Paola's Post is the historical marker for the trading post established here by Baptiste Peoria in the 1840s, on the west side of Bull Creek just outside present-day Paola. The post served the Wea, Peoria, Kaskaskia, and Piankashaw — the displaced Algonquian-speaking peoples who had been pushed onto the Kansas reservations from Illinois and Indiana — and grew into a small commercial centre that eventually became the town of Paola in 1857.
The original buildings are long gone but a Kansas Historical Society marker explains the site's significance. It is a quiet spot a short drive west of downtown, worth a brief stop for anyone interested in the complicated and largely tragic history of the indigenous peoples removed to Kansas before they were displaced again by white settlement after 1854.