The Kansas Historical Society announced it will partner with other Kansas and Missouri organizations to digitize items from their Civil War collections. The Kansas City Public Library recently received a grant from the Missouri State Library and will use those funds to facilitate the planning phase of this major historical digitization initiative, called The Missouri-Kansas Border: Where the Civil War Really Began.

This project is part of a cooperative effort between organizations on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas border to unify diverse collections related to the Civil War in Northwest Missouri and Northeast Kansas. The
$43,469 grant will provide for an innovative plan to develop an engaging, interactive web site that will feature a wide range of digitized resources free and open to the public.

This region was known as a hotbed of conflict in the 1850s and 1860s as pro and antislavery forces engaged in violent guerilla attacks on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas Border. The Battle of Westport, fought in present-day Kansas City, Missouri, in October 1864, is still remembered as the “Gettysburg of the West.”

Kansas Historical Society State Archives and Library Director Pat Michaelis said, “With the upcoming sesquicentennial of the Civil War, we are pleased to participate in this project that will make some of our rich Civil War era documents available online. The Kansas-Missouri border during the Bleeding Kansas period and our early statehood years was the scene of ongoing armed conflict that helped ignite the Civil War. This project involving cooperation of institutions on both sides of the border symbolizes that animosity does not need to continue forever.”

Project partners include the Missouri Valley Special Collections at The Kansas City Public Library; National Archives at Kansas City, serving the Central Plains Region; Kansas State Historical Society; Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas; Western Historical Manuscript Collection and LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri–Kansas City; Mid-Continent Public Library; and Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area. A wide variety of other local organizations and individuals will also contribute relevant materials to the project.