African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology

2. “Pap” Singleton’s Dunlap Colony: Relief Agencies and the Failure of a Black Settlement in Eastern Kansas

There are gathered at Dunlap and vicinity at the present time between 275 and 300 families of colored people, all of whom are succeeding quite well and many of whom are on the road to prosperity. The plan of Dunlap Colony is very simple, the chief reason, probably, of the success met with, being the fact that every settler is compelled to own his property, no renting being permitted . . . as Mr. Atchison expressed it, “everyone is fat and happy.” So wrote the Topeka Daily Capital on October 19, 1882, describing the Dunlap Colony, one of more than a dozen “exoduster” settlements that blacks established in Kansas following the collapse of Reconstruction.1 In the 1880s the Dunlap Colony may have represented one of the best chances for blacks to succeed as yeoman farmers in Kansas. Not only had the Dunlap Colony been carefully planned by Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, but in the spring of 1878 he and his business associates, Columbus Johnson and Alonzo DeFrantz, personally helped two hundred Tennessee transplants move to Dunlap and select and make down payments on their forty- to eighty-acre farms. In addition, during the Great Exodus in 1879, when twenty thousand blacks med poverty and oppression in the south and relocated to Kansas, the Dunlap Colony received substantial lnancial “Pap” Singleton’s Dunlap Colony: Relief Agencies and the Failure of a Black Settlement in Eastern Kansas joseph v. hickey chapter 2 48 hickey support. The Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association (kfra), a state organization founded in May 1879 and headed by Kansas Governor John St. John, provided some of the aid. Much of the rest came from the Presbyterian church, which not only helped destitute blacks purchase farms, livestock, and homes, but also established “The Freedmen ’s Academy of Kansas,” a “Literary and Business Academy” that offered a free education to all former slaves and their children.2 Despite these promising conditions, the Dunlap Colony fared little better than other colonies in Kansas, including the well-known Nicodemus Colony and others in the semiarid western portions of the state. Like most exoduster settlements, Dunlap’s population, which included ninety families in 1885, began to decline rapidly at the turn of the century, and by the end of the Great Depression only a small number of families remained. Today, of the more than one thousand black settlers that once called Dunlap their home, only one black remains, eighty-four-year-old London Harness, who lives on the farm his grandparents purchased in 1879—the year of the Great Exodus. As with other rural settlements in Kansas, many factors contributed to the Dunlap Colony’s death. Improved transportation, the mechanization of agriculture, and urbanization played signilcant roles. Because it was a black settlement, however, a number of other factors that were unique to exoduster settlements must also be considered . Although local racial prejudice and discrimination contributed to the colony’s decline, another factor may have caused even more harm, and that was the misguided attempts of Dunlap relief agencies to transform as many exodusters as possible into landowners and independent farmers. I suggest that Pap Singleton’s colony ultimately fell victim to the best intentions of relief agency and missionary workers , who, during the Great Exodus, decided that it was their duty to relocate as many destitute blacks from Topeka and other Kansas cities—where they had gathered to take advantage of temporary “Pap” Singleton’s Dunlap Colony 49 housing and relief aid—to the Dunlap countryside, and in so doing placed an impossible burden on the Dunlap Colony. The Dunlap Environment Pap Singleton’s decision to locate a farming colony in Dunlap was strongly inmuenced by two factors: one was the nature of the physical environment, which to all appearances—and according to exaggerated claims of local boosters—was an idyllic agrarian environment. The other was cheap government lands that could be had for a small down payment and at very favorable interest rates. As did so many western promoters, however, Singleton and his followers soon discovered that there was a substantial gap between appearance and reality. Dunlap is located in the extreme southeastern corner of Morris County in east central Kansas. During the 1870s and early 1880s, black settlements were created in Dunlap village, in the uplands above the village on the Morris County side, and in the neighboring Lyon County uplands three miles or so to the east and northeast of...