Poplar Heights Living History Farm

09/22/2025

🍂Bring your friends & families to join us for a Story Walk at Poplar Heights Farm!

🍁Kids will get to enjoy a fun craft to take home after the story!

👻 October 12th, 2025
🎃 From 2-3 PM
👻5250 NE County Road 5004, Butler, Mo, 64730
🎃660-424-9200

06/07/2023

05/28/2023

On this Memorial Day weekend we recognize two Medal of Honor winners from Bates County.

FREEMAN DAVIS
Freeman Davis (February 28, 1842 – February 23, 1899) was an American soldier who fought in the American Civil War. Davis received the country's highest award for bravery during combat, the Medal of Honor, for his action during the Battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee on 25 November 1863. He was honored with the award on 30 March 1898.
BURIED WITH HONORS
Captain Freeman Davis’ funeral took place Friday afternoon from his late residence to Oak Hill cemetery, in charge of post 58, G.A.R. The remains were interred with Masonic rites, the deceased being a member of that fraternity. Services at the house were conducted by Rev. Jewell of the Presbyterian church. Captain Davis was a brave soldier and carried a beautiful medal awarded him by the government for valiant services. He was at one time a leading business man of Butler.
Saturday, Feb. 25, 1899
Butler Daily Democrat

PRIVATE GEORGE PHILLIPS, USMCR
During the Battle of Iwo Jima, the night of March 14, 1945, Private Phillips was standing guard as the other Marines in his unit were resting. A Japanese soldier tossed a hand gr***de toward the group. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Phillips sacrificed his life by smothering the blast of the gr***de with his own body to save the lives of his fellow Marines. For this action, he was awarded his nation's highest military decoration – the Medal of Honor. The decoration was received by his uncle, with whom Pvt. Phillips had formerly resided.
Private Phillips was born in Bates County, Missouri, 14 July 1926, and worked on the railroad before enlisting in the Marine Corps on 25 April 1944.
Initially buried in the 5th Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima, Pvt Phillips' remains were reinterred in Bethel Cemetery, Labadie, Missouri, in 1948.

05/27/2023

Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer and honors those who have died in our nation’s wars. This holiday began with the Civil War.
The Civil War was America's bloodiest conflict. The unprecedented violence of battles such as Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, and Gettysburg shocked citizens and international observers alike. Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands died of disease. Roughly 2% of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, lost their lives in the line of duty. Taken as a percentage of today's population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls.
There were an estimated 1.5 million casualties reported during the Civil War. A "casualty" is a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, capture, or through being missing in action. Approximately one in four soldiers that went to war never returned home.
In April 1865, following Lincoln's assassination, commemorations were widespread. The more than 600,000 soldiers of both sides who fought and died in the Civil War meant that burial and memorialization took on new cultural significance. Under the leadership of women during the war, an increasingly formal practice of decorating graves had taken shape.
Among the first references to the commemoration in The New York Times is an article published on June 7, 1868. It describes a note, with an accompanying wreath, by “a little girl about 10 years of age” requesting that an official put the garland on an unknown rebel soldier’s grave. Her father, she explained, was buried in Andersonville, Ga., and she hoped that “some little girl” would do the same on his grave.
The first national observance of Memorial Day occurred on May 30, 1868. Then known as Decoration Day, the holiday was proclaimed by Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic to honor the Union soldiers who had died in the Civil War.
By the 1880s, ceremonies were becoming more consistent across geography as the GAR provided handbooks that presented specific procedures, poems, and Bible verses for local post commanders to utilize in planning the local event.
The name "Memorial Day", which was first attested in 1882, gradually became more common than "Decoration Day" after World War II] but was not declared the official name by federal law until 1967.