Freedom's Frontier heritage area builds connections between local stories

"There was no one right story," Terry Ramsey, Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area board of trustee's member, said about the Civil War.

There were not just two sides to this story. There were dozens of sides and a multitude of stories, and to understand what was going on you have to get all the viewpoints, she said.

"That's what Freedom's Frontier is all about," Ramsey said.

Ramsey who in addition to being a trustee for the National Heritage Area, is also the director of the Bushwhacker Museum which is one of the partner sites in the Heritage Area.

"My job here is to interpret our story and tie it to the other stories in the area. Each place has its own story," she said.

The Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area is all about the stories. Most of the Heritage Areas in the country have some kind of "built environment" to help tie the pieces together. That is not the case of this area. Much of the area's history is connected to locations where something occurred and since frequently this was nothing but a geographic location on the open rolling countryside; there is no structure or obvious indicator of human activity left to see.

"This is truly a storybased heritage area," Ramsey said.

"Each area must have a story to that is unique to American history, that can't be told anywhere else. And it is important enough it changed the country," she said.

Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area encompasses 41 counties in Missouri and Kansas, covering 31,021 square miles.

Ramsey said that the Heritage Area is currently in the process of creating a new multi-layered Web site that will contain a lot of linked information to tie various locations together.

She said the Web site should be finished later this year.

And in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Kansas Humanities Council and the Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area have worked together to create a readers' theater project exploring the events -- the shared stories -- that took place throughout Kansas and Missouri leading up to and during the Civil War.

The project, "Shared Stories of the Civil War" has scripts compiled from original source materials, including letters, diaries and newspaper articles from the Civil War period. These stories are available on the Kansas Humanities Council Web site: www.kansashumanities.org.

"Anyone can download them and use them in classrooms and for discussion," Ramsey said.

Scripts include titles like: "The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War," "John Brown: Martyr or Madman," and "Skirmish at Island Mound."

She said the group is trying to develop three additional scripts, but some topics are difficult to fully develop because there are not enough primary source documents available from which to create a script.

This area is where the Civil War really began -- long before the attack on Fort Sumpter.

The Battle of Black Jack on June 2, 1852m brought anti-slavery forces led by John Brown and the future Confederate Col. Henry Clay Pate together on opposite sides, five years before the formal start of the war.

According to information on Freedom's Frontier Web site, "Our region is the epicenter of conflicts that still define American values, and its struggles to achieve them. The issues of slavery's abolition, the forced migration of Native Americans and the inspiring resilience of those nations in the face of oppression, the voluntary immigration of settlers along the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, and the final resolution of racial segregation in our public schools a century later -- all these belong to the story of the Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area. This story continues to evolve, to define and influence who we are today, in the region and as a nation."

Currently, the Freedom Frontier National Heritage Area is in its infancy. The idea for the heritage area dates to around 1996, when a group in Kansas started a grass roots effort to preserve the Civil War history in Kansas.

Local historian Pat Brophy (now deceased) and Ramsey were the only Missouri people in attendance at an early meeting of this group. Vernon County was tied to the group because of a raid in Vernon County in which John Brown was involved.

Freedom's Frontier grew out of this group, with the original name suggested for the area "Bleeding Kansas."

Establishing a National Heritage Area is a major undertaking that requires a lot of cooperation among a lot of people. It requires an act of Congress to be established, which means it must have strong support from the area legislators and senators.

In the case of Freedom's Frontier, Ramsey said the group had strong support from Ike Skelton, who is a student of Civil War history, Sam Brownback and Jim Talent, all of whom helped get it enacted into law in 2006.

Once that was accomplished the group had to write a management plan for the area that had to be accepted by the 150 or so partner groups in the proposed Heritage Area before it could be submitted to the Department of the Interior for acceptance. The management plan was completed in 2009 and accepted by the Department of the Interior in 2010.

"I'm extremely proud of the management plan and how far we've come," Ramsey said.

Now all of the partner sites are working on telling their own story and relating those to the rest of the area.

She said they are in the process of evaluating partner sites and rating them on what is there. Each site does a self-evaluation and then a team from the Heritage Area visits the site and rates that site, placing in one of three categories, Star, Recognized Site and Registered Site.

Star sites are larger and more developed than the other two categories, with more interpretive stories that relate that place to other sites in Freedom's Frontier.

"We are a Star site," she said, referring to the Bushwhacker Museum.

So are places like Fort Scott, Kan., and Lexington, Mo.

Recognized sites are things like historic markers.

Registered sites are locations or events within the area.

The teams that rates the sites provide information on what needs to be done to raise the ranking of each site. They are each re-evaluated every two years providing an opportunity for each site to improve its ranking. If they decline in quality, the ranking can also decrease.

The goal is to have every site to be a quality site that visitors will appreciate and make them want to see more or come back another time, she said.

For more information on Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area visit their Web site: www.freedomsfrontier.org.