Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area includes the sites of extraordinary events that forever changed America. In the nineteenth century, the nation was focused on the Missouri-Kansas border, where peoples with different definitions of freedom collided, inciting and fueling a Civil War. The

A small two-story wooden building, a grassy meadow, a quiet park, a wooded valley between hills; these spots today are relatively unassuming and even banal at first appearance, but there was a time when these places in rural Kansas were the center of national attention. I visited several major sites