Fulton — Missouri | Shared Latitude

The small Missouri town where Winston Churchill coined 'Iron Curtain' — and where a bombed London church was later rebuilt stone by stone as a memorial. Lia and I stood inside that transplanted church and found the whole idea almost too strange to process.

Fulton is a small college town — home to Westminster College, enrollment in the low thousands — and on paper it has no obvious reason to matter to world history. But in March 1946, Winston Churchill stood on the Westminster campus and delivered his “Sinews of Peace” speech, the one that gave the world the phrase “Iron Curtain” and effectively marked the rhetorical opening of the Cold War. Lia, who studied a fair amount of European history, hadn’t known the speech was given in rural Missouri rather than Washington or London, and neither had I until we planned the trip.

A bombed London church, rebuilt in Missouri

The stranger part came later. In the 1960s, Westminster College brought over the ruined stones of St. Mary Aldermanbury, a Christopher Wren-designed church in London gutted by German bombing in the Blitz, and rebuilt it on campus as a memorial to Churchill, stone by numbered stone, shipped across the Atlantic. Standing inside it, with its restrained Wren interior and stained glass, feels genuinely disorienting — a seventeenth-century London church, fully functioning, sitting on a quad in the middle of the American Midwest.

The reconstructed interior of the Christopher Wren church, moved stone by stone from London to Fulton, Missouri

The National Churchill Museum and Breakthrough sculpture

Beneath the church, the National Churchill Museum traces the speech’s context and Churchill’s life more broadly, and just outside, a sculpture called “Breakthrough” — made from actual sections of the Berlin Wall by Churchill’s granddaughter, artist Edwina Sandys — bookends the story the town has quietly become custodian of. We wandered downtown Fulton afterward, a modest square of Missouri limestone buildings that gave no hint, until we arrived, that it held any of this.

The "Breakthrough" sculpture made from sections of the Berlin Wall outside the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri

Getting There

Fulton is about twenty-five minutes east of Jefferson City and two hours west of St. Louis on I-70 then US-54, with St. Louis Lambert International (STL) the more convenient major airport for most travelers. A car is necessary — Fulton is a small-town stop best paired with Jefferson City or Columbia on a Missouri road trip.