Battle of Lexington...

It was once called "the largest and best arranged dwelling house west of St. Louis." Today Oliver Anderson's mansion is best known for the three bloody days in 1861 when it was a fiercely contested prize in a Civil War battle between the Union army and the Missouri State Guard.

This house was once used as a hospital by Union forces, originally home to Oliver Anderson.

A view of the house from the steamboat landing on the Missouri River.

Union sharp shooters reigned terror on men behind this fence from the second story windows.

The siege ended on the third day in a dramatic and unusual way. The Southerners had discovered a quantity of hemp bales in a nearby warehouse and arranged these bales in a line on the west side of the Union entrenchments. They then began rolling the bales up this hill (picture) closer to the line of trenches. The panicked Federals unleashed their artillery into the moving bales, but their cannon balls had little effect on the dense bales. By early afternoon, the snakelike line of bales had advanced close enough to the Union trenches for a charge, and the defenders of that sector engaged in a brief but bloody hand-to-hand fight before being driven back into their entrenchments.