Hickory Point, lying about 10 miles south of Lawrence, on the south side of the Wakarusa and on the old Santa Fe road, was a valuable piece of timber and prairie land, where some of the earliest settlers located. The first settlers were chiefly free-state men from Indiana, but subsequently others from the western states and from Missouri settled there. In the lower end of the grove a town called Palmyra was laid out early in the summer of 1855. In some cases the original settlers left their claims and returned east, several Missourians took the claims thus forfeited according to squatter laws, and in some cases fraudulently seized others. During the summer and fall this led frequently to disputes and sometimes led to personal violence and bloodshed. This was almost always the case where the contestants to the claim belonged to the conflicting political elements of the territory. Each faction would try to gather around them immigrants of their own political faith, and as the grounds were unsurveyed, with no courts of justice near, many angry contests arose over the ownership of land and collisions were not infrequent. An instance of this character took place at Hickory Point, Holloway, in his History of Kansas says, "led to what is termed the Wakarusa war." (q. v.)