1 of 13
Mark Trout. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
2 of 13
3 of 13
4 of 13
5 of 13
6 of 13
7 of 13
8 of 13
9 of 13
10 of 13
11 of 13
12 of 13
13 of 13
Mark Trout still isn’t getting much sleep. In June, he opened the Missouri Civil War Museum after a decade of hard work. But there is always more work to do. “I’m a man who wears many hats,” he says. “One day, I’m a curator. The next day, I’m the maintenance and lawn-
care guy…”
Trout’s official title is executive director and chairman, which makes it sound like he sits at a desk, talking on the phone and shuffling manila folders. More likely, you’ll see him waving a backhoe into place or poring over a new donation—bugles, saddles, a 35-star American flag. Oddly enough, St. Louis has never had a Civil War museum, even though the city played a pivotal role in the conflict.
“It’s fitting that it would be here,” Trout says. “Jefferson Barracks was one of the largest Union Army bases and hospital complexes in the west during the Civil War. It’s the largest burial ground of Civil War dead in the state; there are 16,000 of them here. The great number is due to the fact that more than 200 Civil War generals served here before, during, or after the war. Some of the most famous names—Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, James Longstreet—they were all here.”
Eleven years ago, Trout drove through the old parade grounds at Jefferson Barracks. He spied a grand, Federal-style building with boarded-up windows and a smaller building next door. “I looked at them and thought, ‘What beautiful buildings.’ I couldn’t believe they were in the condition they were in.” He went home, ruminated a bit, and called St. Louis County Parks Department historian Esley Hamilton, who told him the county just didn’t have the funds for rehab. So Trout proposed getting involved. “What would you do?” Hamilton asked. “Turn it into some sort of building for the public, a Civil War museum or something,” Trout replied. The county agreed to lease the building to him for $1 a year for 99 years.
Trout laughs. “I think we picked the worst decade in American history to do a project like this,” he says. “We started shortly after 9/11. The wars came. Then Katrina came. Then the tsunamis came, and then the depression came, and all the economic problems… It’s been a long haul.”
The 16,000-square-foot Post Exchange Building was built in 1905. It had a giant gym with an elevated running track and locker rooms, a two-lane bowling alley, saunas, an indoor pistol range, a barbershop, a convenience store, rec rooms, and an industrial kitchen. That was during the thick of World War I, when 39,825 recruits poured through Jefferson Barracks in just six months. In 1918, the smaller Officers’ Post Exchange was built next door, with proceeds from concessions at the PX Building.
After the military decommissioned Jefferson Barracks in 1946, the buildings remained a destination—unofficially. “We have members of the organization who grew up here, who were young boys in 1950 and 1951,” Trout says. “They used to sneak into this building; it was a clubhouse. There’s not a week that goes by where another one of these guys doesn’t come in and say he was here as a kid.” Over the years, vandals broke the delicate, spider-web windows; stole the chandeliers; and stripped the metal for scrap.
By the time Trout began working on the larger building, in 2003, there were 8-foot holes in the ceiling, where water would cascade in during rainstorms. (The 1918 building is Phase II, which will house the library and research center. In a funny repeat of history, it will be funded by proceeds from the museum next door.)
“The previous tenants of the building had not treated it well,” Hamilton recalls. “One of the things I remember distinctly is that they had sprayed some kind of insulation material into it—a purple foam. It was all over the ceiling of the gymnasium. It made it look like some kind of horror-movie set.”
The gym also had 150,000 bees nesting in it. The buzzing, as Trout told the Civil War News in 2005, sounded “like the drone of a jet engine.” “Raccoons lived here; pigeons lived here. Bees. Snakes. You name it,” he says. (One day, workers found a mallard duck walking the elevated running track.) “We had to trap the raccoons, take them over to Illinois, and release them there so they wouldn’t come back.” To repatriate the bees, they called an exterminator, who instructed Trout to remove every trace of honey to avoid luring new bees. The work crew filled up four 55-gallon trash cans with honey and hives.
Trout began with a crew of three, including himself and John Maurath, who’s now director of library services. (The museum now has more than 400 volunteers.) Not only did they scrape honey off the ceiling and shovel tons of mildewed trash into dumpsters, they also rebuilt the grand staircase piece by piece. “There were some things we could just not do,” Trout says. “Electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling… But demolition, carpentry, painting—we spent somewhere in the area of $1.5 million renovating this building. But I believe it’s more like a $4 million or $5 million building when you figure that in. It’s a true grass-roots effort.”
Trout served in the Marine Corps and has a history degree from Webster University. He’s a perfectionist and a stickler for authenticity. The walls aren’t drywall, for instance; they’re plaster. Landscaping got underway in 2011, Trout says, “because we knew there was a time when the building would be done, and I would hate to see little 12-inch plants around it.” He says it did elicit some stares before the boards came off the windows in 2012: beautiful grounds surrounding what looked like an abandoned building.
“The cornice—the big white band that runs around the top of the building—was in such bad shape that they took that down. Just replacing that was a huge investment,” Hamilton says. “They had to do a lot of tuck-pointing, because as the water came in, it damaged the mortar between the bricks.”
For a long time, there wasn’t even that sign of external progress, as the group sunk money into pricey but invisible stuff like HVAC. Though the museum received $650,000 in tax revenue from River City Casino via the county government, it didn’t have a large source of corporate or government funding. “I have bathrooms in this place that are the size of living rooms,” Trout says. “You don’t think that 16,000 square feet is that big. But when you have to renovate each and every square inch of it…it is enormous. And to do it virtually without a budget, because you don’t have the funding, you’re raising $20 or $50—we’d raise $100; we’d put $100 into the building. We’d raise $1,000; we’d put it into the building. So you continue to go where the funding can take you.”
Why would a person do this?
“Because they’re insane!” Trout says, laughing. “Or dedicated.”
Trout initially hoped to open the museum on April 12, 2011, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginning. He didn’t make that deadline, but he kept his promise to open by June 2013. Before cutting the ribbon, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley told Trout, “You had an idea and a dream, and you have created a real destination.”
By July, the building looked perfect: The only bees in the vicinity were circling flower buds in a planted strip near the freshly paved parking lot. Maurath stood behind the admission desk and chatted with an elderly visitor who was pondering whether to donate a couple of bugles. A flat-panel TV in the lobby played a slideshow of before-and-after photos. Eventually, there will be an exhibit in that space, telling the history of the building, including the interesting items the renovators found while rebuilding the staircase: World War I tokens and uniform patches that fell through the cracks in the steps, bottles and chinaware from the original construction crew.
But if a visitor didn’t know about the pending exhibit, the museum would still seem perfectly complete. There’s a gallery on the building’s right side with a detailed narrative of how the war brewed, including the whos, whys, and wheres. The gymnasium now has a large central island displaying a Studebaker wagon, a field cannon, and a taxidermied horse. Encircling the room are glass cases filled with themed displays on medicine, photography, and the role of women during the war. There’s also weaponry: cannonballs, cartridge boxes, mortar shells, swords, daggers, an 1854 musket used at the Battle of Harpers Ferry. The medical items often seem grimmer than the guns: bone saws, trepanning devices, picks, lancets, files, curettes, vials of quinine and chloroform. There’s also a literal carpetbag, the object that originated the term Southerners used for Northerners who bought up plantations during Reconstruction.
Down in the basement is a Medals of Honor exhibit, a postwar gallery, and another on veterans’ groups. A flat-panel TV shows footage of former soldiers with white chest-length beards marching in parades. Trout says there eventually will be galleries devoted to Jefferson Barracks’ history and the Civil War in pop culture. “We’ll show everything from reunions of veterans to motion pictures,” he says. “We have a first-edition Margaret Mitchell Gone With the Wind and a uniform that was worn in the movie. We have a lot of costumes and props from the Civil War movies of the past—John Wayne and Rock Hudson, actors like that.”
There are still “hundreds and hundreds” of artifacts in storage, he says. After all, the museum has been collecting them for more than a decade. “Someone who was here on opening weekend would be surprised about what’s out here now,” he says. They have brought back things “from California to New York, from Texas on the south to Wisconsin on the north, and everywhere between… You’d be surprised what’s still out there.” He points out a new acquisition: the standing desk of Wiley Britton, who fought in Missouri during the Civil War and wrote a memoir about it. “His last works were written at that desk,” Trout says. “It’s been in the Britton family ever since, until they donated it to the museum.”
And the museum is still raising money for additional acquisitions. This summer, the basement housed a rack of theatrical costumes and a camera that takes sepia-tint photos, so people could get their own Civil War–era portraits for a small fee. The funds went toward something Trout’s had his eye on for a long time: what he calls “the lost cannon.”
“That’s the big one,” he says. “It was one of the big cannons that sat up by the old Spanish guns, and the troops used to fire it into the river. Then, sometime between 1912 and World War II, it just disappeared. But we have photographs of it, of them shooting it, and it’s a very unique cannon.” Only two were known to exist: muzzle-loading Civil War cannons modified to be breech-loading, so the charge and the projectile could be put in the rear of the barrel. They became the prototype for modern cannons. “We’re putting it in the basement,” he adds. “It weighs about 811 pounds without its base, so we’ve got to find a way to carry it down the stairs.”
By that time, there’s a good chance Trout will be engaged in another seemingly impossible errand—and won’t be sleeping in anytime soon.
The Missouri Civil War Museum (222 Worth, Jefferson Barracks, 314-845-1861, mcwm.org) is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Photographs by Kevin A. Roberts
