Just a 40-minute drive north of Kansas City along the banks of the Missouri River sits the town of Weston, Missouri. With its historic downtown district founded in 1837, rolling hills and eclectic shops, Weston is the poster child for Midwestern Americana. But this quaint town wasn’t always an idyllic escape from the city.
Back in the mid-1800s, Weston was the second-largest port in Missouri, behind St. Louis only. The town’s early economic successes were in large part due to the region’s booming hemp industry, which was enabled through the widespread use of slave-based labor.
"By 1840, there were 300 people in Weston; by 1850, it's well to 5,000 people, and a third of them were Black, and most likely, all of them were enslaved," Angela Hagenbach told KCUR's Up To Date.
Hagenbach, a renowned Kansas City jazz singer turned historian, and her sister, Joyce Johnson, had been researching their family line for over a decade when they discovered their mother's family were brought as enslaved people to Weston in the early 1840s.
In 2021, Hagenbach and a group of close friends came together to create the Black Ancestors Awareness Campaign of Weston (BAAC), a nonprofit that uncovers and documents the lives and contributions of Weston’s Black forebears.
Charter member Phyllis Becker hopes the work the organization is doing in Weston, including its annual Juneteenth Heritage Jubilee, will serve as inspiration for other communities in the region.
"And so I think how this has worked, in our approach and our partnerships with the town, could really be a template for other small towns to kind of uncover their histories as well," says Becker.
4th Annual Juneteenth Heritage Jubilee: Honoring Weston's Historic Black Ancestors, 11-4 p.m. Saturday, June 15 at the Weston Red Barn Farm, 16300 Wilkerson Rd., Weston, Missouri 64098. Free.
- Angela Hagenbach, founder of the Black Ancestors Awareness Campaign of Weston (BAAC)
- Phyllis Becker, charter member of BAAC
- Rebecca Ehrich, charter member of BAAC
