Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Lecompton, KS

Lecompton is a small city in Douglas County, Kansas, founded in 1854 on a bluff on the south bank of the Kansas River.

Lecompton was originally called Bald Eagle and was renamed in honor of Samuel Dexter Lecompte, chief justice of the territorial supreme court.

Lecompton was the de jure territorial capital of Kansas from 1855 to 1861 and served as the Douglas County seat from 1855 to 1858.

Lecompton was the center of pro-slavery power in Kansas Territory during the violent period known as Bleeding Kansas, while nearby Lawrence was the free-state stronghold.

In the fall of 1857, a convention meeting in Constitution Hall drafted the Lecompton Constitution, which would have brought Kansas into the Union as a slave state; Congress ultimately rejected it.

Constitution Hall, built in 1856, still stands in Lecompton as a National Historic Landmark and a Kansas state historic site.

Congress appropriated 50,000 dollars for a territorial capitol building in Lecompton that was never finished, and the foundation that was completed later became the base of Lane University.

The old Lane University building is now the Territorial Capital Museum, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's parents met and married while they were students at Lane University in the mid-1880s.

In its 1850s heyday Lecompton had more than 1,000 residents, several hotels and four churches, and it was nicknamed the 'Wall Street of the West.'

Lecompton today promotes itself as the birthplace of the Civil War, 'where slavery began to die.'