The First Parade Ground at Fort Leavenworth

In eighteen twenty-seven, Colonel Henry Leavenworth selected this ground as the site of a new military outpost on the Missouri River. Around the parade ground his men raised the first crude permanent buildings of what they called Cantonment Leavenworth.

The location was deliberate. The Army needed a base to protect the Santa Fe Trail and to project American authority onto the Great Plains, where the fur trade was booming and tensions with Indigenous nations were rising. From this parade ground, soldiers marched out to escort wagon trains and enforce U.S. claims over territory that had barely been explored.

Fort Leavenworth grew into one of the oldest continuously operating military posts west of the Mississippi. It later housed the School of Application for Cavalry and Infantry, ancestor of the Command and General Staff College, became a critical hub for the Mexican-American War, and later held Confederate prisoners during the Civil War. The parade ground at its center is where it all began.