Naming rights
Despite being a major force behind the establishment of many of the earliest towns in Kansas, the Massachusetts (and later, New England) Emigrant Aid Company never really settled on a strategy for naming them. (Except for one time when it did…)
The Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company was conceived during a burst of anti-slavery fervor in the northeastern US following the introduction of and the debate surrounding the Kansas Nebraska Act in the spring of 1854. But despite the ‘humanitarian’ intentions of the mission it espoused, it was also sold to potential donors as a money making opportunity. In today’s terms, the pitch was akin to investing in a business that could turn waste plastic into a clean fuel - an opportunity to support something that is good for society and make some money doing it. The MEAC planned on encouraging New Englanders to migrate en masse to Kansas by offering to offset the transportation cost and provide infrastructure (such as saw mills and hotels) for any community they might found. In exchange the settlers would provide the MEAC with prime lots of land in the town that could then be sold or developed for a profit.
But first, the MEAC needed to raise money to get the operation off the ground. Circulars and pamphlets were printed and distributed, speakers were dispatched to lyceums and churches, and letters were published in newspapers throughout the northeast. During this early stage, EE Hale, one of the organization’s founders even conceived of a kind of contest to reward communities that bought the most stock in the MEAC: having the first community in Kansas named after their town.
“It is recommended by your committee that the first settlement made by this company bear the name in the Commonwealth (Massachusetts) which shall have subscribed most liberally to the capital stock of the company to its last decennial valuation and that the 2nd settlement be named from that city next in order so subscribing”
This ‘for-profit’ stage of the MEAC was short-lived however. Naming contests like what EE Hale proposed never were implemented as stock subscription from the broader community proved challenging, and several of the more prominent members of the MEAC board (most notably Amos Lawrence) thought that the ‘money-making’ aspect called into question their motives for being involved with the efforts. The MEAC was soon reorganized under the name the New England Emigrant Aid Company as a ‘charitable’ organization.
At the same time the Emigrant Aid Company was sorting out its business plan, the Kansas Territory was formally opened to white settlement. The first group sponsored by the MEAC was directed towards an area just west of where the Wakarusa river joins the Kansas River, that had been scouted by agents of the MEAC previously. Although the directors of the MEAC never formally dictated the name for this nascent community, they would consistently refer to it as “the Wakarusa settlement” throughout the summer and autumn of 1854. The first edition of the MEAC-affiliated newspaper, the Herald of Freedom, while being printed in the east prior to its press being moved to Kansas, carried a dateline of Wakarusa, Kansas.
This reflected an unofficial but generally professed position by MEAC leaders to give communities Native American place names. Amos Lawrence, writing to Samuel Pomeroy (one of the company’s agents in Kansas) on Sept 17, 1854, noted, “As to names it is my decided opinion, that the Indian names of places, if they are not too harsh are the best.”
This sentiment would prove to be only partially successful in practice. While one early community would combine the names of the Osage and Potawatomi tribes to come up with the name Osawatomie for their town, the people at the presumptive Wakarusa settlement had an eye on securing resources to ensure their nascent town’s survival. Shortly after the second MEAC-sponsored group arrived in early September, the combined group formally organized their town and named it Lawrence, with some arguing that such a prominent early proponent of a free Kansas was worthy of the honor, and if it helped secure more resources for the community, all the better.
Amos Lawrence attempted to push back when informed of the decision, again asking that the name Wakarusa be used, but Charles Robinson, writing to him on behalf of the new townspeople, wrote on September 30th, 1854 that it was too late: “With regard to our name and your recommendations, your letter came too late to influence the action of the citizens. The name of ‘Wakarusa’ is inappropriate, as our city is not situated on the river by that name; besides, the interpretation of it is not often given in the most modest way. It is said to mean ‘not up? to the middle’”
A transcription of the original Charles Robinson letter to Amos Lawrence, provided to the Kansas State Historical Society
As people continued to pour into the territory in the spring of 1855, another community was being formed by emigrants looking to name it after a prominent Northeasterner, and again Charles Robinson was instrumental in the process - but this time in the other direction.
Among the northerners arriving in Lawrence in 1854 was Cyrus K. Holliday, a Pennsylvanian who saw an opportunity for railroad riches with the opening of the Kansas Territory. Robinson hoped to convince Holliday that Lawrence was the right town to invest in, but when that failed, he led Holliday and a small group of New England emigrants upriver to scout other locations, settling on what is now Topeka. According to a New Deal-era Federal Writers Project history of Topeka, Holliday wanted to name the new town Webster, after Daniel Webster, the famed anti-slavery legislator, but Robinson and others pressed for a Native American place name, with a NEEAC settler, Rev. Lum, suggesting the town be named after a word that was thought to refer to a kind of prairie root (or potato) important to the local Native American tribes’ diet. And so instead of Webster, the eventual capital of Kansas was named Topeka.
Farther up the Kansas River, another group of NEEAC sponsored emigrants had consolidated a number of small unaffiliated settlements into the town of Boston near established overland trade routes to Oregon and California and the US Army outpost of Ft. Riley, in March of 1855. Had a steamboat with a group of settlers from Cincinnati not run aground nearby that summer, the town might still be named Boston today. The group from Cincinnati had their own town company and government charter, and had hoped to found a community near what is now Junction City, but couldn’t make it any farther upriver. But according to their charter, any town they established had to be named Manhattan, so as part of the process of merging the efforts of the Northeasterners and the Ohioans, the town of Boston’s name was changed to Manhattan.
That name never set well with one key member of the MEAC, Dr. Thomas Webb, who mentioned again his preference for Native American place names when discussing his personal financial interest in Manhattan with a settler named Page on December 3, 1856:
“It seems a little singular, that I am likely to have ownership in a town, against the name of which I am so averse. Can it not now be changed? If so, there are any number of preferable ones. I have a great desire, as far as is practicable, to retain Indian names when euphonious and expressive.”
Which brings us full circle to an otherwise forgotten event at the tail end of the NEEAC’s town founding in Kansas, where money again was the driver behind the decision. While most of the communities established by the NEEAC - places such as Osawatomie, Lawrence, Topeka and Manhattan - are all well established in the firmament of the state’s history and growth, another town the NEEAC created had a very different genesis and course of its life: Batcheller, Kansas.
Batcheller appears to be the only directly named town of the NEEAC in Kansas. All of the other communities had their naming ultimately left up to the people who actually went there to start new lives. Batcheller was named as a perk for a donation to the NEEAC.
By 1856, fundraising for the NEEAC was in a bit of a crisis. The practice of sending speakers out on the lecture circuit had led to uneven returns and was being discontinued in favor of having local drives led by local figures. The NEEAC also devised a plan to approach leaders of certain trades and ask for larger donations from amongst these well-to-do men, with a perk if the group collectively committed $10,000 - the group could name a new town.
The first test of this plan came in late 1856 and it was a roaring success. Eli Thayer, the Company’s most passionate speaker, met with the leaders of the region’s burgeoning boot and shoe industry in Boston. It was certainly a good place to go looking for money. Enterprising New Englanders were transforming what had been a craftsmans’ trade of making bespoke shoes for individuals, into an industry creating footwear as a mass consumer product, and making new fortunes for themselves in the process. So in mid November Thayer met with a group of industry leaders and left with a pledge of $20,000.
Boston Evening Transcript on November 15, 1856
The group would meet a few weeks later and decide the names it wished to bestow upon two new Kansas towns: Batcheller and Claflin. The notes of the NEEAC’s executive board meeting on December 26, 1856, described the group’s decision and the approving votes of the board. NEEAC Secretary Webb would write a letter the next day to pass on the request to one of the organization’s agents in Kansas, George Pomeroy, along with the request to locate the towns along the same meridian as Osawattomie.
“Vote that Mr. Pomerory be requested to select and secure locations for two new towns; the one to be named Claflin, the other Batcheller.”
Naming a town Claflin could be easily understood. Lee Claflin and his son William ran a very successful shoe business and were highly active and vocal members of the anti-slavery movement in Massachusetts, and William Claflin was in attendance at the November meeting and put himself on the committee tasks with collecting the full amount of the pledged funds. But the other name selected to be honored with a town - Batcheller - was less obvious. Alfred Hubbard Batcheller was also at that meeting and heard Thayer speak, and like William Claflin agreed to help raise funds. He also committed $1,000, far and away the largest amount pledged by any of the attendees, and he did so in the name of the firm he worked for, T & E Batcheller Company, run by his uncle Tyler and his father Ezra. What makes that donation interesting is that the T & E Batcheller company had made its fortune by selling shoes for slaves.
A page from an 1857 accounting journal of the NEEAC, showing amounts collected from the “S & Leather Trade, Boston” highlighting the donation of the T & E Batcheller Co.
According to a paper presented at the 2016 Harvard History, Culture, And Society Workshop by Prof. Seth Rockman, “Innovation, Alienation, and the Russet Brogan: Plantation Provisioning and New England’s Industrial Revolution”, “Batcheller Brogans” were shoes designed specifically for the needs of slave owners in the South. They were an enormous source of profit for the T & E Batcheller Company, and would remain so right up to the Civil War - the Batcheller company had over $250,000 in orders on the books with Southerners that were wiped out when the conflict began.
1838 Men’s Russet Brogan, T. & E. Batcheller, North Brookfield, Mass. Courtesy North Brookfield Historical Society.
A H Batcheller was courting Emeline Walker, the daughter of prominent abolitionist Amasa Walker, at the time (he would marry her later in 1857) and this may help explain his desire to help keep Kansas a free state. But it doesn’t explain why he would want to attach his company’s name to the cause or desire such a public display of commitment by attaching the family’s name to a a NEEAC community in Kansas. Doing so could have had a major negative impact on the family business. As noted in the linked piece, the slave shoe trade was competitive and plantation owners had several manufacturers vying for their business. More importantly, the MEAC/NEEAC had created a panic throughout the South when it began operations. Southern newspapers would deliberately misinterpret the original charter granted to the MEAC to imply that nefarious Northern interests had millions of dollars in their coffers that would be used to simply pay people to go to Kansas to swamp any vote on slavery there. By making such a public display of solidarity, the Batcheller’s had to know that they were putting some of their business at risk.
But it seems that, in the end, it never became an issue for the Batchellers. This might be because, unlike the other NEEAC founded towns that whose names might appear in newspapers back east as violence flared in the Kansas territory, the town of Batcheller never really came to anything. Pomeroy did not follow the instructions regarding the meridian aligned with Osawatomie and founded the town much farther west, past Manhattan, which kept it away from the conflict that surged along the border with Missouri. The town did not attract many settlers in its earliest years and never would flourish, and would ultimately change its name to Milford. (It is unclear if agents of the NEEAC ever established a town named Claflin; the current town of that name was not founded until 1887.)