In 2008, the Monnett Battle of Westport Fund launched the Saving Kansas City's Battlefield Initiative to recover and preserve land from the Battle of Westport, the largest battle fought west of the Mississippi River, and by then had recovered 250 acres while seeking further donations for land acquisition and removal of structures. The effort grew from a longer preservation history beginning in 1923, when Kansas City officials adopted ordinances encouraging preservation of Battle of Westport sites, followed by unsuccessful 1926 efforts in Congress to create a National Military Park at Loose Park and Byram's Ford. In 1975, members of the Civil War Round Table of Kansas City formed the nonprofit Monnett Battle of Westport Fund in honor of Dr. Howard Monnett, raised $25,000 to purchase and place markers along a 32-mile auto tour, and then expanded preservation through donations and acquisitions, including 50 acres at Byram's Ford in 1983, more than $40,000 to acquire another critical 80 acres in 1992, a three-acre tract in 1995, and later transfers of battlefield tracts to the Kansas City Parks Department between 1995 and 2002 for development and maintenance as the Big Blue Battlefield. Additional support included more than $110,000 in 2010 for part of the purchase of a warehouse property on the battlefield and a 2012 donation of another warehouse tract for reclamation to green space. The Byram's Ford Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 because it was directly associated with a significant juncture in the Civil War Battle of Westport on October 22-23, 1864. That battle was the largest of the war west of the Mississippi, the last major Union victory in the Trans-Mississippi West, and it signaled the end of organized Confederate military operations in Missouri; eighty days after the Confederate defeat at Westport, the Missouri State Convention abolished slavery in Missouri and Governor Thomas C. Fletcher issued an Ordinance Abolishing Slavery in Missouri on January 11, 1865.