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.
“At the very bottom of this deed of trust was the names of nine enslaved people, some of them with very brief descriptions, like blacksmith, or their race, their age,” she says. “We had never seen these names before.”
Bader-King, the executive director of the John Wornall House and Alexander Majors House Museums, made the discovery when she was researching Majors’ bankruptcy records.
Listed among thousands of acres of land owned by Majors were the names of nine people: Amos, 45; Henry, 45; Sarah, 32; Charles, 30; John, 25; John, 21; Thomas, 21; Little John, 18; and Milly, 12.
“It was a really, really exciting discovery just for the museum. But then as I started digging more into the records, I realized that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of names of enslaved people hidden within these records,” Bader-King explains.
To preserve the information and make the documents more accessible, Bader-King created a free, online enslavement database for Jackson County. The site was officially launched in February 2026.
Bader-King says it’s an important step in reckoning with the history of slavery at the property.
“We think it's a really valuable public service that we are telling the full story of enslavement in Kansas City and Jackson County,” Bader-King says. “Especially on the border here, this is a very volatile area historically, so it doesn't do anyone a service to try to hide it or not talk about it.”
The project proved to be a massive undertaking. Bader-King says it also underscores how entrenched slavery was in local society. Legal records show that enslaved families were often divided by death, marriage and inheritance.
“You have people that otherwise did not enslave people, but they're using their labor,” she says. “They're renting them out. There are auctions on the courthouse steps that literally everybody who lived in Independence would walk past.”
Sifting through cursive legalese
To help sift through the historic documents, often written in cursive and steeped in legalese, Bader-King enlisted the help of the museum’s Director of Community Engagement, Jackie Berry.
Berry scoured for any references to the nearly 4,000 enslaved people who were estimated to live in Jackson County by 1860. She says she was surprised by the prevalence of female enslavers, who were often gifted enslaved people through inheritance or marriage contracts.
“There are several documents that I've seen where an enslaved person is held in trust for a woman who is marrying into a new family,” Berry says. “Often upon her death, that (enslaved) person would either go to her children or back to her father, rather than to her husband.”
The database includes historical documents, images, and quotations, and is searchable by name. Each entry shows a scan of the original document and includes a summary.
In addition to database access, the museum offers up to two hours of free research assistance to people researching their family genealogy who believe their ancestors were enslaved in Jackson County.
Many documents, like a deed of trust from 1835, help illustrate how deeply embedded slavery was in the local financial and legal system.
“William Hagrie puts five enslaved people in trust to John R. Swearington as collateral for a debt,” the deed reads. “If Hagrie fails to pay the debt, Swearington can sell as many of the enslaved people as needed for cash to settle the debt. Sally is the mother of the named Richard and Joseph. Wiley and Christine are husband and wife.”
In stark terms, the document spells out how a borrower in Jackson County could leverage enslaved people to secure a loan. At the same time, it preserves important information about the enslaved family, including their relationships to each other.
Unlike Alexander Majors, most slaveholders in Missouri owned fewer than 10 enslaved people. For the person who was enslaved, life in a border state like Missouri meant escape to a free state was possible, but the journey was perilous.
‘There’s power in knowing’
With funding from the Kansas City Monuments Coalition, an organization that works to tell understudied and unknown history in Kansas City, Berry and Bader-King have reached out to other institutions to help expand the database.
“Museums and historic sites in Kansas City are not competitors,” Bader-King explains. “Working with different organizations allows us to tell a full picture that goes beyond our little slice of Kansas City history.”
In early July they stopped by the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, where Executive Director Dr. Carmaletta Williams invited the pair to check out documents in the archive’s files.
“We can't do anything about enslavement, but we can do something about telling the truth and that's what we try to guide people towards,” Williams says, noting easier access to these documents could give people a deeper understanding of the region’s history.
“When we see people disavowing themselves from enslavement, it's because the public perception of those folks shifted,” she says. “But in their time, it was different.”
Williams says this new tool might also be able to help descendants of enslaved people trace their family history more easily.
“When we have people come here to research, we want them to find something positive, something to help them to hold onto and grasp and understand who they are and where they came from, because there’s power in knowing,” she says.
