Buffalo Sculpture

If you have driven down 17th or 15th just east of the Brown V Board Nation Historic Site, you have seen this statue of a Buffalo (Concrete Bison Sculpture) in Cushinberry Park. Near the area that 15th and 17th streets merge together.

photo by Kevin Surbaugh

Originally at the campus of the now defunct Kansas Vocational Institute (KTI), that had been near 6th and Rice Road. It had been the schools mascot, that the students lovingly called "Old Buff."

about the institute:

The institute was known in Topeka as the “Western Tuskegee,” was the result of the work of Lizzie Riddick, a prominent member of the Colored Women’s Suffrage Association, and Edward Stephens. Riddick and Stephens successfully enlisted the support of Booker T. Washington and later the state of Kansas to establish the second oldest black college in Kansas (the first was Freedmen’s University, 1863).

Riddick and Stephens were elementary school teachers who in 1895 founded the kindergarten, sewing school, and reading room in Mud Town, an area of Topeka originally settled by black Exodusters from Mississippi and Louisiana in 1879. Booker T. Washington visited Topeka and endorsed their efforts in 1897, and in 1898, with funds from the black community, they purchased a building in the heart of Topeka's African American black business district on Kansas Avenue. The State of Kansas gave them $1,500 the following year. In 1900, Washington sent Tuskegee graduate William Carter to be the Institute's first president and the faculty began teaching industrial arts and scientific agriculture.
- See more at: BlackPast.org

In 1919 the State of Kansas had become the principle contributor to the school, took control and renamed it Kansas Technical Institute. 

photo by Kevin Surbaugh

photo by Kevin Surbaugh

Location:  15th and Jefferson

Artist/Sculptor: Unknown