The Founding: 1854
Leavenworth’s origins are explosive, tied directly to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854.
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- The Rush: As soon as the territory was legally opened, a group of 32 men from Weston, Missouri, crossed the river to stake a claim. On June 12, 1854, they formed the Leavenworth Town Company.
- Bleeding Kansas: The city quickly became the epicenter of the ideological war between abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates. It was here that the first newspaper in the territory, the Kansas Weekly Herald, was printed—famously produced under an elm tree before a building had even been constructed.