Hogg Town: A Guest Essay by Ustaine Talley
Reclaiming Black History in Kansas
I want to welcome guest author Ustaine Talley to “Joining In.” Now residing in Denver, Colorado, Kansas native Ustaine Talley made Bird Runner Wildlife Refuge her home base for research trips in June 2023 and September 2023. Her mission, as she puts it, is to “reclaim and proclaim” Black history in Kansas. She focuses in particular on settlements founded by Black pioneers, adding welcome detail to Nell Irvin Painter’s assertion that Blacks relocating to Kansas in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly motivated by “the Afro-American quest for land.”
In this guest post, Ustaine shares what she has learned about a little known community called Hogg Town. She also shares some of the ways in which nineteenth-century experiences resonate with her own.
Ustaine Talley and I co-founded the non-profit Prairie Heritage, Inc. , in 2001, and Ustaine served for many years as president of the board. When she moved to Colorado, she transferred the presidency into the capable hands of James Sands, founder of the Black History Trail of Geary County. Ustaine remains as President Emerita of Prairie Heritage.
Enjoy her story as she includes us in one of her discoveries! —Margy Stewart
A Discovery that Touched Me Deeply: Hogg Town, An All Black Kansas Settlement Ustaine Talley, Guest Writer
If my Kansas research trip in June was a “serendipity tour,” my just-completed trip in September was my “miracle tour.” Just when I needed more information, the right person appeared with the right documents in hand!
For the moment, I want to share just one of those discoveries—the story of Hogg Town, a Black settlement about a mile outside of Kansas City. This story touched me particularly, as I had personal experience with the Black settlements in eastern Kansas, along the border with Missouri. As a young woman in the early 1960s, I worked as assistant to the director of Douglas Hospital in Quindaro, then a thriving Black community that had originated, as had my home community of Dunlap, as a farming settlement. In addition to its own hospital, Quindaro included schools, businesses, churches, professionals, social organizations, civic institutions, and even its own university.
But during my time in Quindaro, I heard nothing of a neighboring Black settlement named Hogg Town. Even when I started my research years later, I didn’t learn of it. Socolofsky and Self’s Historical Atlas of Kansas doesn’t mention it; nor does Painter’s Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. But on this trip—miraculously—an anonymous person at the Wyandotte Library presented me with a spiral bound notebook assembled in 1980 by the Community Development Program of the City of Kansas City, Kansas.
It included information on a settlement, established in the late 1880s, called Hogg Town.
According to this notebook, the settlement was founded by members of the Hogg family, five brothers with the first names of Ephraim, Green, Tom, Hezekia, and Seth. For years the brothers had labored gathering cast-off items of value, ranging from bottles and bones to tar paper and tin. Some of these salvaged materials were in demand by nearby homebuilders and brought a good price. By the late 1880s, the Hoggs were able to acquire rural land beyond the city limits. The brothers subdivided the property and invited other Blacks to buy in to their proposed community. The Hoggs were religious themselves and wanted only fellow Baptists to apply. They had a second, unusual requirement—that every family seeking land from them must contain at least one dark-skinned member. Color prejudice pervaded all communities at the time, and light-skinned Blacks were often favored over darker ones. The Hoggs took a stand against this injustice: They proclaimed dark complexions to be advantageous and essential.
The new residents of Hogg Town built homes, planted truck gardens, and raised livestock.
The Hogg brothers must have heard many puns in response to their last name. They decided to embrace the coincidence while bolstering the community’s agriculture: They welcomed each new resident with the gift of a little black pig.
In addition to their agricultural labors, residents supplemented their incomes with jobs in the packing houses and other areas. The community grew and prospered. Soon Hogg Town had its own grocery store and of course, a church—the Greater Jerusalem Baptist Church.
As Hogg Town expanded, it connected with a car line, making transportation easier to the packing houses and to jobs in more remote locations.
By all accounts, the hard-working community thrived until 1909, when the unthinkable happened. The City annexed Hogg Town and seven years later condemned it to make room for Kensington Park. The residents’ homes, pastures, and gardens were destroyed, along with their community connections and the foundations of their future. Their church, the center of their community, was relocated to 13th and Ann St. in Kansas City. Some residents followed and tried to make new starts in that area. Others dispersed, with some settling near Groves Center, where “Potato King” Junius Groves, already one of the nation’s wealthiest Afro-Americans, had established a farming community.1
Hogg Town was no more. The residents had achieved the Black settlers’ dream of owning the land they worked—only to have that land, precious beyond words, taken away from them by eminent domain.
Unfortunately, this would not be the last time that African American pioneer settlements in Kansas would face upheaval and extinction, resulting in loss, grief, and displacement.
I know this from personal experience. After working in other cities in the U.S., I returned to my beloved Quindaro, only to find the community destroyed by “urban renewal”—this time to make way for a highway. This was a story repeated all over the United States, including elsewhere in Kansas—Black communities built up by so much dedication and hard work eliminated to create highways, housing projects, land fills, toxic waste dumps, and parking lots.
Still the dream of land ownership, heroically realized if only temporarily, gave us Blacks in Kansas a place to start and a proud history to reclaim and proclaim.
This pioneer love of land runs through my childhood memories of the Flint Hills where I grew up, on land we called “the Farm.” I remember a time—I was about seven years old, and already my father’s right hand “man.” We had just taken a break from clearing rocks from what was to become our truck garden. Daddy bent over and picked up a handful of soil. He caressed the soil and let it cascade through his fingers. “This soil is life. It’s my life,” he said to me, a little girl who heard and wondered and did not completely understand. But this was just the first of many times Daddy talked to me about the life-giving and life-receiving links that connected us to the land. He stressed the honor and responsibility of caring for our farm, of loving what the Kaw people had also loved. He inspired in me a reverence for the generations that came before me on that prairie--for the Kaw people and for my ancestors, including Robert Lee Payne, who shortly after Emancipation left Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to homestead Flint Hills land.
The information about Hogg Town is taken from Greenbaum, Susan D. The Afro-American Community in Kansas City, Kansas: A History. Kansas City: Community Development Program, City of Kansas City, Kansas,1980.