My Visit to an Old Civil War Cemetery in Higginsville, Missouri

I've visited an old Civil War cemetery in a little town called Higginsville, Missouri. About 800 Civil War soldiers are at rest here. Many of the gravestones are old and weathered with time. There's a certain amount of peace and tranquility here. You really feel a deep connection to the past. A sort of timelessness pervades you. And right next to it, there's a little white chapel built in 1892 by the women who lived in the area for the cost of $1,200. You have to love the workmanship of these old buildings. There's a unique, solid quality to them that time itself seems to bring to life. And while standing inside the chapel, I felt like I was briefly at times transported back to a much simpler time. A time where things were easy to understand. Things didn't get overly complex back then. There was a right and there was a wrong. And they were simple to understand. Much easier to understand than the rights and wrongs of today. But there's a particular element in this cemetery that really stuck out and it lies way in the back of it. One simple tombstone with the name William Quantrill inscribed on it. Let's go there now and I'll tell you more about it. There are presumed to be about 800 Civil War graves at this site. And I'm going to show you a few of them. Let's walk through here. You can see some of these stones here with some of these dates, 1838, 1926, 1918. Some of these are pretty worn down, 1839 and 1926, pretty worn down. There's one, John Burton, 1846 to 1931, and he was actually part of General Sterling Price's regiment that fought at Wilson's Creek, it's a very famous battle in Missouri. There's the Battle of Wilson's Creek, and then there's the Battle of Lexington. And I'll tell you that, I'll tell you about that in a second here. Frederick Smith, 1840, 1936 Clark's Division, Alpha Windsor, 41 to 36. But here is one that some of you may know about, William Quantrill, Captain William Quantrill. Born in 1837, died the year the war ended in 1865. This guy had quite a history. Now, Captain Quantrill was known to be a guerrilla. He was actually one of the very few Confederate guerrilla soldiers of the Civil War. And what happened was, he was originally born in Ohio, and he moved down to Texas, and he met a guy, I forget the guy's name, but he was a Cherokee war chief. He learned ambush-style guerrilla tactics from this Cherokee war chief. Now, this was around 1860, 1861, right at the beginning of the Civil War. So what Quantrill did is he joined General Sterling Price's army in 1861, and he fought. He actually fought in the Battle of Wilson Creek, and he also fought in Lexington. Those were the two battles, two famous battles in Missouri. Both of them, the Confederate side won. Now, Missouri itself, the state, for most of the war, it was actually under Union control. But at the very beginning of the war, the governor was outwardly Union, but he actually was privately a Confederate on the Confederate side. So eventually the Union forces came in and pushed Sterling's army down to Arkansas. Now that whole time, William Quantrill was part of General Sterling Price's army. And it was not until late September of 1861 that Quantrill decided, hey, you know what? I'm just going to go off on my own. He left General Sterling Price behind, and he started a guerrilla gang, so to speak. And they went out and basically did their own thing. He was a Confederate guerrilla leader, and they basically went out and did whatever they wanted. He did a lot of killing. He went out and did a lot of damage. There's a famous battle in Lawrence, Kansas, I believe, where he slaughtered around 150 soldiers and also, I believe, civilians as well. It was a pretty bloody battle. He had a string of victories with his guerrilla gang. He got the group up to 450 people. But eventually, right around the time when General Lee surrendered, Quantrill and his gang, he was reduced down to maybe 10 people. And he was outnumbered, and they caught him. And they sent him, I believe, to a prison camp in Louisville, Kentucky, where he died of wounds in 1865 at the age of 27. So somewhat of an interesting figure in Civil War history. And again, we're looking at the graveyard here that surrounds him. Interestingly, his gravestone is at the very, if you look at this, right, this is the edge of the graveyard. And this is like way, way, way in the back. This is literally almost as far back as you can get. There's his gravestone right there, but you can see that's the front of the graveyard, and that's the big monument. For some reason, they put him way at the back of this graveyard. I don't know if there's any kind of meaning or symbolism behind that. It's called a Confederate cemetery, but from what I found out, a woman at the museum down the road here, she said it's a mixture of Union and Confederate soldiers. This is just outside of Higginsville, Missouri. It's probably about five miles off of Interstate 70. And if you get a chance to come down here, it's quite phenomenal. There's a chapel right there. I'm about to see if I can go into that and check it out. Okay, we are inside the chapel next to the cemetery. And it says here that it was built in 1892 for $1,200. The current stained glass window replaced the original pre-20s window that's featured in this picture. So 1892, and it appears, and there's a stained glass window that is mentioned. Not the original, but it appears that the majority of this is authentic. Really an amazing job on the ceiling. Hard to believe that this was built for $1,200. Looks like we have the original floors, very well maintained. We're standing outside the chapel, built in 1892, and this is obviously a historical landmark. Built in that same time period, actually just near the end of that stick style of architecture that we saw at the train depot. They still have that cross section of what they call stick work. And here you have a very, very steep, as you can see, a very steep roof, which is, and right there too, you can see. And that basically is your typical stick style component, where they have the steep roofs, they have the overhanging eaves there. They don't have the projecting bays on here, though. You know, they had quite simple handiwork back then, but they put a lot of effort into how they built their structures. They used very good lumber, and lumber was, lumber is probably one of the most important distinguishing characteristics between your late 19th century homes and buildings and your modern buildings of today. They had just really good quality lumber coming from gigantic trees in the forests. They didn't cut any quarters. They put a lot of pride into their work. So they took their time on building these structures, and that's why you see a lot of these still doing just fine 100 to 150 years later. And again, you see that steep roof there, which is one of the distinguishing characteristics of a stick style architecture from that time period. And even that roof right there is quite steep as well.