Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and

Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book,

all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet most difficult of circumstances.

But in one case it took on a whole new meaning, one in which a group of people looking for acceptance

got much more than they bargained for, and they got out of there as quickly as they possibly could.

Henry S Club had a problem. In 1855 he was part of a collective facing a major societal hurdle.

They were vegetarians.

The problem wasn't their dietary choices.

It was because Club and his people were alone in a world of meat eaters, and they just

wanted to find a place where they felt like they belonged.

Aside from their abstinence from meat, they also refused to consume alcohol, tea, coffee,

tobacco, foul, and dairy products, making them closer to vegans than vegetarians, and they

stuck out like a sore thumb among everyone else.

Around the same time, the Kansas Territory became hotly contested between pro-slavery and abolitionist groups.

Gallons of blood was shed on both sides, resulting in a nickname for both the area and the time period, bleeding Kansas.

But the new territory also spelled opportunity for club

and his fellow vegetarians.

So he and about 50 families formed a new coalition called the Vegetarian Kansas Emigration

company with one goal to move to Kansas and establish a new community of their own.

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