The townsite was purchased and organized in 1856 from and by Wyandots for development as a port-of-entry for Free Staters settling further within the Kansas Territory,[2] with construction starting in 1857.

[3] One of several villages hugging the narrow bank of the Missouri River under the bluffs, the town was established as part of the resistance to stop the westward spread of slavery.

Planners seeking to establish a Free-State port noted the site's advantages: At a point six miles above the mouth of the Kansas river, on Wyandotte Indian land, they found a fine natural rock ledge where the river ran along the bank six to twelve feet deep, making a convenient landing.

Quindaro became a legendary port for fugitive slaves and, later, blacks arriving as contraband (escapees) during the American Civil War.

Clarina Nichols[12] was a writer for the Quindaro Chindowan, a friend of Susan B. Anthony, and fellow crusader for the rights of women and children.

[7][15] Having reached a peak population of 600, the booming commercial townsite quickly went bust due to a nationwide economic depression, and a failed campaign to attract a railroad.

With the American Civil War, the Union Army recruited away many young men, and only few farming families stayed.

After being abandoned, the early lower commercial townsite became overgrown, with some areas covered by earth falling from the bluffs.

The Reverend Eben Blachly had been a farmer in Dane County, Wisconsin, one of the early pioneers who had migrated from Pennsylvania.

According to Blachly family legend, he was nearly hung as a "Northern spy" while trying to find his oldest son, a Union soldier who had been captured by the Confederates.

After praying out loud for the welfare of their souls (the rebels were about to hang an innocent man), they took the noose off his neck and sent him home to Wisconsin.

This traumatic experience, apparently, led him to dedicate his life to helping former slaves by organizing the Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University), which was chartered in 1867, and which he ran until his death in 1877.

Its principal in 1872, when the state legislature added a four-year normal school, was Charles Henry Langston, a leading black abolitionist and activist, educator, and politician in Ohio and Kansas.

"[16] In the early 1900s, Western University added a full industrial curriculum, with buildings to house livestock and another for a laundry.

Because of the significance of the town, the townsite has been designated an archaeological district on the National Register of Historic Places.

[4] In 1996, the University of Kansas sponsored an oral history project, in which more than a dozen professors interviewed those among the nearby African-American community for their family accounts of Quindaro.

In December 2007, the Kansas Humanities Council awarded a grant to the Concerned Citizens of Old Quindaro, Kansas City, for In Unity There is Strength: The African American Experience, an exhibit to interpret the history of former slaves who escaped to Quindaro from across the Missouri River in the mid-19th century.

[17] In 2018, Quindaro community stakeholders including historians, archeologists, scholars, and activists began resolving decades of struggle over how to manage the historical site.