the town of bald eagle

Most of the bald eagles, as have the people, moved elsewhere but the little town of Lecompton soldiers on, hanging on to a small piece of American history. Here, in the original Capital of the Kansas Territory, the Lecompton Constitution was proposed and had it been ratified, Kansas would have been admitted as a slave state. Rigorous debates followed throughout the country but eventually free-staters rejected the idea and moved the capital to Topeka.

A few antebellum structures remain in the town, one of them the farmhouse pictured above. What's interesting about this house, besides the fact that the transition to large, round hay bales means the the house no longer serves as a home or a barn, are the carved sandstone columns, each carved from a single slab of stone, that hold up the porch.