Kinsman Monument
Near Omaha, Iowa
In the Soldiers' Circle of Fairview Cemetery here in Council Bluffs stands a Civil War monument, ringed by four cannons. It honors Colonel William Kinsman, a Council Bluffs man who became the commanding officer of the Twenty Third Iowa Volunteer Infantry. He had begun the war in the Fourth Iowa under Grenville Dodge.
On May seventeenth, eighteen sixty three, Kinsman was leading his regiment in a charge against Confederate lines at the Big Black River bridge, near Vicksburg, Mississippi, when he was mortally wounded. More than seventy six thousand Iowans fought for the Union, and roughly thirteen thousand never came home. Kinsman was one of them.
In recent years new headstones have been placed around this circle for Union veterans whose graves had gone unmarked for over a century.
