In 1860, Saline County had 15,000 residents, including 5,000 enslaved African Americans. The collapse of the hemp market and emancipation in 1865 led many African Americans to leave farms and plantations, and many freedmen formed all-black settlements, including nearby Pennytown southwest of Arrow Rock and Cow Creek to the northwest. Separation did not spare them harsh, discriminatory, and sometimes violent treatment, yet African Americans in Saline County endured adversity and made significant contributions to their communities and the nation. Among them were William Henry Joseph Cutter Brown, known as Doc Brown, born around 1835 on the Arrow Rock plantation of Meredith Miles Marmaduke, who moved to Kansas City in 1868, became a celebrity, led city parades, and elevated cakewalking into a national art form linked to the rise of ragtime; Josephine Jackson Lawrence, born in 1929 and raised in Pennytown, whose collection and recording of the town’s history helped preserve the Pennytown Church and document the Black residents of Pennytown and Arrow Rock; James Milton Turner, born into slavery in 1839 and freed in 1843, who came to Arrow Rock on Nov. 7, 1869, while working for the Freedmen’s Bureau to investigate missing school funds for Black education, saw that a school opened in Brown’s Chapel Free Will Baptist Church, later became the first African American United States diplomat as ambassador to Liberia, served Missouri as assistant state superintendent of schools for African Americans, and helped establish Lincoln Institute; and Jacob Montgomery, enslaved at Brownsville, who during the 1830s preached powerfully to Black and white audiences across Saline County and won over many critics. Missouri called a constitutional convention on Jan. 6, 1865, and five days later delegates passed an ordinance abolishing slavery in the state, three weeks before Congress proposed the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.