Highlights in History

Event Details

This Memorial Day weekend, you and your family are invited to visit Fort Scott National Historic Site as we honor our nation’s fallen heroes. Experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a frontier military fort. Celebrate the weekend with traditional living history programs, cooking demonstrations, and artillery firings. A guided tour will be offered at 1 p.m. each day and a National Moment of Remembrance honoring American Soldiers who died in the line of duty will be held Monday at 3 p.m.

On Saturday, programs will focus on community life at Fort Scott in the 1840s, with special presentations from our site volunteers on cooking, baking, and washing clothes. Come join the post laundress as she demonstrates washing Soldiers’ clothes, 1840s style. Smell the aroma of freshly baked bread from the fort bake house. Watch as the Soldiers and women of the fort go about their daily routines. Living history stations will also include officers’ wives demonstrating needlework, an Infantry Soldier discussing camp life, and the post sutler hawking his wares.

Small arms demonstrations are scheduled Saturday and Monday and the roar of artillery will be heard on Sunday. Special programs on Saturday will include a reading of Fort Scott officers who died in the line of duty, a tribute to American Soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice in all wars, and a reading of letters written by Captain Thomas Swords and his wife, Charlotte. The couple was stationed at Fort Scott in the 1840s; Captain Swords served as the post quartermaster at Fort Scott and oversaw its construction.