Civil War History Marked in Stone

In today’s world, the tolerance for monuments to the “Lost Cause” are under attack. Although Kansas City doesn’t have large monuments in public spaces like New Orleans and Charleston, the area was under intense fighting as a severed line between Union and Confederacy.

Confederate monument in Forest Park, St. Louis
Photo courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch

There are small memorials to both sides of the fighting in private cemeteries across the area. One memorial erected by a local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy remained practically unnoticed in the middle of one of the busier intersections in town until a resident, likely inspired by the very-public removal and scrutiny of Southern statues being removed around the country, called attention to it.

Erected in 1934 and donated to the city, the monument “In Loving Memory to the Loyal Women of the Old South” originally graced parkland on the Plaza. It was moved to 55th and Ward Parkway in 1958 and remained camouflaged as millions of car raced passed it over the years.

It was simply another statue in the center of Ward Parkway surrounded by trees and green spaces.

This cement bench and shaft was in honor to the women who suffered during the strife of the war. Other large monuments- like Robert E. Lee in New Orleans- were met with cheers and tears as they were torn down. A St. Louis monument to the Confederate dead in Forest Park was disassembled and hidden from view in June 2017. The memorial to the women of the South remained untouched and unoffending until all hell broke loose in the media.

DOC Monument that sat at 55th and Ward Parkway, removed August 2017 to
an undisclosed location

All of these monuments have one thing in common-

They were on public parkland and in public spaces.

In Forest Hill Cemetery, 75 unmarked graves are a part of this area’s Civil War history. This Confederate burial ground wasn’t their first resting place; they were first buried where they fell, then moved to a small burial ground and finally made their way to an area marked with a monument - a monument that remains in a quiet, undisturbed cemetery in the heart of our city.

This is a place that should remain untouched.

Byrum’s Ford to the Gettysburg of the West

Gen. Sterling Price, CSA

On 63rd St. north of the Kansas City Zoo is parkland dedicated as the Big Blue Battlefield Park. This place, also known as Byram’s Ford, is the gateway to the showdown that happened just south of Brush Creek. At the Battle of Westport, Confederate Gen. Sterling Price, with approximately 8,500 troops- some of which were bushwhackers- launched an attack against 22,000 men led by Union Gen. Samuel R. Curtis on October 22-23, 1864.

The numbers speak to the outcome; this was the end of Price’s Raid on Missouri and the last major Confederate military operation west of the Mississippi.

Gen. Sterling Price’s defeat at the Battle of Westport would have the bushwhackers following him south, thus virtually ending guerrilla warfare along the border. 1,500 soldiers were killed, captured and wounded in what many would coin “The Gettysburg of the West.”

Burial of the Unknown Confederate Casualties

The healing process post-war for those a part of “The Lost Cause” was to memorialize their memories in speeches and in stone. During Reconstruction, no one had the money to invest in the proper burial of so many that fell on the battlefields.

Around 1866, a local man named George W. Briant told some of his friends that if they would remove the bones of these Confederate soldiers from the trenches, he would give them a proper burial place.

Briant deeded a small fraction of his land to the Byram’s Ford Internment Association so that men hastily buried along the battleground could be placed in a proper cemetery. The cemetery was on the southeast corner of current-day Troost Ave. and Self Ave. (now Gregory), and they started removing unknown soldiers to this location. The cemetery became known as both the Confederate Soldier’s Cemetery and the Self Cemetery.

Overlay map on an 1877 atlas showing the location of the Confederate Cemetery. The area is marked with a cross and "Confed"

Even though today we mark the location of the Battle of Westport at Loose Park, the battle was much, much larger than this and included thousands of acres of farmland. The Battlefield Trust places the core battle area as just north of the Plaza, extends to Forest Hill Cemetery to the south, from State Line to the west and east to where Research Hospital is today. Just south of the Ward house (now 55th and Ward Parkway), over a dozen soldiers with no names or ranks known were buried in the trenches. Judge A.M. Allen of Westport commented, “I saw those Confederate buried the day they were killed.”

Col. Upton Hays 

Those unknown soldiers were moved to this location.

On May 20, 1871, thousands gathered at the little burial ground to honor five bodies that had been removed from local farms that were part of the Battle of Westport. They had been interred without known names or ranks.

Joining these unknown soldiers at the Confederate cemetery was one colonel idolized for his service. Col. Upton Hays, a 30-year-old local man-turned-militant, had fallen in Newtonia, Mo. in 1862 with a bullet through the head. Earlier in the summer before his death, Upton Hays and Dick Yeager, one of Quantrill’s lieutenants, had arrived in Westport with six others. They went to the home of Dr. Boggs and “demanded a large Union flag known to be in his charge, which of course he was compelled to deliver over.”

According to Deryl P. Sellmeyer in Jo Shelby’s Iron Brigade, “[Hays] had used the flag as the lining for his overcoat, and it formed part of the shroud in which he was buried.”

It was at his family’s wishing that Col. Upton Hays be re-interred at the only Confederate cemetery in Jackson Co. Those present when he fell were able to identify the grave outside of Newtonia, dig him up and carry him back to Jackson Co.

Civil War soldiers at Battle of Westport reenactment
Courtesy battleofwestport.org

As the crowd gathered, words of honor were bestowed upon the fallen Confederate colonel. “Col. Upton Hays was a Missourian. He was a man that never knew an hour of fear. . . He was brave, generous, true, devoted, noble- a patriot.”

Present also on this monumental day was James Barnes Yager (1809-1883), a man who served two terms at the state legislature and five terms as a judge in Jackson Co. His son, Richard Francis “Dick” Yeager, was a “notorious Missouri guerrilla” who served under Quantrill as one of his trusted lieutenants.

During the Border Wars, Yeager’s name graced headlines across the country as being a tyrant torturing Kansas towns. He sacked Shawneetown, Blackjack and was present at the Lawrence Massacre. At just 25 years old, Dick had developed quite the reputation.

As early as June 1864, it was reported by Union soldiers that Dick Yeager had been killed near the Jackson/Lafayette Co. border. News spread like wildfire, so when newspapers reported in early August 1864 of his death in Arrow Rock, the headlines read “Dick Yeager Killed Again.”

From the Wyandotte Commercial-Gazette, Aug. 6, 1864

The accepted death of Dick Yeager is that of the encounter in August 1864. As guerrillas robbed safes and stores in Arrow Rock, it was said that Yeager was shot through the top of the head. Two doctors in Arrow Rock examined the wounds and “thought they were of such character he could not recover, his brains exuding from two places.”

The guerrillas, with Dick in tow, we were said to have headed back to Jackson Co.

So when the little Confederate cemetery at the corner of Self Ave. and Troost was dedicated, it was only proper that Dick Yeager be re-interred there as well. Due to the complications of his death date, the stone today simply reads “1864.”

Shelby's Last Stand marker inside
Forest Hill Cemetery

Confederate Cemetery in Danger

By 1890, as roads were being widened, the cemetery that had simple rocks marking those buried there was being threatened. It was proposed in the Kansas City Star that they “may move bodies to Forest Hill and erect an appropriate monument.” Forest Hill Cemetery, started in 1888 and built upon the land of David Self (namesake of the Confederate cemetery), was just across the street from the infringed-upon cemetery and held 320 acres of land between Troost Ave. and Prospect Ave.

By this point, at least 70 unidentified bodies had been moved to the little space. Many of these soldiers were said to have served under Gen. Jo Shelby.

Rather fittingly, Forest Hill sat on the site of Gen. Jo Shelby’s last battle against the Union troops. Today, there is a marker inside the cemetery commemorating “Shelby’s Last Stand.” It was stated that the Confederate cemetery held the remains “among the best and bravest in Shelby’s command.”

Clipping from Elsmore Enterprise, Feb. 19, 1897

Between 1893 and 1894, the seventy-something bodies of Confederate soldiers along with Col. Hays were moved for a third and final time to lots donated by Forest Hill Cemetery.

Today, the location of what was once Jackson County's only Confederate cemetery is a car lot surrounded by large chain link fence and barb wire.

When Gen. Jo Shelby, then a 67 year old U.S. Marshal of the Western District, fell ill with pneumonia in February 1897, the discussion began as to where was a fitting place to bury the Confederate hero. The Ex-Confederate Veteran’s Association owned many lots near where the 70-something graves had been moved from the Self Cemetery, so it was determined they would make space for Shelby and his whole family.

Gen. Jo Shelby

Stephen Regan, a prominent Kansas Citian and Confederate veteran, was part of the Ex-Confederate Association’s committee that helped to move the remains from the old cemetery to Forest Hill. He had called on Jo Shelby weeks before his death and said that the old General had told him, “Captain, have you any room for me in that burying ground out at Forest Hill for me? When I die, I want to be buried there among my old soldiers.”

When Gen. Jo Shelby passed away peacefully in his home in Adrian, Mo. on Feb. 13th, the family decided “to bury General Shelby beside his comrades of the Confederacy in Forest Hill cemetery, Kansas City.”

The Movement for a Monument

The bodies had been moved together inside Forest Hill, but there still was no monument to mark them. At the turn of the century, the Daughters of the Confederacy moved to change this. They hosted balls, concerts and lectures to raise the $5,000 needed.

Dr. Jeremy Neely, Civil War and military history professor at Missouri State University, understands the influx of the movement for monuments during this time period. “I think that Confederate memorials say as much, and perhaps more, about the people who raised them and the period in which they were erected than the people of the Civil War generation,” Neely commented.

The monument "In Memory of Confederate Dead" was erected in
1902 by United Daughters of the Confederacy 

Memorial Day 1902, thousands gathered, including several hundred ex-Confederate soldiers, near the southeast corner of Forest Hill to see the monument “In Memory of Our Confederate Dead” unveiled. The project was backed by some of the most prominent men of the city.

They had talked of placing the monument on The Paseo or another spot on the battlefield; however, many men, including former mayor of Kansas City Turner Gill, believed Forest Hill was the most appropriate place because “that is where the bodies lie of the men whose memory it is proposed to perpetuate.”

Today, we should be glad the monument made it inside private gates.

The Monument Today

It’s hard to miss the monument inside Forest Hill Cemetery, yet so many don’t know it is there. Perched upon the top of a granite shaft high above the air is a Confederate soldier facing north. Inscribed on the monument reads: Erected by the Kansas City Chapter, 149 UDC, to the memory of 75 Confederate soldiers representing the states of Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois who fell at the Battle of Westport, October 23, 1864.

Dr. Neely believes that monuments are a part of our history. “Situated in highly public places, such as parks and cemeteries, monuments weren't just history, a remembering of what had happened in a particular place, but a conscious celebration of one person, event, or part of the past that civic leaders decided were worthy of honor.”

Today, we know that only one side of history- the history of the Lost Cause- is represented on this monument erected in the shadows of the Jim Crow era. “One of the most glaring problems with these Jim Crow era monuments was that they reflected the values and nostalgia of only one part of the body politic--white former Confederates,” Neely said.

Unlike the monument removed in 2017 public land at 55th and Ward Parkway, this monument amongst fallen soldiers rests on private property and many men that fought for the Lost Cause are buried all around it. It’s not the only remaining marker to Confederate soldiers in the area, but it holds importance in the fight to save those unmarked graves of fallen men left in the trenches of the battlefield.

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