Kansas City & the Western Border

The cargo of a sidewheeler that sank in 1856, dug out of a Kansas cornfield in 1988 and 1989 and shown in the River Market, from boots and buttons to jarred pickles.

The Toothman farm in Bates County that soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry fortified as Fort Africa before their fight on the burning prairie on October 29, 1862.

The Anderson House and the Missouri River bluff at Lexington, where the Missouri State Guard rolled river-soaked hemp bales toward the Union lines in September 1861.

A reconstructed 1808 fort and government trading house on a Missouri River bluff at Sibley, where Osage leaders signed the treaty that gave up most of present Missouri.

The Independence house Harry Truman lived in for half a century without owning it until 1953, kept as Bess Truman left it and seen only on small ranger tours.

The City of Independence museum of the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails, told from travelers' journals, with a research library of more than 2,300 trail diaries, letters and recollections.

Kansas City's Liberty Memorial of 1926, paid for in ten days of giving, above a museum of the First World War entered across a glass bridge over 9,000 poppies.

Kansas City's jazz museum at 18th & Vine, with Charlie Parker's Massey Hall saxophone, the 1912 Gem Theater across the street and the Blue Room, a working club inside the museum.

The national museum of Black professional baseball in Kansas City's 18th & Vine Jazz District, two blocks from the YMCA where the Negro National League was founded in 1920.

A free art museum of more than 45,000 works built from two Kansas City estates, opened in 1933, with four giant Shuttlecocks on the lawns of its sculpture park.

The limestone house where Thomas Hart Benton lived from 1939 to 1975 and the carriage-house studio where he died, left with his brushes in coffee cans.

Westport's 1855 Greek Revival brick house, built by the hotelkeeper whose Harris House served the trail trade and the Union army, and moved and saved by a group of women in 1922.

A three-story 1860 woolen mill in the Clay County hills that still holds nearly all its original machinery, at the center of the 3,660-acre Watkins farm called Bethany.