17 minute read
Fulton, Missouri
By Kris Grant
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Take a map of America and see if you can pinpoint the center of the country. Chances are your fingers will land in the vicinity of Fulton, Missoƒri, a town of a population just shy of 13,000.
How is it that Presidents, British Prime Ministers, Secretaries of State and their entourages have all made their way to this small town? How did it come to pass that a 17th century church designed by famed architect Christopher Wren today sits prominently in Fulton? And where else in America can you find a huge sculpture incorporating major blocks of the Berlin Wall?
And, oh yes, Fulton is also the home of America’s National Churchill Museum, dedicated to the life of Winston Churchill, arguably Great Britain’s most beloved prime minister of all time.
Stay tuned… I have all the answers!
But first, let’s begin with a little tutorial on the town of Fulton!
Fulton’s historic Brick District is filled with thriving local shops and restaurants.
Photo by Kris Grant
The charming Missouri town of Fulton epitomizes what we Californians call “Midwest values” – where life is pleasant and, for the most part, calm and relatively uneventful. Its citizens like it that way, preferring a steady pace of solid work, close friendships and family ties. Its rich heritage is embedded in Fulton’s brick-paved downtown where 19th century architecture is enhanced with a classic All-American vibe.
Fulton was founded in 1859, just before the start of the Civil War. Located about 20 miles north of the Missouri River, it was named in honor of Robert Fulton, the inventor and engineer who was widely credited with developing the first commercially successful steamboat on New York’s Hudson River earlier in the century.
I spent a day and evening touring Fulton with Renee Graham, the city’s Director of Tourism. Fulton is also the county seat for Callaway County, which, she lightheartedly points out, is “geographically a large – with almost more cows than people.”
Photo courtesy Visit Fulton
GoPo Gourmet Popcorn is also a popular coffee shop where customers are invited to linger and play games – they have more than 600 in stock.
Photo by Kris Grant
Fulton is about 30 minutes southeast of Columbia and about 30 minutes northeast of Jefferson City, the Missouri State Capital. Some residents commute there, and many work at “the plant” – that’s the Callaway Nuclear Generating Plant – 13 miles outside the city.
The Missouri School for the Deaf was founded here in 1851 and continues serving students ages 5 through 21. Also in 1851, Fulton State Hospital opened. It’s the oldest continuously operating public mental health hospital west of the Mississippi.
Fulton is home to two private universities. William Woods University, a women’s college, was founded in 1870 in Camden Point, north of Kansas City, to educate girls who had been orphaned during the Civil War; the school moved to Fulton in 1900. Today, one of its most celebrated areas of studies is its equestrian program, with a placement rate in the 90th percentile. “They have more job offers than they can fill,” Graham said. “Students with equestrian degrees go on to work in the fields of medical supplies for horses, barn management, equestrian photography, riding instructions and other equestrian related careers.”
And now we turn our attention to Westminster College, which brings us back to presidents and prime ministers.
Green Mountain Barn Company is on Fulton’s outskirts.
Photo by Kris Grant
Westminster College and its Green Lectures
Photo Courtesy of America’s National Churchill Museum at Westminster College.
Westminster College was founded in 1851 as Fulton College, a men’s-only college; it assumed its current name just two years later. Since 1979, the college has been co-ed.
Beginning in 1936, the college has conducted a lecture series – typically an annual event – that is funded through an endowment in memorial to John Findley Green, a St. Louis attorney who graduated from Westminster in 1884. The endowment makes it possible to present lectures designed to promote understanding of economic and social problems of international concern. It further provides that “the speaker shall be a person of international reputation.”
On March 5 1946, Winston Churchill delivered the seventh Green Lecture at Fulton College.
Tim Riley, director and chief curator of America’s National Churchill Museum at Westminster College, took me back in time.
“It’s 1945 and World War II is over,” Riley began. “Churchill is revered for having led his country through its ‘Darkest Hour’ to victory over Nazi Germany. We all remember the images of Churchill giving his ‘V for Victory’ salute, and his voice is known the world over on radio.
“Three months later there’s a British election and Churchill is out as Prime Minister. In England, you vote for the party, not the person. The Conservative party didn’t run a good campaign. Overwhelmingly, the Labor Party positioned itself as the party of peace.
“As you can imagine, it was difficult for Churchill. When his wife said it was a blessing in disguise, Churchill replied, ‘It is very effectively disguised.’
Photo Courtesy of America’s National Churchill Museum at Westminster College.
“He went on a painting holiday and it was at that moment in the fall of 1945 that he received a letter from Westminster College President Frank McCluer who invited him to give the John Findley Green Foundation lecture the following year.
“It was a bold move,” Riley said. “I’m convinced Churchill would have politely given it to his secretary and instructed her to thank them very much but decline.
“But at the bottom of the letter, opposite McCluer’s signature, was a handwritten note:
It is one of the most famous postscripts in history.”
Riley continued: “Churchill’s mood was immediately buoyed. He realized that if he were onstage next to the President, he’d be back in the game. He hastily planned a trip; booked passage on the Queen Elizabeth, and went south to Miami Beach to relax and reflect on the postwar era. There he began to write his speech.
Churchill’s famous words…
“From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,”
…ushered in the Cold War that didn’t let up until the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991. “Iron Curtain” became a household phrase overnight.
“What did he mean by that?” Riley mused. “Churchill saw that after the war the Americans, the British and the Canadians went home but the other ally, the Soviets who suffered horrendous losses on the Eastern front didn’t go home. He knew full well that the Communist ideology would expand and that unless the Englishspeaking democracy-loving countries joined together to buttress this looming threat, the Soviets would continue to expand.
Riley paused, then said: “Russian aggression has come back into the headlines, and Churchill’s speech informs how we might deal with it today. As Mark Twain once wrote, ‘History doesn’t always repeat itself but it may rhyme.’”
While Churchill’s speech initially met with mixed responses from Americans, Riley contends, “Churchill turned out to be prescient.”
“Churchill called it the “Sinews of Peace” speech; sinews being things that bind us together and make us stronger. If we uplifted and extolled the things that make our democracy great, we could stand up to the Communist ideology. He recognized that Stalin admired strength, and nothing more than military strength and so he suggested that the sinews would mean a continued investment in military might. He advocated the United Nations have a military force, particularly an air force. And he very cleverly outlined a blueprint through which military strength could buttress Communism through a policy of deterrents.”
Copyright, Wiegand Foundation
Moving a church across the Atlantic
Photo courtesy of America’s National Churchill Museum
There’s a beautiful 17th century church that now stands on the Westminster campus -- St. Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury Church was a parish church first mentioned in 1181 and destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was rebuilt in 1670 of Portland stone, designed by one of the most famous architects in British history, Christopher Wren. Wren rebuilt 52 churches throughout London after the fire and later designed St. Paul’s Cathedral.
St. Mary’s served Londoners until Dec. 29, 1940, when the German Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs over the city and the church burned again. All that was left were the outer walls, columns, and bell tower. The church remained in ruins until 1965.
In 1961, Westminster College President Dr. Robert L.D. Davidson met with college friends and members of the St. Louis chapter of the English-Speaking Union to discuss a memorial to Winston Churchill.
A recent Life magazine feature on war-ravaged Wren churches slated for demolition sparked the suggestion of importing one to serve as both a Churchill memorial and the college chapel. With the help of the college architect, Emmett Layton, his wife, Ruth Layton, and consulting architect, Patrick Horsbrugh, the suggestion turned into a plan. Further investigation proved St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury to be the clear choice, its size perfect for the campus.
President Truman turned the symbolic first shovel for the reconstruction on April 19, 1964.
In 1965 work began. Workers carefully cleaned, removed, and labeled each of the 7,000 stones, noting their location in the church. More than 650 tons of blocks were shipped by boat to Virginia (The U.S. Shipping Board moved them as ship’s ballast at no charge). From there, they traveled by rail to Fulton.
The foundation stone was laid in October 1966, 300 years after the Great Fire of London. While reconstructing St. Mary’s, the architects used photographs to construct the exterior of the church exactly as Wren designed it in 1672.
Spurring the fundraising effort came a dapper, sophisticated, influential individual with a wide range of famous and important friends on both sides of the pond – none other than the actor known for swashbuckling heroics by the name of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Fairbanks had been a Navy man in World War II, assigned to Lord Mountbatten’s Commando staff in the United Kingdom; Mountbatten later became godfather to Fairbanks’ three daughters.
It came to pass that Fairbanks and Westminster’s college vice president Dave Stinson were randomly paired up on the popular TV game show, “Password.” The two men failed miserably on the show, but made amends by going on a Manhattan club crawl. That event led to a lifelong friendship.
Vitally interested in the church restoration project, Fairbanks coordinated invitations to members of the Churchill family, Mountbatten and other notable and wealthy people. He enlarged the scope of donors via his extensive connections in Hollywood, New York and London, and served as the Master of Ceremonies for a large and successful fundraising dinner in New York.
St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, like the legendary phoenix, had risen once again from the ashes. The Church now stands exactly as Wren’s design envisaged in 1677. The chapel features a handcrafted tracker organ and an original Wren pulpit.
Today, America’s National Churchill Museum contains more than 10,000 objects, and its vaults house over 200 linear feet of archives and personal papers. Included are personal Churchill correspondence, original Churchill paintings, and one of the largest privately owned collections of Churchilliana.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. enthusiastically joined the fundraising efforts to rebuild St. Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury church. From the book The Inspiring History of a Special Relationship; photo by Vera Fairbanks.
At midnight, Saturday, August 13, 1961, East German soldiers began sealing off the city of Berlin. First, they strung miles of jagged barbed wire, which had been purchased inconspicuously from West Berlin firms. The wire was soon replaced by a much more ominous and lasting presence—the concrete Berlin Wall. The wall curled through Europe’s third largest city, rising ten to thirteen feet high. If straightened, it would have measured 100 miles long.
In the era of Perestroika and with great collaboration between President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the wall came tumbling down. On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached, and almost overnight it was gone.
A sculptor by the name of Edwina Sandys -- Clementine and Winston Churchill’s granddaughter – was so moved that she created a sculpture using massive slabs of the wall. “Breakthrough” portrays an abstract male and female figure silhouetted between slabs of the wall
On Nov. 9, 1990, Sandys’ sculpture was dedicated at the Churchill Museum by President Ronald Reagan, just two years after he commanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
In many ways, said Riley, things have come full circle at the Churchill Museum. In May 1992, Gorbachev spoke in front of the wall and said in essence, “The Cold War is over.”
Margaret Thatcher delivered the Green lecture in 1996. And in 2019, Secretary of State, the late Madeleine Albright delivered the lecture.
When the movie Darkest Hour was released in 2017, Riley arranged the film’s Midwest debut at the museum, working with the film’s producer Lisa Bruce, who grew up in Coronado.
“We continue to be part of history,” Riley said. “Churchill’s warning and legacy keeps happening. The mood was palpable when Russia invaded Ukraine and we realized, “Whoa! This still matters.”
Above and top: “Breakthrough” by Edwina Sandys, Winston Churchill’s granddaughter. The west side of the former Berlin Wall is emblazoned with graffiti; the heavily guarded east side is blank.
Photo by Kris Grant
The Brick District
Brick pavers were installed on Fulton’s Downtown streets between 1910 and 1912.
Photo by Kris Grant
Fulton’s charming downtown is appropriately named “The Brick District,” in homage to its historic building and vintage brick streets. Here are clustered more than 100 locally owned restaurants and businesses in historic buildings dating back to the mid 1850s. Inside the surprisingly deep spaces with high ceilings, you’ll often walk on the same oak floors and find original tin-lined ceilings.
Here were some of my favorite stops:
1Canoe2
Let me quote from their website: “1canoe2 is an illustration company that spreads joy through cheerful, thoughtful paper goods and gifts. Each piece of artwork we create shows the hand of the artist and embodies our love of home-cooked meals, weekends spent in nature, and all things happy. In 2009, we followed a dream and bought a big old letterpress, and 1canoe2 was born. The name represents a spirit of kinship, heartland roots, and memories of canoe trips and campfires along Missouri streams with “one canoe, two girls.” Our popular line of gifts and stationery has appeared in over 1000 independent boutiques around the world and select national retailers like Anthropologie and Paper Source.
The Brick District Playhouse
The Brick District Playhouse is housed in the renovated and repurposed Fulton Theater. The Fulton Theater opened in 1928 and closed when its owners opened an eight-plex. The Playhouse is a non-profit community space that serves as a venue for plays, concerts and special events. Its Playhouse Café serves breakfast and lunch weekends and brunch on Saturdays; it’s also the spot to get your Starbucks fix.
The circa-1928 Fulton Theatre is now a community playhouse.
Photo by Kris Grant
Well Read Books
Here you will find a great selection of used books, local books and selected new-releases, plus toys and gifts.
GoPo Gourmet Popcorn
GoPo Gourmet Popcorn, billed as “Missouri’s Popcorn Destination.” Inside the 5,000 square-foot shop and restaurant, I discovered and sampled several of the 16 popcorn flavors offered daily. The shop also features a coffee bar where each week a new GoJo coffee drink is featured. The shop also invites families and friends to linger and play games – they have more than 600 to choose from in their stacks!
Photo by Kris Grant
GoPo Popcorn features samples of 16 varieties of handcrafted popcorn.
Photo by Kris Grant
Beks
Photo Courtesy Visit Fulton
This American gastropub and steakhouse is housed in two adjacent buildings, both listed on the Missouri Historic Registry and designed by famed Missouri architect Morris Frederick Bell. The main building was once a dry goods store owned and operated by Bell’s son-in-law.
Beks is owned by Garry and Rebecca Vaught, who also own a farm on the outskirts of Fulton. Don’t be surprised if your greens came from their farm and the eggs from their chickens. The restaurant, named Bek’s after Rebecca, evolved from a coffee bar to lunch space to one of Fulton’s most popular dinner houses. It features a casual historic ambiance that’s defined by exposed brick and the original tin ceiling. Among the culinary offerings are USDA aged rib eye and filets, pasta made in-house using 100 percent cream, home-smoked turkeys and ground beef that comes from Missouri’s Show-Me Farms.
Green Meadow Barn Company
Green Meadow Barn Company is on the outskirts of Fulton and totally worth the trip. Here, Carolyn Linton is a master furniture maker. With the help of the local Amish, she takes down old barns and homesteads and transforms the reclaimed wood into furniture and accessories that are sure to be a focal point of any room.
Photo by Kris Grant
Saults Drug Store
You don’t usually shop at a pharmacy, but Saults has a boutique area filled with home accessories. And you can take a seat at their 1930s-era soda fountain, where they are said to serve up the best malts in Missouri.
Saults Drug Store has been a fixture in the Brick District since 1937. You can enjoy a phosphate, a malt and more at the soda fountain at Saults Drug store.
Photos by Kris Grant.
The Station
The Station – The Station’s back deck is a perfect place to close out a hot summer day, enjoying one of their famous frozen cocktails, offered up in much the same way as selfserve yogurt bars.
The Spot
The Spot – And right next door to the Station you’ll find The Spot, where you can order up for the kids a fresh-squeezed lemonade and a freshly spun cotton candy in all flavors of the rainbow.
Photo Courtesy Visit Fulton
Learn more about our 33rd President
The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, Independence, Missouri.
Photo by Kris Grant
If you’ve gone all the way to Missouri, I recommend you scoot up to Independence, Missouri (just a two-hour drive from Fulton) and tour both the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library and the Truman Home. The museum has just finished a massive renovation of all its exhibit space, the first major renovation in more than 20 years and the largest since the museum opened in 1957. It is a wellcurated presentation of Truman’s life – his early years, his service in World War I, his savvy rise in politics, his Presidency at the end of World War II and decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan – and his later years.
Speaking of those later years, Harry and Bess moved back to their humble home in Independence after Truman’s presidency
and lived happily ever after. I wish I could have shared photos of the home’s interior, but there was a strict “no photos” policy. You would be surprised how modest it was! Speaks to the character of the man!
Harry Truman’s former home in Independence, Missouri is now a National Historic Site, managed by the National Park Service.
Photo by Kris Grant
IF YOU GO…
Visit Fulton
www.VisitFulton.com
Listings of all Fulton’s restaurants, shops, accommodations, special events and more.
America’s National Churchill Museum
www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org
The site includes background information, special exhibits, hours, prices, directions.
The Loganberry Inn
www.loganberryinn.com
I happily stayed at this bed and breakfast, just a block from the Churchill Museum. I stayed in the Margaret Thatcher room. Yes, it’s where the former Prime Minister slept when she delivered the John Findley Green lecture at Westminster College! The inn’s parlor and dining room are elegant and very Victorian, and the breakfast, served in three courses, was delicious.
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum
www.trumanlibrary.gov
(Independence, Mo)
Truman Home
Harry S. Truman National Historic Site (National Park Service)
www.nps.gov
(Independence, Mo)
