in his diary, saying that he went down to the river to “pull some timber” to work on the structure, Altenbernd said. By December 1858, it was complete.

Not long after that, John Brown would enter the picture.

Brown, of course, is a subject Altenbernd knows a lot about, as he’s portrayed John Brown as a historical reenactor for nearly 20 years. Altenbernd said Brown was in southeastern Kansas on Dec. 19, 1858, when he was approached by Jim Daniels, who was a slave in Vernon County, Missouri. Daniels was allowed by his master to go around selling brooms that Daniels made, but all the profits went back to his master. Daniels told Brown that his master recently died, and as part of the estate sale, he and his wife and two kids would be sold off and separated.

The next night, Brown and his men rode into Vernon County and liberated 11 slaves from three separate homesteads. They took food, oxen, wagons and other supplies, which Altenbernd said Brown called “small recompense for what (the former slaves) are really owed.”

As news quickly spread about Brown’s raid, he and his traveling party trudged north through cold temperatures, traveling only at night so as not to be caught by the slave catchers who “swarmed the area,” Altenbernd said. Along the way, Daniels’ wife gave birth to a baby boy, who was named after John Brown.

Altenbernd said Brown brought his traveling party to the Grovers’ farm in late January. Although accounts differ on how long the group stayed at the Grover Barn, first-hand accounts, including one from Samuel Reed, a farmhand working for the Grovers, recorded they had left “for the North Star” on Jan. 24, 1859.

They would evade their pursuers and travel over 1,000 miles through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana to Detroit, Michigan. On March 15, Brown stood on the banks of the Detroit River and watched the former slaves go to freedom, Altenbernd said.

There were other stories of people stopping at the Grover Barn on their way to freedom — including students who had escaped from the Haskell residential school — but Altenbernd said the fact this particular journey was recorded made it incredibly important to help preserve the barn.

“There is documented, first-person proof that Brown brought freedom seekers here,” Altenbernd said.

• • •

While the site was always known in the city as a stop on the Underground Railroad, Altenbernd the site has had many other uses since the Grover family sold it in the 1950s.

First, it served as a home for a family that bought it, then it was used by a sculptor named Bernard “Poco” Frazier as a studio. As the city expanded west, much of the area that was previously farmland started to get plotted and houses were being built. In 1980, then-mayor Barkley Clark had the city purchase the lot to use as a fire station.

But after that, Altenbernd said efforts to highlight the site “just sort of languished” for a period. It remained in the city’s hands, but it was often used for storage, holding old police equipment at one time and now housing a snowplow.

In recent years, Altenbernd said his group has helped bring more attention to the history. In 2018, the site was added to the Network to Freedom, a branch of the National Park Service whose mission is to honor, preserve and promote the history of people who escaped from slavery. The city worked with the group on the application for this recognition, as the Journal-World reported. In January 2022, historic panels about the barn’s role in the Underground Railroad were installed.

But Altenbernd’s group has much bigger plans for the Grover Barn. They, along with a “loose consortium” that includes the Watkins Museum, the Lawrence Public Library and the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, have a concept of the first floor of the building serving as a historical center, while upstairs would house a research and archive center.

Although Altenbernd said sometimes it felt that progress moved at a “glacial pace,” he said the city, especially Porter Arneill, the city’s director of arts and culture, has shown a lot of support. Now, the master plan indicates that “documents are behind them 100 percent.”

Luis Ruiz, the Parks, Recreation and Culture director, said in an email to the Journal-World that the Grover Barn holds an important place in the city’s abolitionist history, and the city is committed to work with the community to “preserve and honor that legacy in ways that can be appreciated by both residents and visitors.”

“While no funding has been allocated at this time, we remain engaged in collaborative efforts to identify potential pathways for preservation and future use,” Ruiz said.

Altenbernd said the group has requested funds from various organizations to create more official plans. He estimated it would take $40,000 to $60,000 to get official plans drawn up, which could help lead to more concrete grant opportunities. With uncertain economic conditions, he said it’s anyone’s guess when those plans might come about, but it’s clear the city has worked to maintain the property so the aim of his group’s project “is not losing ground.”

Despite the current uncertainty, Altenbernd remains hopeful that this story of John Brown, the 12 freedom seekers, the Grovers and the Underground Railroad in Kansas will get the attention it deserves.

“I hope it gets done within my lifetime,” Altenbernd said. “I’d like to be able to bask in it.”