Grinter Place State Historic Site

From 1855 to 1860 Moses Grinter operated a trading post. Troops traveling between Forts Leavenworth and Scott sometimes crossed the Kansas River on a ferry operated by Moses Grinter. A native of Kentucky, Grinter married Annie Marshall, a Lenape (Delaware) Indian whose people had been relocated to the Fort Leavenworth Indian Agency in the early 1830s. Moses and Annie Grinter's later home, a two-story brick house completed in 1857, is preserved today as the oldest home in Wyandotte County. The trading post sold about one hundred sixty types of goods (clothing, powder and bullets, perfume, sugar, and scissors, among other things) to the Delawares in exchange for cash and furs. The Grinters also farmed, raised poultry and livestock, and planted an apple orchard on their farmstead. During the Civil War one of their sons served in the Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry. More than 10,000 emigrant Indians from about two dozen tribes or nations were brought to Kansas. Two of the eight military posts spanning the permanent military Indian frontier, Fort Leavenworth and Fort Scott, tried to maintain order among the emigrant Indians and U.S. citizens along the borders of Indian Territory. This location is part of the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area. Extraordinary events in Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area forever changed America. In the nineteenth century, the nation turned its eyes to the Missouri-Kansas border, where peoples with diverse definitions of freedom collided, inciting and fueling a Civil War. The impact of these events is forever woven into the nation’s fabric. The heritage area focuses on three main themes: Shaping the Frontier, Kansas/Missouri Border War and the Enduring Struggle for Freedom. Learn more here.