Missouri's Confederate Soldiers Home

This monument stands in what was once the Confederate Soldiers Home of Missouri. In eighteen eighty nine, nearly a generation after the Civil War, aging Missouri veterans gathered for a reunion in Higginsville and resolved to care for their poorest comrades. Within a year they had raised enough to buy three hundred sixty five acres of farmland here, and in April of eighteen ninety one the first veteran moved in.

Over the next six decades the home sheltered roughly sixteen hundred people, veterans along with their wives, widows, and children, many of them with nowhere else to go. The state took over funding in the eighteen nineties. The home finally closed in nineteen fifty, after the last Confederate veteran in Missouri died, and the grounds, chapel, and cemetery became a state historic site that today remembers the more than forty thousand Missourians who fought for the South.