The oldest fort west of the Mississippi River is an enormous operation that’s been serving the nation since 1827.
And although it sits lower than 40 miles from downtown Kansas Metropolis, Fort Leavenworth is surprisingly straightforward for many people to miss.
That’s ironic, as a result of the fort’s location, excessive on the Missouri River bluffs, was chosen for its strategic worth. (Lewis and Clark famous the deserves of the location once they visited in 1804.)
George Pettigrew believes the time has lastly come to acknowledge the very important position Fort Leavenworth performed in America’s westward growth. And nonetheless performs at present.
As chairman of the Frontier Museum of the U.S. Army Basis, he’s working to unveil a brand new world-class facility by 2027, the fort’s two hundredth birthday.
Pettigrew is the nice grandson of a Buffalo Soldier—one of many Black People who started serving within the U.S. Army instantly after the Civil Warfare.
At Fort Leavenworth, Buffalo Troopers manned the ninth and tenth Cavalries. They’re commemorated by a sculpture that Colin Powell devoted in 1992.
“What occurred right here modified the world,” Pettigrew says, including that Buffalo Troopers have been only one side of that.
Fort Leavenworth, he’s satisfied, was uniquely positioned as each portal and protector for hundreds of settlers and explorers who handed by means of on their technique to lands unknown.
It was additionally place the place the navy educated a few of its best minds.
“What this fort has meant to the event of the USA exists nowhere else,” Pettigrew states proudly.
Artifacts and displays testifying to that historical past are at present displayed within the Frontier Army Museum—a cramped, low-slung WWII period briefing corridor. Even its curator admits lots of the fort’s residents and common guests in all probability don’t know the museum exists.
To make issues worse, it’s on the improper facet of the gates.
“Very daunting.” That’s how Brigadier Common Bryan Wampler, USA (Retired) describes the method required for many of us to get onto the bottom. For a lot of civilians, he says, “it’s scary… and simpler for them to not come on.”
That’s why the museum that he and Pettigrew are envisioning might be constructed outdoors the gates—nonetheless on the fort’s grounds, however with out the armed guards.
Ideally, they are saying, it may be nestled within the midst of hills, timber and trails; an open and welcoming construction that’s in sync with the pure world round it.
Robert Riccardi, an architect on the Kansas Metropolis design agency Multistudio, is aware of it may be completed. He factors to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Museum in North Dakota as nice examples.
“The straightforward factor to do can be put it up on the flat land,” Riccardi says whereas tromping right into a ravine simply north of Leavenworth’s Metropolitan Avenue. “The extra fascinating factor goes to be placing it down right here.”
Wherever it’s constructed, and nonetheless it appears to be like, after building is accomplished, the ability might be turned over to the Heart for Navy Historical past in Washington, D.C. The middle has entry to hundreds extra artifacts within the military’s assortment. They’ll create the shows and handle the brand new museum’s operation going ahead.
Gained’t all this be extremely costly? Most probably.
However Wampler is hesitant to set a price ticket till the ultimate designs are chosen. He does say it can current a “vital fundraising alternative”—one he’s assured that philanthropic organizations and members of the navy group worldwide will embrace.
For the Kansas-born brigadier basic, that is one other of the numerous issues his thirty two years of service ready him for. As Pettigrew places it, “The Bryan I’ve gotten to know is a doer. He’s not a talker. You set the mission, you set the mission parameters, you then make it occur.”
“I owe an important deal to the navy,” is Wampler’s response. “And if I may give again in slightly approach, I believe it’s worthwhile. And I believe it’s crucial.”
It’s additionally necessary to each he and Pettigrew that the brand new Museum of the Frontier expands its narrative to incorporate extra tales from extra views, together with these of the Indian tribes whose lands have been misplaced alongside the way in which.
“We wish to inform a extra full story, not an offended story,” Pettigrew says. “We wish to applaud the efforts of all these individuals—immigrants, those that have been right here first, those that got here. All of them contributed a method or one other, and so they all have a component.”
©2024 The Kansas Metropolis Star. Go to kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company, LLC.
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