national churchill museum
For the last two summers I have served as the chairperson of the Epworth Historical Society. Our committee of twelve oversees the Epworth Museum in our historic hotel, built in 1894. One of the men on this committee is a docent at America’s National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri. He did a fascinating talk about Winston Churchill this summer, and I was determined to go see the place on our trip across the country.
First of all, why is a museum to a British Prime Minister situated in the American Midwest? Fulton, Missouri is the location of small Westminster College. In 1945 the president of Westminster knew that Churchill’s mother had been an American, and through a contact in the US government found a way to get an invitation to Churchill to come to the college and make a speech. President Truman gave the request more traction when he scrawled his own personal invitation to visit his home state of Missouri at the bottom of the formal request. Truman even promised to accompany Churchill and introduce him, if he would agree to come.
After rallying Great Britain through the harrowing years of World War II, Winston Churchill was summarily ousted as Prime Minister. Persuaded to visit Missouri, at Westminster College Churchill gave one of the most significant speeches of his post-war career, entitled, “Sinews of Peace,” in which he coined the evocative phrase “An Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” The beginning of the Cold War was forever linked with those words.
In the 1960s Westminster College marked the 20th anniversary of this extraordinary visit by purchasing St. Mary the Virgin Church Aldermanbury from London and bringing it stone by stone to the campus. Designed by Christopher Wren and built in 1677, the church was badly damaged in the London Blitz, and Westminster had it rebuilt and restored according to Wren’s original specifications. Underneath the current structure is a marvelous little museum dedicated to the life of Winston Churchill.
Another feature of the museum complex is an art installation using pieces of the Berlin Wall. “Breakthrough” was designed by Edwina Sandys, one of Churchill’s ten grandchildren. Everyone, including East Germany, jumped on board with the idea. On November 9, 1989 President Ronald Reagan came to Westminster to dedicate “Breakthrough”, saying:
“The truth of the matter is, if we take this crowd and if we could go through and ask the heritage, the background of every family represented here, we would probably come up with the names of every country on earth, every corner of the world, and every race. Here, is the one spot on earth where we have the brotherhood of man….maybe one day boundaries all over the earth will disappear …and this world can become that brotherhood of man in every corner.”
Sounds like heaven to me.
Love, Liz
