Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on the restoration of the Big Blue Battlefield in Kansas City, Missouri. In the mid-19th century, overland trail teamsters driving wagons west sometimes followed a branch of the Santa Fe Trail out of Independence, using the shortcut to reach fields where the animals used by freighting operators grazed. This road led to a firm rock bottom across the Blue River. The crossing came to be called Byram’s Ford, for Augustine Byram of Kentucky, who had arrived in 1839 and acquired acreage west of that crossing. ‘The Meadow’ becomes killing field During two days in 1864, approximately 11,000 Civil War soldiers crossed the Blue River there and faced off on a plain known as “The Meadow.” On Oct. 22 Confederate troops pushed across the river and forced Union companies to the west, some of them falling back to the countryside near or in what is now the Country Club Plaza at Brush Creek.The following day, other federal forces arrived from the east and pushed the Confederate soldiers back to the west. A Better Big Blue Battlefield | Part I Written accounts from officers on both sides document the nature of what occurred on that meadow. Col. John Philips, the organizer of the Seventh Missouri State Militia Cavalry, who had been placed in command of a Union brigade by Gen. Alfred Pleasonton on the morning of Oct. 23, maintained a battlefield diary. “Cannonading heavy,” he noted in its pages at one point. Upon the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Westport in 1989, Civil War re-enactors staged another mock battle at Swope Park. (Courtesy | Missouri Valley Special Collections) “Shells falling all around me. Lt. Combs, ‘C’ Co,, shot in bowels, dying…Fighting fierce. Tried to charge hill with 1st, couldn’t make it. Pleasonton, it seemed, wanted to get me killed and the Missouri State Militia destroyed.” Brig. Gen. John B. Clark, Jr. of the Confederate forces described the view from that same hill — before the battle known as Potato Hill, but soon renamed Bloody Hill. “My brigade contended nobly with the foe for two hours and strewed the open field in our front with his dead,” Clark wrote. ‘Fearsome bloodied conflict’ After the combat ended, Capt. George Sawin, quartermaster with the 58th Illinois Infantry, took a slow inventory of the Byram’s Ford site. “Here were the unmistakable marks of stern and cruel war,” he wrote. “The evidence of a fearsome bloodied conflict was around us. A sad sight of old and youth — gray hairs of age laying beside the smooth face of boyhood. The enemy took a stubborn and determined stand here.” In 1923 Kansas City adopted ordinances encouraging the marking and preservation of sites associated with the Battle of Westport, including Byram’s Ford as well as the Brush Creek area near the Plaza. Congressional efforts to establish a Kansas City military park ceased with the Great Depression. Organized local commemorations of the 1864 Battle of Westport date to at least the early 1900s. Here, an undated photo depicts two men, perhaps former Confederate and Union Civil War officers, shaking hands. The photograph may date to 1912, when a reported 30,000 spectators watched a re-enactment of the Battle of the Big Blue in Swope Park. (Courtesy | Missouri Valley Special Collections) In 1975 members of the Civil War Round Table on Kansas City formed the nonprofit Monnett Battle of Westport Fund, named for Howard Monnett, author of the 1964 book “Action Before Westport,” an account of the battle; he had died in 1975. Fund representatives raised money to place interpretive markers along a 32-mile battle automobile tour. In subsequent years they also worked to preserve and restore the Byram’s Ford site, much of which since the 1950s had been occupied by an industrial park located near East 63rd Street and Manchester Trafficway. In the 1980s preservationists began receiving donations of funds and property that placed various parcels of the Byram’s Ford area within the public domain. In 1989 the U.S. Department of the Interior listed the Byram’s Ford Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Still, in 1990, the secretary of the interior declared Byram’s Ford one of the country’s 25 most endangered Civil War sites. Beginning in 1995 the Monnett Fund transferred battlefield tracts to the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department for development of the Big Blue Battlefield. Research also continued. In 1996 volunteers with metal detectors assisted during a weekend archaeological survey of portions of “The Meadow.” They recovered a “plainback” button from a federal coat, so named because it carried no manufacturing identification on its back. Such buttons were standard issue late in the war. They also found a fired .57 caliber Enfield bullet often associated with Confederate forces. In 2006 the Monnett Fund launched its Saving Kansas City’s Battlefield Initiative; it since has acquired 250 acres at the Big Blue Battlefield site. One of the interpretive panels in place at the Big Blue Battlefield is a depiction of 4th Kansas State Militia soldiers chopping down trees in an attempt to impede Confederate forces intending to cross the Blue River at Byram’s Ford. (Courtesy |Monnett Battle of Westport Fund and Tom Beard). Its officials also initiated efforts to eliminate the industrial park’s nine buildings. Several since have been acquired and removed; the ultimate intention is to have all structures removed and the ground remediated to green space, returning the acreage to its presumed 1864 appearance. This year, at the Big Blue Battlefield, Kansas City parks crews cleared trees and overgrowth atop the ridge known as Bloody Hill. The newly unobscured view allows visitors looking east at “The Meadow” a better perspective. “These landscapes represent an irreplaceable part of our heritage and an incredible educational resource,” Daniel Smith, Monnett Battle of Westport chair, said at an Oct. 3 unveiling ceremony for new interpretative panels at the Big Blue Battlefield at 4800 E. 63rd St. “This preserved battlefield site is a tangible and continuing connection between generations of Americans, assuring that our heritage is not lost and will inspire future generations yet unborn.” Byram’s Ford itself is now approached easily from Hardesty Avenue just east of the Blue River. Visitors can follow a walking and biking trail down to the channel and consider signage explaining just who crossed the shallow water and when. Coming next: The friendship of two former foes illustrates reconciliation efforts in the years following the Battle of Westport. Flatland contributor Brian Burnes is a Kansas City area writer and author. The post A Better Big Blue Battlefield in Kansas City| Part II first appeared on Flatland.