Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Dunlap, KS

Dunlap is a city in Morris County, Kansas, founded in 1869 by Joseph Gage Dunlap, an Indian agent for the Kanza tribe, after the Kanza had migrated to Oklahoma, and it was incorporated in 1887.

Dunlap's post office was first established as Hillsborough on March 19, 1874, then reestablished as Dunlap on April 20, 1874, and it finally closed in 1988.

In the spring of 1878, Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a formerly enslaved man who had escaped to freedom in 1846, came to Dunlap and formed Singleton's Colony, which consisted of 200 Black families known as Exodusters who had fled the post-Reconstruction South.

In 1880 the Presbyterian Church founded the Freedmen's Academy of Kansas in Dunlap to educate African-American settlers, and in 1882 it served 90 male and 85 female students, 45 of whom were listed as ex-slaves.

Dunlap's population peaked at 408 residents in 1890, and around 1900 it was a chief shipping point for Morris, Lyon, and Chase counties on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway.

The Dunlap Colored Cemetery, also known as the Exoduster Cemetery, was established in 1880 in response to segregation, holds over a hundred African American graves, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 14, 2018, for its association with the Exoduster Movement and Pap Singleton.

Dunlap sits near the Neosho River, which has historically caused flooding in the town, and it covers just 0.25 square miles.

The 2020 census counted just 27 people, 15 households, and 9 families in Dunlap, down from 408 people in 1890.

Dunlap's last Black resident was buried in the Colored Cemetery on April 27, 1993, and the town is now often described as one of the ghost towns of Kansas.

Dunlap is served by the Morris County USD 417 public school district.