A World-Class Museum Opens

by David Swafford

Beginning December 2, area residents and visitors alike will have a renewed opportunity to honor “the courage, loyalty and sacrifice of the patriots who offered and who gave their services, their lives and their all in defense of liberty and the nation’s hour during the World War.”

After months of being closed to the public, the new museum at the Liberty Memorial is ready to open its doors. Designed by the renowned Ralph Appelbaum Associates of New York, the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial is the only museum in the nation dedicated exclusively to The Great War and is sure to be one of the city’s top tourist attractions.

Gone are the days of static displays and ho-hum exhibits. The National World War I Museum features interactive stations that allow visitors to explore the war in greater detail. These kiosk-like stations thrust the visitor into the war, presenting decision-making scenarios. Visitors can also engage historians in interactive Q&A’s.

Also new: Living archives will convey personal experiences through extensive eye-witness testimonies, quotations from letters and journals, and family remembrances.

The museum’s location—underneath the memorial itself—is one of its most striking features. The space is about 85,000 square feet, with about 30,000 square feet as the core exhibit area. Additionally, students and academics have access to a new 20,000-square-foot research center and a new collections storage area.

Solemn Red Poppies

From the south side of Liberty Memorial, the museum’s entrance is graded downhill, which helps focus visitors on what they are about to enter. The entrance hall features a glass bridge across 9,000 red poppies, each representing 1,000 military fatalities. One is reminded very quickly that 10 million soldiers lost their lives in World War I.

The museum has showcased poppies because these flowers grew wild in the killing fields of France and are symbolic of the lives lost in the violent trench warfare between the German and Allied positions.

Other features that make this museum unique are the immersion galleries, which allow visitors to become “immersed” in the period by the dramatic installations of large-scale objects. These galleries convey the physical and emotional magnitude that soldiers felt in battle.

The large-scale, multi-layered timeline is also noteworthy. It presents interwoven stories, sharing the domestic, social and cultural impacts of the war.

According to museum curator Doran Cart, the Liberty Memorial Association has in its possession about 75,000 to 100,000 artifacts, some of them singular objects having no duplicates. Even before the Liberty Memorial was built, the collecting of these objects had already begun. Cart says most people have only seen a small fraction of the 49,000 items now on display in the $26 million museum.

John Lewis Barkley

In commemoration of the museum’s opening, a small but poignant event took place on November 11 this year. On that day, the 88th anniversary of Armistice Day, Liberty Memorial trustee Joan Barkley Wells handed over her father’s Medal of Honor to be showcase in the new National World War I Museum.

Her father, John Lewis Barkley, was a local recruit sent to Europe to fight in the trenches. About a month before the enemy surrendered, Pvt. Barkley was stationed in an observation post half a kilometer from the German line. Using his own initiative, he repaired a captured German Machine gun, mounted it in a disabled French tank near his post, and twice opened fire on enemy lines—which helped break open the front.

For those actions, John Lewis Barkley became one of the few recipients of the Medal of Honor for service during that war. After coming home to Kansas City, he headed the Medal of Honor Society and became active in the local community, even serving as a Liberty Memorial trustee.

Today his memory is appropriately honored in the expanded museum, and Barkley’s generosity in handing over her father’s many awards culminated 16 years of ongoing dialogue with the association. “As soon as she understood that we were going to go forward with the expanded museum, and it was going to be known as national museum, she immediately came forward,” Cart acknowledges.

By such a gesture, Joan Berkley Wells is helping usher in a new era of civic pride in the Liberty Memorial.