1816 - 1881

Frederick Thomas Kemper, pioneering Missouri educator and founder of Kemper Military School in Boonville, was born at Madison Courthouse, Virginia. After graduating from Marion College in Palmyra, Missouri, he came to Boonville in 1844 and opened his first boarding school for young boys, the new Boonville Male Academy. For the next ten years the school grew in enrollment and went through several name changes until he settled on the name Kemper Family School in 1854. In that year he married Susan Holten Taylor, a teacher in a local school for girls, with whom he had eleven children. In 1856 Kemper accepted a position at Westminster College in Fulton where he remained for the next five years. With the impending Civil War he returned to Boonville and reopened his school. In the 1873-74 school year a military flavor was introduced for the first time with the adoption of a cadet-gray uniform in the West Point style. The school continued to grow in both enrollment and physical size up to the time of Kemper's death on March 9, 1881, at which time the reins of the school were handed over to one of his former students, T.A. Johnston. Kemper and his family are buried in Walnut Grove Cemetery in Boonville. During Kemper's lifetime he was an advocate of strict family discipline and Christian morality along with the rigorous regimen of a classical educational curriculum. His motto was "Not to make mere scholars, but to make men."

Dedication: June 24, 2006

Sculptor: Kwan Wu

Marker is on Morgan Street near Main Street (U.S. 40), on the left when traveling east.

Courtesy hmdb.org

Credits and Sources: