Higginsville, Missouri

To get to the battle of Lexington you practically have to pass through Higginsville, site of Confederate Memorial state park. This is the site of the Confederate Veterans home. From 1891 to 1950 Confederate veterans could live here and be taken care of. When there were enough veterans living here they had a working farm with dairy. Now it is a serene location with a Confederate cemetery, a chapel and some fishing ponds.

This has to be one of the simplest monuments I've ever seen, a plaque on a large boulder.

In the cemetery though is this impressive monument.

I was there a few days after a state wide flap about the Confederate flag and at that time the prevailing idea with the state park system was that they were not going to fly any flag here. It is appropriate for a Confederate flag to fly over Confederate graves but such common sense was not being followed then. Maybe eventually things smoothed over.

Here is the final veteran who lived here.

This grave actually has some of Quantrill's bones. I met a worker near the chapel who said they thought it was his arm. I don't know if there was any proof there or just a guess. If you search on find a grave you'll see that Quantrill's body was buried in Kentucky, dug up for the family (just to view), then spirited off to Ohio (where he was born), but somehow the skull and other bones made their way to Kansas. The skull eventually went to Ohio and the other bones were buried in Higginsville. A very strange story.

If you had a Confederate relative who lived in Missouri after the war they may have ended up living here at one time. On the park's website is a link to a list of applicants to the home, including their regimental info. You didn't need to have served in a Missouri unit, just have served in a Confederate unit and now being elderly in Missouri.