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A bronze infantry figure commemorating Kansas City’s WWI soldiers, sited in the Westport neighborhood. Sculptor, dedication date, and precise location require archival verification.
The monument
The WWI Doughboy at Westport is a bronze sculpture depicting an American infantryman of World War I — the type of figure commonly known as a “Doughboy” — installed somewhere in the Westport area of Kansas City, Missouri. The Kansas City public art inventory records it under the identifier PUB-020, placing it at approximately 39.0532° N, 94.5894° W in the Westport–Roanoke corridor.
The sculptor, casting foundry, and formal dedication date have not been confirmed through primary sources. The Viquesney Doughboy Database (the most comprehensive catalog of E. M. Viquesney’s mass-produced Spirit of the American Doughboy casts) does not list a Kansas City entry, suggesting this monument, if it is a Viquesney cast, may be unrecorded in that database, or alternatively it is a one-off commission from a different sculptor.
The “Doughboy” form — a tin-helmeted infantryman advancing with rifle and bayonet, or standing at parade rest — was the dominant idiom for neighborhood-scale WWI commemoration across American cities during the 1920s and 1930s. Hundreds of such figures were installed by American Legion posts, Gold Star Mothers chapters, and civic associations during that period.
What it commemorates
The monument commemorates residents of the Westport neighborhood and the surrounding Kansas City area who served or died in the United States’ participation in World War I (1917–1918). Whether the dedication inscription names a specific unit, regiment, or roll of local servicemembers has not been confirmed.
Kansas City’s WWI contribution was significant at the city-wide scale: the Liberty Memorial Association raised $2.5 million in ten days in 1919, drawing donations from 83,000 Kansas Citians, to fund what became the national WWI memorial. A neighborhood-scale Doughboy would have served as a local counterpart to that city-wide gesture, honoring specific streets and families rather than the war in aggregate.
Location and condition
The monument is catalogued in the Westport area, roughly within the Westport–Roanoke corridor at the coordinates above. Exact placement — whether in a park, on a boulevard median, or adjacent to a community institution — has not been confirmed through on-the-ground documentation. Current condition and any restoration history are likewise unverified.
The nearest verified WWI memorial at the neighborhood scale is the Murray Davis Memorial (1928) at 40th and Main Streets, a pink Tennessee marble monument designed by architects Wight and Wight to honor Major Murray Davis, a Kansas City attorney killed at the Battle of the Argonne on September 29, 1918. That monument is distinct from the Doughboy and commemorates a single individual rather than the neighborhood’s servicemembers collectively.
See also
- westport — neighborhood context
- kc-in-wwi — Kansas City’s broader WWI history
- liberty-memorial — the national-scale WWI memorial anchoring Kansas City’s commemorative geography
- liberty-memorial-sculptures — sculptural program at the Liberty Memorial complex
- The KS.City Wiki