In the early 1920s, Kansas City residents rallied behind an ambitious plan to honor the men and women who had served in World War I. The Liberty Memorial Association, formed by a group of prominent local citizens, raised more than 2.5 million dollars in just ten days in 1919, a sum equivalent to roughly 45 million dollars today, to fund construction of a towering monument south of Union Station. Ground was broken in November 1921 in a ceremony attended by five Allied military commanders and an estimated 100,000 spectators, and three years later, as the tower's stonework was going up, a copper box was sealed into its cornerstone with instructions that it not be opened for a full century.
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