A crisp, white Civil War-era mansion overlooks the busy intersection at South State Line Road and 82nd Street, just to the east of the Missouri-Kansas border. The building is now a museum, and surrounded by suburbs, but when Alexander Majors built the house in 1856, it was on the Western edge of the United States.
Missouri was a slave state, and Majors, who was credited with founding the Pony Express, lived there with as many as 22 Black people, whom he kept as property. The men, women, and children served his family, and labored on his properties in Westport, Kansas City and Nebraska City.
For generations, very little was known about the people Majors held in bondage — until the spring of 2024, when Sarah Bader-King stumbled across their names while digging through historic property records…