Battle of Lexington State Historic Site

Lexington was a hemp town before it was a battlefield. Hemp for rope, with tobacco, coal, cattle and river trade, made its money, and enslaved people were about a third of Lafayette County's population. William B. Waddell, later a partner in the Pony Express, built a brick store and a hemp warehouse here, and in 1855 more than two hundred slaveholders gathered in Lexington to denounce the antislavery settlers moving into Kansas.

In September 1861 Colonel James A. Mulligan held the town for the Union with about 3,500 men dug in around the Masonic College on the bluff. Sterling Price's Missouri State Guard, about 15,000 strong, surrounded him and cut him off from water. On the evening of September 19, General Thomas Harris's men took hemp bales from the warehouses and soaked them in the river overnight so heated shot could not set them alight. On the 20th they pushed the bales forward as a moving breastwork, and that afternoon Mulligan surrendered his garrison. Oliver Anderson's Greek Revival house, beside the Union works and in use as a Union hospital, changed hands three times during the fight, and bullet holes and cannon damage are still in its walls.

The win raised State Guard hopes that the war could be won and made Missouri Unionists doubt they could hold the state. The visitor center tells the battle, and guides take visitors through the Anderson House and over the battlefield, now quiet ground of orchards and gardens close to I-70.