Spring Fling 2026 - Day 6: Churchill Museum

We are now in Illinois after driving 320 mi from the Kansas City, Mo area.

Along the way we took a slight detour to the small college town of Fulton, Illinois.  British prime minister Winston Churchill made a famous speech here on March 5, 1946, a speech where the phrase: "An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent" effectively marked the startup the Cold War.

Westminster College had invited Churchill to speak there, and when President Truman endorsed the idea, the former prime minister accepted.  Truman would accompany Churchill to the event.

The church at Westminster College is the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, a 17th-century London church designed by Sir Christopher Wren. It was dismantled stone-by-stone, shipped across the Atlantic, and reassembled in Fulton, Missouri, to serve as a memorial to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech.

The museum is located below the church: 

Martha and I toured the exhibits which were laid out chronologically ending with the speech event in 1946. The life of Churchill was covered pretty well I thought and I learned a few things that I had not known from my previous readings about him and World War II. 

These are the things that caught my eye or that I learned, there was of course a lot more information in history about the quite accomplished life of  Winston Churchill!

This is how Churchill became a known public figure:

Sir Winston Churchill was a direct descendant and the grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, John Spencer-Churchill. He was born at the family's ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, in 1874.

Martha got a chance to pose at Sir Winston Churchill's desk: 

We also visited the church, which is accessible via a set of winding stairs from the museum:

Info on the church and it's rebirth in Fulton, MO:

I found this graphic interesting, it shows London in 1945 depicting all the bomb damage suffered by the city during the war. If you look for the soul spot of color you can see where the church was located back then.

Outside the church, there are five pieces of the Berlin Wall that were shipped to Fulton for the museum:

After we left Fulton, it was about 2 and 1/2 hours and we crossed into Illinois and I now camping for a couple of days or so at a US Army Corps of Engineers campground near Carlyle, Illinois.