Most Americans don’t know the country’s only WWI museum is on a Kansas City hilltop

It’s built on $2.5 million in dimes

Kansas City sits on something most Americans don’t know exists.

Right in the middle of town, on a hilltop near Union Station, a museum tells the full story of World War I, and it’s the only one in the country that does.

Congress made it official in 2004 as the national WWI museum, then added the memorial designation in 2014. The collection inside ranks among the largest in the world.

But your visit starts before you even walk through the door.

9,000 red poppies spread beneath your feet

You enter across the Paul Sunderland Glass Bridge, and below you, 9,000 bright red poppies fill the floor. Each one stands for 1,000 lives lost during the war.

The reference comes from “In Flanders Fields,” the poem written in the trenches of Belgium. You’re walking on glass above 9 million deaths, and the count hits you before you reach the first exhibit.

The whole room goes quiet. That’s the point.

Kansas City raised millions in just 10 days

Back in 1919, Kansas City residents pulled together more than $2.5 million in about 10 days to build a memorial for those who served.

The Liberty Memorial opened in 1926, designed by architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle in an Egyptian Revival style.

The modern museum came later, opening in 2006 in a large space built directly beneath the original tower. What started as a local tribute now draws visitors from across the country as a National Historic Landmark.

350,000 objects tell the war from start to finish

The museum holds more than 350,000 objects and documents.

Uniforms, weapons, handwritten letters, and rare wartime papers fill the galleries in chronological order, walking you through the conflict from its start to its end.

What pulls you in are the personal items, the things soldiers carried, wrote, and left behind. Touch screens at several stations let you dig deeper into individual stories and pull up battlefield maps on your own.

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