All Stories: 175
Stories
Concordia Missouri St. Paul's College
In 1883, Paster Biltz, his congregation at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Concordia Missouri, as well as sister congregations in Emma and Alma Missouri, insisted on the need for a school in the western district of the Lutheran Church Missouri…
Concordia Missouri Train Caboose
Railroads came to Missouri via the Missouri Pacific Railroad. This railroad started in St. Louis and would stretch all the way to Kansas City. Though construction was started in 1851, it took 14 years to complete.
Lafayette County, seeing the…
Emma Missouri Civil War Massacre Monument
September 27, 1864, marked one of the bloodiest guerilla conflicts in Missouri throughout the war. It was on this date in Centralia, Missouri 400 bushwhackers led by William "Bloody Bill" Anderson killed all but 32 out of 155 new Union…
Concordia Missouri Civil War Massacre Site Marker
At the start of the Civil War, Lafayette County had the fourth-highest slave population of any county in the state behind just St. Louis, Jackson, and Buchanan. So, despite being officially unaffiliated, the militia which had been raised in…
Missouri's Little Dixie African American History Tour
Each of the places along this historic tour takes one through the important locations of African American history as this group progressed from enslaved people into 'freedom' in Saline County, Missouri. As you will see, when slavery…
Concordia Missouri Franz J. Biltz
It is difficult to discuss the history of Concordia without first discussing Franz Julius Biltz. Born in Mittelfrohna, then part of the Kingdom of Saxony now Germany in 1825, Biltz became an orphan at age twelve. His half-sister, Ms. Louise Volker,…
Concordia Missouri Marker
Starting in 1847, a stagecoach passed through Freedom Township twice a week as it traveled between Sedalia and Lexington. In 1851, a relay station was built along this road 3 miles east of St. Paul's church known as Cook's Store. When a…
Chillicothe Missouri Stone Music Hall Store
Spencer A. Stone was born on April 1, 1853 in Connorsville, Wabash County, Indiana to Kentucky native Spencer A. Stone Sr. and his wife Miss Ellen Daily. The death of his parents at an early age, left him an orphan. When he was fifteen years old, he…
Chillicothe Missouri Jenkins Hay Rake & Stacker Co.
Marion R. Jenkins was born in Audrain county on August 15, 1854. His parents Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Jenkins lived on a farm in Browning, Missouri of Linn County. After quitting the farm, M. R. Jenkins became the owner of the Jenkins Hay Rake &…
Chillicothe Missouri State Industrial Home for Girls
The State Industrial Home For Girls was approved by the Thirty-Fourth General Assembly of Missouri on March 30, 1887. Based on a cottage management plan and a domestic industry instruction program required by law, $50,000 was appropriated and the…
Chillicothe Missouri Luella Theatre
The Luella Theatre was the first opera house in Chillicothe, Missouri, to serve the patrons of the city for not only entertainment but as a place for social organization gatherings for important events in the late nineteenth century. In January…
Chillicothe Missouri Federal Building
The Federal Building and Post Office jointly located in one building on the corner of Locust and Clay streets in Chillicothe, Missouri, was constructed in a grand rectangular size, with three-floor levels in the Beaux-Arts architectural style, which…
Lexington Missouri Machpelah Cemetery
The Machpelah Cemetery in Lexington, Missouri is one of the oldest and continuously used cemeteries in the state. It began as the Waddell Family cemetery in 1839, when the first burial occurred. In 1849 Bradford Waddell donated the cemetery to the…
Lexington Missouri Historical Museum
The Lexington Missouri Historical Association and Museum is currently housed in the former Cumberland Presbyterian Church that was built in 1846. The Historical Association and Museum tells the history of Lexington, Missouri so it can be shared and…
Lexington Missouri Wentworth Military Academy
Stephen G. Wentworth originally founded the Wentworth Male Academy in 1880 in Lexington, in honor of his son after he died in 1879 and in 1882 it was renamed the Wentworth Military Academy. At the time of the founding of the Wentworth Male Academy, …
Chillicothe Missouri Tour
Livingston County is located in northern Missouri north of the Missouri River that borders the Grand River. The land has several small streams with even smaller twisting water branches that flow southeast and drain into the Mississippi river. The…
Sedalia Missouri The Harris House
Joseph E. Imhauser, a local businessman, built the three-story Harris House in 1896 located at the corner of 705 Sixth Street and S. Harrison Avenue. Architect, W. S. Epperson, designed the home and Jerome Moyer served as contractor. The building…
Sedalia Missouri American Red Cross
After the Battle of Solferino in 1859, Henry Dunant from Switzerland organized the European Red Cross Movement to train national relief societies that could provide neutral care during war. In 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross…
Lexington Missouri Tour, Lafayette County Court House
The Lafayette County Court House in Lexington, Missouri opened in 1847. It was the third county courthouse built in Lexington. The first court house was built in 1825 and was destroyed by fire on July 4th, 1831.
The second court house, built on…
Sedalia Missouri German Evangelical Church
The German Evangelical Church of the West was formed on October 15, 1840, in Gravois, Missouri. It united the various German church denominations of Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana. In 1866, the organization changed its name to the German…
Blind Boone in Warrensburg
The park that today is known as Blind Boone Park once served as the park for African American residents of Warrensburg up until the Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, KS Supreme Court ruling that mandated the integration of public…
Sedalia Missouri Hotel Bothwell
The Bothwell Hotel of Sedalia Missouri opened in 1927 on 103 East 4th Street and 317-321 South Ohio Avenue in Sedalia, Missouri. John Homer Bothwell, a prominent businessman in Sedalia, paid for the construction of the hotel. John H. Bothwell was…
Blind Boone in Warrensburg
John William Boone was born on May 17, 1864, to Rachel Boone in Miami, Missouri, in a Union army camp occupied by the Seventh Militia, Company I. Rachel Boone had been enslaved at birth in 1843 in Kentucky. It is unclear just exactly who enslaved…
Sedalia Missouri Lincoln/C. C. Hubbard School
Before the Civil War, a Missouri law prohibited education for African Americans. After emancipation in 1863, the state’s constitution was revised that allowed at least twenty black children from the ages of six to twenty that lived within the…
Sedalia Missouri Pettis County Doughboy Statue
The sculptor Ernest Moore Viquesney of Spencer, Indiana, created his stone design of “The Spirit of the American Doughboy” statue to immortalize the importance of what the soldiers were and had sacrificed in the Great War. In December of 1920, his…
Sedalia Missouri Liberty Park
Joseph D. and Frank E. Sicher, brothers, created Sedalia's first public recreation park. The Sicher family came from Austria and migrated to St. Louis, Missouri, when Joseph was ten years old. In 1872 the family moved to Sedalia and began…
Blind Boone in Warrensburg
John Lange, Jr., was born enslaved in Harrisburg, Kentucky on October 4, 1840 to a free man and an enslaved mother. During the Civil War he worked with his father as a butcher and at the end of the Civil War the Lange family moved to Columbia…
Sedalia Missouri Sedalia Public Library
A group of prominent individuals from Sedalia met in White's Hall on Ohio street and formed the Sedalia Library Association in 1871 and established the community's first privately-funded library and reading room. The first library was…
Sedalia Missouri Katy Depot
Formerly the Tebo & Neosho Railroad line, The Missouri, Kansas, & Texas train tracks ran from Denison, Texas to Fort Scott, Kansas, and on to Sedalia, Missouri. The Sedalia to Fort Scott, Kansas portion of the railroad was completed by…
Blind Boone in Warrensburg
When Willie was eight, Rachel Boone married Harrison Hendricks and moved into his home, which sat "just back of the old Land Fike's Mill [Eureka Mills] on Mill Street." Melissa Fuell Cuther noted: "The house was a one-room log…