Why is “Uncle Sam” Buried in Missouri?

He came to Missouri several times
and died here in 1932

Frank Coburn is not a name that many people known, even though he was perhaps the most famous face in America during World War I. He portrayed “Uncle Sam” for 35 years and crisscrossed the country getting Americans excited about patriotism. He traveled extensively through Missouri during his role as everyone’s favorite “Uncle” and even concluded his life near Kansas City after going to Excelsior Springs for medical treatment.

The Legend

It is first important to understand the history of the name. Legend has it that it all started with a man named Samuel Wilson from Massachusetts. After the Revolutionary War, he and a family member opened a food business in New York and began hiring relatives. That part of the story is important because they all called him “Uncle Sam.” The nickname stuck with people throughout the community.

His nickname began to spread during the War of 1812 because Wilson’s meatpacking business suppled food for the soldiers. On the side of the crates of food were the letters, “E.A.-U.S.”¹ The legend has it that someone made a joke that U.S. stood for Uncle Sam, not United States. Then others began saying that “Uncle Sam was feeding the troops.”

Newspapers began picking up the story and spreading the legend. Wilson died in 1854, but the legend didn’t die with him. Keep in mind that there are other theories about where the name came from, but this one gets the most attention. That’s because lawmakers decided to commemorate his war-time deeds in 1961 with a resolution where Congress “…salutes Uncle Sam Wilson of Troy, New York, as the progenitor of American’s National Symbol of Uncle Sam.”²

Uncle Sam, Part II

Then came Frank Coburn. Coburn was not the original Uncle Sam, but he is the one who made the icon even more famous in the early 1900s. The best way to describe Coburn was “unique.” He had traveled the world by the time he was in his 40s. He was called an “ultra-distance” walker because he traveled mostly by foot.³ He started crisscrossing the country around 1896 and began dressing the part as Uncle Sam. He also memorized famous patriotic speeches and documents and recited them while dressed in his red, white, and blue.

“He has memorized ‘The Declaration of Independence,’ ‘Constitution of the United States,’ ‘Washington’s Farewell Address,’ Lincoln’s speeches and whole volumes of other material, as well as readings from his favorite poets, Tupper, Pope and Shakespeare, and has at his tongue’s end an inexhaustible supply of incidents and anecdotes of his own travels.”

Dayton Sunday Journal, 1917

Uncle Sam’s Final Tour

Coburn walked all over America for 30 years as Uncle Sam. He even traveled in a route across the country that spelled out “Uncle Sam” in 1921. It was during that tour that he walked hundreds of miles of Missouri’s backroads to accomplish spelling out the name.

If his story was accurate, he entered Missouri somewhere around Branson and walked along the southern border toward Cape Girardeau. He then doubled back and walked toward Kansas City. He looped around toward Mid-Missouri and appears to leave the state near Joplin completing the letter “e.” It appears he later re-entered Missouri to complete the “L” when he went through the area near St. Joseph and Maryville. He continued walking for the next decade.

He came back to the Show Me State in 1931 when he got ill and had to go to the U.S. Veteran’s Hospital. Coburn stayed at the medical center for about a year and died there in Excelsior Springs on January 4, 1932 at the age of 73. He is buried in the Crown Hill Cemetery.

Sources

1. Smith, Philip R. Jr. (March 1979). “Who is Uncle Sam? The Legend and the Reality”. Soldier. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Chief of Public Affairs. pp. 37–38 – via Google Books. ↩︎
2. Eller, Jack David (2018). Inventing American Tradition: From the Mayflower to Cinco de Mayo. Reaktion Books. ↩︎
3. Crockett, & Crockett. (2022, February 17). Around the world on foot craze (1894-96) | Ultrarunning History. Ultrarunning History. https://ultrarunninghistory.com/around-the-world-2/ ↩︎