Category Archives: capitol

Notes from a quiet street, Monsoon season edition

Posted on by
Reply

(Being a compilation of observation not reaching the level of full blogviation.)

Has it occurred to anyone else that the wrapped Capitol dome kind of looks like the Stanley Cup?   Maybe if you squint a little?   Kinda? Sorta?

090

We’ve heard several folks who don’t watch hockey remark that they were glued to the Stanley Cup finals. “That’s really intense,” one of them has said a couple of times, referring to the constant, fast, physical play.   Some folks who watched the games because a Missouri team was playing—and making history by winning—are likely to watch games next year because they’re hockey.

The fact that the Royals are dismal and the cardinals have been fighting hard to achieve mediocrity probably drove some of those fans to the Blues games.

One of the observers also has remarked that the championship by the Blues makes the absence of an NFL team in St. Louis a whole lot less important.

-0-

Back when we were covering the Senate, Eric Schmitt claimed to be the tallest state senator in Missouri history. We found some ancient references indicating he had some historic rivals but the record remained fuzzy enough that Schmitt remained firm in his convictions although we think we introduced reasonable doubt in at least one case.   He is now definitely the tallest State Treasurer in Missouri history.

But he is not the biggest man ever to work at the Capitol.

Until somebody comes along to disprove the information, we’ll report that title belongs to Clyde Perkins, a former restaurant man from Barnard. The Jefferson City Daily Democrat reported in January of 1923 that Perkins had been hired as an accountant for the House Accounts Committee. House Speaker Oak Hunter was the big guy in the capitol until then at 274 pounds.

The article about Perkins’ appointment said he had been “off his feed” since losing an election the previous November in Nodaway County, but he thought he’d be back at full strength when he regained fifty pounds. Perkins was to be paid five dollars a day. That’s about $74 a day in 2018 money, $370 for a five-day week. Probably not enough to sustain a man very long who weighed 476 pounds..

A 2008 Nodaway County history by Michael J. Steiner says Perkins topped out at 536. Steiner’s book has a picture of two women, each standing in one leg of Perkins’ bib overalls.

Clyde was called “Fatty” by the people back home in those less-sensitive times.  He was the Nodaway County Treasurer when he died at the age of 44 in April, 1936. His death certificate says a contributing cause of death was “extreme obesity; patient weighed 480 pounds.”

Better to be tall, we guess.

—

Administration of the death penalty in Missouri was a local affair, hanging in the counties, until the late 1930s when the gas chamber was built at the state penitentiary.

The Cole County Democrat observed on February 7, 1907, “The residents of Jefferson City get mad at least every two years. When the legislature meets some untamed jackass introduces a bill to have all hangings pulled off in (the) penitentiary. No person with sense enough to grease a gimlet can blame them for getting angry. The idea of making Jefferson City the human slaughter pen for the state is disgusting in the extreme.”

The disgust lasted three decades.

The legislature in 1937 approved asphyxiation by lethal gas at the state penitentiary instead of hanging at county seats. The first victim of the new gas chamber was a 100-pound pig that stopped struggling three minutes after fifteen cyanide eggs were dropped into a crock of sulphuric acid on December 13. The death of the pig convinced state officials that the gas chamber could be safely used on humans.

Three months later it was. John Brown and William Wright were strapped to the side-by-side chairs at 6:18 p.m. on March 3, 1938. The fumes hit them three minutes later. Medical personnel say they died within three or four minutes. A newspaper story recounted, “Only twenty-five witnesses—as compared with thousands which often-times made ‘Roman Holidays’ out of hangings—peered through the five windows to watch the lethal gas deaths.”

Prisoners were gassed from 1938 to 1965 in Jefferson City. The first drug-induced execution, in 1989, was done in the gas chamber before executions were moved to Potosi, then to Bonne Terre. Gas couldn’t be used because the rubber seal around the chamber door had rotted through disuse and the gas would have been fatal to witnesses, too.

Today, people on tours of the old pen can go into the gas chamber. Many of them get their pictures taken sitting in the chairs.

It is still legal to use gas for Missouri executions. But there’s no place in the state where such an execution could be held safely.

—

Well, that was pretty heavy, wasn’t it? Here’s something a little lighter.

About three years back (April of 2016) we put together a fanciful discussion of how a member of the family became his own grandfather, kind of along the lines of the famous 1940s popular and country song.

Well, friends, that song isn’t as absurd as it might seem.

Herewith is a story we discovered while trying to find something else in the State Historical Society newspaper library, straight from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune of July 29, 1924:

HIS BROTHER WILL BE HIS FATHER IN LAW

Frank Lueckenhoff, well known and popular merchant at St. Thomas, and Miss Frances Sommerhauser, step-daughter of H. J. Lueckenhoff, the grooms [sic] brother, are to be married next month, according to word received from St. Thomas.

Mr. Lueckenhoff’s brother will be his father-in-law and his sister-in-law will become his mother-in-law.

Henry J. Lueckenhoff, the older brother married the widow of John Sommerhauser. She had two daughters and Frank Leuckenhoff (the spelling changed in this paragraph) marries the oldest one next month.

Vote for the boats

Posted on by
Reply

Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist George Bernard Shaw said it in his play Back to Methuselah in 1949: “You see things; and you say “Why?”  But I dream things that never were; and I say “why not?”

I awoke one morning a few months ago thinking about a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, a museum that emphasizes the role of Missouri River steamboats as the lifelines to the American West.   It was a little while after our meeting in Kansas City at the Steamboat Arabia Museum where we talked about the museum’s future and its move to a new location where it can become a National Steamboat Museum.

There once had been some uneasiness about applying the “national” name to the museum— how a museum alongside the Missouri River could assume the “national” title for a creation that had such a profound impact on almost all of the nation’s navigable streams for most of the Nineteenth Century.  But that uneasiness went away when I remembered the Shaw’s remark about dreaming things that never were and asking “Why not?”

And that’s why we’re willing to buck some politically-influential big nay-sayers and the reason we hope members of the legislature will join us in a venture that requires some courage to make something great materialize for our city and for our state.

Why not put our National Steamboat Museum along the nation’s longest river system?  Why not put the museum on a hill overlooking the most challenging river that steamboats ever faced?  Why not display a boat or boats exhumed from their watery graves of a century and a half ago and more?  Why not a museum that represents the importance of steamboats to this nation’s greatest adventure—the expansion of our country from ocean to ocean?

Others have not been reluctant to use the “national” designation in connection with steam boating.  Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, has the National Steamboat Monument, a sixty-ton replica of the original paddle wheel from the “American Queen” (a modern tourist boat built in 1995) that towers forty feet off the ground, with a series of twenty-four metal smokestacks to symbolize the importance of steam in early river travel and the importance of riverboats to Cincinnati’s history.

Jeffersonville, Indiana—across the Ohio River from Louisville—has the Howard National Steamboat Museum in the 1894 mansion of steamboat captain James Howard (a museum that, appropriately, has survived a 1971 fire caused by an explosion of its steam heating plant).

Marietta, Ohio has the Ohio River Museum that includes a twenty-four foot long model of the sternwheeler “The Pioneer,” and a collection of artifacts from steamboats in three buildings.

The Clifton Steamboat Museum in Beaumont, Texas is a 24,000 square foot museum that includes steamboat history as well as artifacts from various wars in which Texans have participated.

Irvington, Virginia’s Steamboat Era Museum includes the pilot house from the steamer “Potomac,” built in 1894 and disassembled in 1938.

And Marion, Arkansas has The Sultana Museum that commemorates the disaster that struck the steamboat Sultana in 1865, an explosion of boilers and fire on a 367-passenger capacity boat packed with 2,300 passengers, mostly paroled Union soldiers just released from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prison camps. Only five-hundred of those passengers survived.

But nowhere is there a museum that honors the steamboats that fought the nation’s most dangerous river, a river on which the average lifespan of a steamboat was only three years. And in honoring those boats and those who built and operated them, wouldn’t we be honoring steamboat history in general?

The dream is for a museum that houses at least one exhumed steamboat. The whole thing. But maybe more. We’ll know when we dig down to others. The museum also would provide a window on the people we were in the early days of the frontier through the years until railroads had so penetrated the West that steamboats were no longer essential to the survival of frontier communities and the movement of the frontier toward the Pacific Ocean.

Some parts of the museum already exist; the steam engine from the “Missouri Packet,” the first of about 400 boats to sink in the Missouri River when it went under in 1820, the two-hundred tons of cargo recovered from the exhumed “Arabia,” and soon, the cargo of and perhaps the entire “Malta,” due for recovery this winter if fund-raising can be completed.

Introductory displays of the earlier history of steamboats on the Hudson, Potomac, and Ohio Rivers—among others—can provide the context for the main displays in the National Steamboat Museum which will take nothing away from the importance of existing collections and monuments but will instead bring the importance of steamboats and their era into sharp and dramatic focus complementing other facilities that highlight this often overlooked but vitally important part of the development of our nation.

Why the Missouri River?  Writer and epic poet John G. Neihardt, who canoed downriver from Fort Benton, Montana in 1908 wrote:

“The Missouri is unique among rivers.  I think God wished to teach the beauty of a virile soul fighting its way toward peace—and his precept was the Missouri.  To me, the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”

I have come to realize we can call it The National Steamboat Museum because—while focusing on Missouri River steamboats—it will be a tribute to all of the rivers, all of the boats that challenged them and won or lost, all of the people who invented, built, and operated those boats—and those who died in their disasters—and all of the people who rode them into uncertain futures that are our national history.

Their descendants not only will have a unique glimpse of their real-people ancestors. They might draw courage by knowing that progress is not achieved by sitting on a riverbank and watching the water flow by but instead is often achieved by having the courage to go against the current in search of better things.

Those of us who want to create the National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City do not lack the courage to face the heavy opposition of our casino industry to provide the funding for that museum as well as for a State Museum building and the transformation of the present state museum space into a visitor center that focuses on the history of the capitol and of state government, a place to learn about being a Missouri citizen. The casino industry, which has capitalized on (some say “has taken advantage of”) our steamboat heritage for more than twenty-five years, appears not to care about leaving funds in Missouri to accomplish great goals that will benefit all Missourians. The legislature can decide if its best to keep some of the casino’s annual windfall here for future generations rather than let it flow to casino corporate offices in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

A National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, Missouri?

Why not?

Join us in making what never has been—-

be.

A chance to do something extraordinary

Posted on by
3

And a chance to BE something extraordinary.

Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.

If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.

It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.

A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there.  If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource.  Jefferson City is acting.

The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City.  Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity.  And a major challenge.

We should not underestimate that challenge.  Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.

We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.

There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package.  It also would finance construction of a new state museum building.  Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.

This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.

This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol.  The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.

You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.

If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war.  We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity.  If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.

A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal.  There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum.  We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.

We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state.  We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.

This is an important point:  We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds.  We can do all of this without a general tax increase.

Our proposal is even more significant because—

It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856.   It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.

Why are these boats so special?  And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west.  Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier.  We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived. 

From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air.  The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.

The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty.  Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.

The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.

The  Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.

David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.

And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete.  If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.

If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.

Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill?  Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?

David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere.  The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.

David is a dreamer.  Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River.  That history spanned 1820-1880.  By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.

The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles.  It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close.  The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta. 

We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.

The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.

2019-2026. It’s not much time.

Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal.  It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.

Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed.  But we, as a community, must help them.  Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers.  Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms.  It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.

We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”

We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.

We must do this.

(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)

Christmas: Just another working day

Posted on by
2

Merry Christmas from the Missouri Capitol.
Governor Mike Parson’s office is fully involved in the Christmas season. We don’t recall anything like this in all the years we have covered the capitol. Don’t expect to see him at his desk on Christmas day, however, although there were many times when a lot of people were at their capitol desks at Christmas.
The governor’s office often has been on display during this Christmas season because of something else Governor Parson has done that we’ve never seen done before. The double doors between the capitol hallway and the big oval office are open often with a glass barrier that people can walk up to and look into the office. The doors are closed when he’s doing governor business but at other times they’ve been opened so the visiting public can see the office and its Christmas decorations.
We’ve often thought it’s a shame that capitol visitors don’t get to see that magnificent room.
History tells us that Christmas has been through a lot of changes through the decades. For decades, it was just another day. Not until Victorian times did it begin to assume the secular commercial bonanza it is.
When the state legislature moved from its temporary home in St. Charles to the City of Jefferson, the fourth session of the General Assembly convened on Monday, November 20. Christmas day was just another regular business day, as was New Year’s Day. A reading of the House Journal for December 25, 1826 sounds similar to the House Journals today. It is—as it is now—pretty dry stuff.

MONDAY MORING, DECEMBER 25, 1826
The house met pursuant to adjournment.
Mr. Speaker appointed Messrs., O’Bryan, Grant, Thornton, Jewell, Canole, Bollinger, Nash, Johnson, Bruer, Brinker and Brock as a select committee on an engrossed bill from the senate, entitled an act supplementary to an act to organize, govern and, discipline the militia, approved 11th Feb. l825.
Mr. Grant of the committee of ways and means introduced bill appropriating money for defraying the expenses of government, which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading. On motion of Mr. Watkins, the rules of this house requiring a bill to be read three several times [sic] on-three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on to-day.
On motion, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house. Mr. Harris of the select committee to whom was referred the petition of sundry inhabitants of the counties of Chariton and Ralls, praying for the formation of a new county, reported a bill to establish the new county of Marion which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading.
On motion of Mr. Burckhartt, the rules of this house requiring bills to be read three several times on three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on jo-day,
On motion of Mr. Cook, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house.

The journal continues for several more paragraphs of routine business before the House adjourned until the next day. Representative Jewell, by the way as Dr. William Jewell of Boone County, a founder of Columbia for whom William Jewell College was named. Bollinger was George F. Bollinger, who represented Cape Girardeau in the territorial and state legislatures from 1812 until 1840. When a new county was formed of Cape Girardeau County, it was named for him.
Working on Christmas was not all that unusual in those times. It was seventeen years yet before Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published or that Sir Henry Cole, an Englishman, printed a couple thousand Christmas cards that sold for a shilling each. Christmas would not be declared a federal holiday for forty-four more years.
In 1828, the second general assembly to meet in Jefferson City took December 25 off but was back at work the next day. The practice was common for several years. In 1840, the House took the day off but the Senate did meet on Christmas day, a Friday, and on Saturday the 26th but adjourned both days because it could not achieve a quorum. Business as usual resumed in both chambers on Tuesday the 29th.
The House met on Saturday, December 21, 1844 and transacted business before adjourning until Monday the 23rd. But not enough people showed up to make a quorum again until the afternoon of December 30. The Senate met on Christmas day but only five members answered the roll call. It tried to meet each day after that but didn’t get enough members in the chamber to do official business until the 30th.
Then we get to this entry:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, At the First Session of the Fifteenth General Assembly, begun and held at the City of Jefferson, on Monday, the Twenty-Fifth day of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight.
The Senate was called to order by the Hon. JAMES YOUNG, Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate, and FALKLAND H. Martin, Esq., acted as Secretary pro tem.

That’s right. The 1848 legislative session began on Christmas Day. And it happened again just six years later:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, AT THE FIRST SESSION, BEING THE REGULAR SESSION, OF THE EIGHTEENTH GENERAI ASSEMBLY, BEGUN AND HELD AT THE CITY OF JEFFERSON, ON MONDAY THE 25TH DAY OF DECEMBER, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR, THAT BEING THE DAY FIXED BY LAW FOR THE MEETING OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI.

The Senators were called to order at 11 o’clock, A. M., by the Hon. Wilson Brown, Lieutenant Governor, and President of the Senate.

Lt. Governor Brown was one of about thirty people killed in the Gasconade bridge disaster on Nov. 1, 1855, the day the first passenger train was to have arrived from St. Louis.


In this building, long ago, Christmas was just another day for many years. There were times, though, when it appears some members of the general assembly left town for a few days, leaving the House and Senate without enough members to transact business although a few members who lived too far from home in those pre-highway, pre-bridge, pre-railroad days when the rivers were too icy to travel by boat stayed in Jefferson City, a town of no paved streets, few amenities, and fewer than three-thousand people before 1860.
The new Missouri Constitution adopted in 1865 established the January start date for the legislature, ending the winter sessions. Although the observance of Christmas had been slowly building, it was not until the Reconstruction years that December became the biggest month of the year for retail sales.
In a couple of weeks, today’s legislators will start a new session in today’s capitol. By then the Christmas decorations will be gone and the present capitol will feel, as the old one undoubtedly felt, the quickening pulse within it. Christmas and the old year are gone. A new year and new careers soon will begin to take shape. And so will the new journals that somebody else might read 170 years hence.

A GODDESS COMES TO EARTH

Posted on by
4

Ceres, a lady of myth and mystery who has extended blessings to state capitol visitors for ninety-four years, has been brought to earth by mortals who love her and care for her.
She’s in Chicago now and will be staying there about a year before she comes home to the capitol.
She’s a ten-feet four-inches tall, two-thousand pound bronze statue whose presence among flesh-and-blood humans was an emotional event for many of those who spoke quietly in loving terms as they walked around the flatbed trailer on which she’d been carefully laid after days and hours of preparation for her removal from the capitol dome.
She’s beautiful.
We’re going to spend some time in this entry telling her story, which is as ancient as the Greek and Roman empires, as recent as last week, and is beginning a new chapter. We’ll be drawing on the research we did for The Art of the Missouri Capitol: History in Canvas, Stone, and Bronze and for the upcoming book about the history of the building.

WHO IS CERES?
Ceres is a figure from Roman mythology whose Greek counterpart is Demeter. She’s the goddess of grain, of agriculture, of fertility, a representative of Mother Earth. We’ll use the Roman version of her story here. She was a sister of Jupiter who was impregnated by Jupiter (family relationships among gods and goddesses apparently were not frowned upon in the myth
The family weirdness continues with Pluto kidnapping Proserpina with plans to marry her and live in the underworld. Mama Ceres, as you might expect, was not favorably disposed to such an arrangement. As she searched for her daughter, she stopped the growth of crops and caused deserts, acts that alarmed Jupiter to send Mercury to the underworld to convince Pluto to let Proserpina return to the surface.
Pluto blackmailed Proserpina. He forced her to agree to return to the underworld for part of the year. When Proserpina showed up, Ceres was happy and as long as the two were together the earth was fertile and crops grew, trees had leaves, and the grass grew. But when Proserpina has to return to Pluto, Ceres becomes depressed and the earth begins to lose its productivity and the trees start to lose their leaves and the lawn finally stops growing.
So we have brought Ceres to earth at a time when she supposedly becomes depressed because she misses Proserpina—which might explain the chilly and snowy day of falling leaves and dying lawns when she came down. Although the capitol restoration workers say she’ll be put back up in a year, regardless of the weather, we think it would be more appropriate to put her back in place at a time when the wind blows warmer, the trees are budding, the days are growing longer, and so is the grass.
That’s the best we can figure out this complicated family relationship of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome and ancient Greece.
Regardless, let’s hope that Proserpina, unknown to her mother, already is living in Chicago (known for many years for its underworld history) and hears that Mom is going to be in town, and that they get together. We’re ready for a quick return of spring.

WHY CERES?

Simple. She’s the goddess of agriculture, among other things.  Although Missouri is becoming more urban, its number one industry remains agriculture. It was even moreso when she was commissioned, cast, and put into place.

THE MISSOURI CAPITOL WAS NOT HER INTENDED SITE
It not only was not the intended site, but the statue of Ceres appears to be less than an original design.
For example, the Smithsonian Learning Center has this statue titled “Maidehood,” a version of which also is in the Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.
The hand is up, not down, and the gown is more revealing than the attire of Ceres. But the design similarities are unmistakable.
Then there is this work from the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, also by Sherry Fry:
She’s called “Peace” in this version.
Fry originally intended the statue to fulfill a commission for Grant’s Tomb in New York. But an undated newspaper clipping in the papers of Decoration Commission member Cora Painter says, “When he visited the Missouri Capitol, he was struck with the thought that there was the building to which his theme was fitted and he executed the model for Missouri instead of New York.”

SHE’S NOT THE ONLY CAPITOL CERES
We aren’t the only state capitol with a statue of Ceres. Vermont’s capitol in Montpelier has had a Ceres statue since 1858. As this is written, sculptor Chris Miller is carving—from Honduran Mahogany— the third Ceres statue to adorn the statehouse dome. The clay model he is working from was done by Jerry Williams, who usually works in granite. The first two wooden statues fell victims to rot after about eighty years each.
(The picture is from Sevendaysvt.com)

WHO DECIDED SHE SHOULD BE UP THERE?
The original decision was made by the State Capitol Commission Board, the predecessor of the Capitol Decoration Commission. And for a time, there was some consideration of making her out of something else.
The capitol architectural firm of Tracy and Swartwout (pronounced Swart-out) proposed a ten-foot statue of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture “fully robed and head erect.” They suggested, “In her right hand she carried the torch of education and in her left, which hangs by her side, are a few blades of wheat.” The Capitol Commission Board approved the idea in September, 1915 then wondered whether the statue should be made of sheet copper instead of bronze, what the thickness of copper should be if that was the material of choice, and what would be the cost difference.
By mid-1916 the board was waiting for the great bonze doors to arrive for the south front of the building and had started casting up sums to see what else it could buy. It thought there would be enough for a statue of Ceres on the dome, among other things. The W. F. Norman Sheet Metal Manufacturing Company of Nevada, the home town of commissioner Theodore Lacaff, sent the board a plaster model of a proposed twelve-foot ball statue that could be made of 48-ounce of sheet copper for $2,480.
But the board was hit with a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that almost drained its bank account, leaving it without funds for the statue or to hire sculptors to carve figures for the main pediment.

Architect Egerton Swartwout called the board’s suggested cost of the statue “absolutely inadequate” and noted the price of bronze had gone up so much since war broke out in Europe that the board could not afford the bronze for the statue much less pay for casting it. He warned of vendors who would “sell you a lot of junk which they too often put on court houses and other such buildings, like the Civil War Memorials that are scattered through the land, made out of stamped tin.”
Swartwout suggested the statue be made of hammered sheet copper, the material used in the Statue of Liberty. Norman said copper and bronze were scarce because the government was not allowing their use for anything but war work. Norman endorsed the idea of Ceres “since such stress is being laid upon the importance of cereals” at the time and the Missouri War Production Board was encouraging, and getting, great improvements in state agriculture production. Although Norman later got an option on some copper of the same weight used in the Statue of Liberty, the Ceres project wound up on the Capitol Commission Board’s scrap heap.
The Jefferson City Daily Capital News observed that the war had caused Ceres “to gracefully sidestep the honor of standing on top of the capitol dome and beaming down upon a peaceful world. Gallantly Ceres gives way for old glory who will proudly wave over the most beautiful state capitol in the Union.” But, forecast the newspaper, “When victory ends the war, Ceres will have her inning.” Sherry Fry’s bronze Ceres statue was hauled to the top of the dome in the fall of 1924, made of bronze. It would be more than six decades before the Norman Company got some of its products in the capitol, when it installed the tin ceiling in the office of Senator Harold Caskey.

THE SCULPTOR
The statue was designed by Sherry Edmundson Fry, an Iowa-born sculptor who began his career when he shaped a figure from clay scooped from a ditch near his Creston, Iowa home. His father refused to support his desire to study are in college so Fry picked potatoes to work his way through Grinnell College.
After graduation, Fry worked with sculptors Lorado Taft and Charles Milligan in Chicago before moving to New York to work for Karl Bitter, who created the original “Signing of the Treaty” panel that is on the river side of the capitol. He signed on as a crewman aboard a cattle boat bound for France so he could study at the leading art institutes in Paris. Fry continued his studies in Italy before returning to France where he met Des Moines businessman James Edmundson who hired him to create a sculpted image of his father. Fry so admired Edmundson that he took the man’s last name as his middle name. (The Archives of American Art in Washington, D. C., has the only photograph of Fry we have been able to track down.
)During World War I, Fry was part of the newly-formed Army Camouflage Corps, one of the leaders of which was Evarts Tracy, whose architectural firm designed the Missouri Capitol. Tracy appears to have been the connection that got Fry the Ceres commission. He was paid $15,000 for this work (about $215,000 today).

THE REAL WOMAN, PERHAPS
We have suggested that the inspiration for the figure on our capitol’s dome might have been Audrey Munson, considered the country’s first supermodel. We have only circumstantial evidence because the records of the Capitol Decoration Commission have disappeared (we maintain a hope somebody will find some dust-covered file boxes in their attic or in a long-forgotten closet corner that will contain those records) and we have not located any of Fry’s personal papers

 Audrey was the favorite model for New York sculptors—the New York American referred to her as the “queen of Artists’ Studios”—including those who decorated our capitol, for more than a decade. She was such a popular subject that the organizers of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco published a guide book of the exposition statues that featured her face and body. More than half of the statues at the exposition were of Audrey.
Audrey Munson went into movies and became the first woman to appear nude in an American mainline movie. Her family put her in a mental institution in 1931. She died there in 1996 at the age of 104, thirty years after Fry’s death.

SIZE

Some of those who saw Ceres on the trailer after she was brought down were surprised that she isn’t bigger. It’s a matter of proportion and the Capitol Decoration Commission that commissioned the statue wanted to make sure the statue did not overwhelm the building’s design nor would it be insignificantly small. When Sherry Fry submitted a design, a steeplejack made a two-dimensional wallboard silhouette that he hoisted into position atop the dome. Commission members and others on the ground walked around the dome to study the figure from all angles and found, as one chronicler put it, the statue “stood out, bold, distinct, and beautiful.”
By contrast, Thomas Crawford’s statue of “Freedom” on our nation’s capitol is nineteen feet-six inches high and weighs fifteen-thousand pounds. The statue was cast in Rome, where Crawford had his studio. It was shipped to this country in six crates and put together atop the capitol in 1863. Your loyal observer frankly thinks that she is too large for that dome but—to the surprise of some, perhaps—he was not around in 1863 to protest. Neither was Crawford, who died in 1857.

BRINGING HER DOWN

No one is alive today to see her return to earth who saw Ceres, or at least the top part of her, hoisted to the dome in 1924. For most of a century we have had only photographs from airplanes or long lenses to show us her beauty.
Unless you went to Columbia.
Before Sherry Fry was allowed to cast a bronze statue, he had to submit a half-size preliminary sculpture to the Decoration Commission. Many of the preliminary drawings, paintings, window designs and sculptural models were taken to the University of Missouri School of Art and Archaeology by commission chairman John Pickard, the founder of the university’s art history department. Some preliminary painting are in the Ellis Library. The plaster models of the south front frieze line some of the hallways on the top floor of Jesse Hall, the main administration building. Unfortunately (as of our last visit there) there are no signs telling anyone what those encased things are.

For years, Fry’s preliminary model of Ceres was in Pickard Hall on the Francis Quadrangle but when that building was closed after it was found to be contaminated by radioactive elements left from research in the early 1900s the museum was moved to what’s known as Mizzou North, the former Ellis Fischel Cancer Hospital on the business loop. The statue is still there although it has lost a hand and some toes.

In 1995 some folks made their way to the top of the dome to check on Ceres’ condition. A few days before she was brought down, the Office of Administration had a photographer on the dome with her. Until workers started preparing to bring her down several days ago, nobody had gone face-to-face with the goddess since ‘95. Unless they’d been to Columbia.

It’s hard to compare the face of the plaster model with the face of the final bronze statue because of light and perspective. But it appears to us Fry made a slight alteration in the face of Ceres, perhaps slightly lengthening it, when he made the final version. (Compare with the statue’s face at the end.)

Two guys were essential to the safe return of Ceres to earth. One was Zack Franklin who ran the big crane that reached up and over to Ceres and gently lifted her from her perch and gently lowered her to the trailer below. Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe (who commemorated their roles) called Franklin “the most important man in Missouri during the five to seven minutes Ceres was in the air.”

The eyes for Franklin on the platform far above was James Stafford, talking by radio to the crane operator as the delicate task of attaching the hook to the carefully-wrapped harness around the statue. It was fitting that Stafford should be intimately involved in the process. His great-grandfather had been one of the workers who constructed the building that Ceres has presided over all this time.

 

So she came down, wrapped in a state flag that was a last-minute thought earlier that morning, turning to seemingly bless the building over which she presided or maybe to wave goodbye for a little while, and then for the first time in more than nine decades, she was allowed to lie down.

 

FACING THE WRONG WAY?
We don’t know where this got started, the idea that when Ceres was winched to the dome in 1924 that workers turned her the wrong way before anchoring her. We have never found any contemporary accounts saying that.
We’re not sure what the rationale is for that idea other than north Missouri is the state’s main corn, wheat, and beans producing region while the south (except for the Bootheel) is better at raising rocks.
One person has suggested she faces south to reflect Missouri’s Confederate heritage, in effect turning her back on the North. Again, we have never found any contemporary comment or account indicating that is the case. It is true that “Dixie” was part of the inauguration ceremonies for new governors in those days but we do not believe the Capitol Decoration Commission was in any way motivated to turn its goal of appropriately decorating the building into a political statement.

So why does she face south—and WILL face south when she returns from Chicago (as shown in Lloyd Grotjan’s photo from our Art book)? Because the south front of the Capitol is where the people come for admittance to the halls of their government. Her hand is extended in blessing to the people of Missouri who gather below her for inaugurations, rallies, concerts—-for some years in the hot summers the mainline Protestant churches held joint worship services on the lawn—or just to visit the state’s greatest symbol. It would be extremely poor manners if the patron goddess of Missouri turned her back on her people.
We wouldn’t be surprised if that was what the commission thought when Ceres ascended in 1924.

AND A FINAL NOTE—
Some of us think the beauty of Ceres should not be so far away that Missourians cannot be touched by it for another century or so. Perhaps those restoring the Capitol would consider doing what has been done with “Freedom” in the National Capitol.
The full-size plaster model for that statue that was used to cast the bronze statue on top of the building was stored in pieces for more than 130 years before it was restored by the Architect of the Capitol in 1929. It stands today in Emancipation Hall of the U. S. Capitol’s Visitor Center.
The United States Capitol Historical Society sells a nine-inch tall version of the statue made of crushed marble removed during the renovation of the east front of the building and mixed with resin. It sells for forty-six dollars. An much smaller replica is available as a Christmas ornament.
Oklahoma, which finally put a dome on its Capitol is topped by a twenty-two foot tall statue, a nine-foot replica of which is in the rotunda.
Today’s laser scanning and 3-D printing technology could produce an accurate reproduction of Ceres that would make a striking attraction in the Capitol Museum or to the Capitol visitor’s center that is talked about from time to time. And a small but well-detailed version made of the dust from the stones removed during the present restoration and repair project could be a solid seller at the tour desk.

Beauty should not be hidden, even if it is in plain sight, 250 feet above those who would admire it.

 

The portrait

Posted on by
Reply

To be candid, we had something more interesting than this planned for today but decided to wait a little bit before posting it. Instead we are focusing on a tempestuous teapot of an issue.

Post-Dispatch reporter Jack Suntrup asked a few days ago if there will ever be a portrait of Governor Eric Greitens hanging along with portraits of Missouri’s other governors at the Capitol.  The answer is, yes, there should be one.

The hanging of official portraits has been an irregular sort of thing.  Several recent governors’ portraits were missing until the Missouri Academy of Squires (as we remember the story) paid to have them painted.  Matt Blunt’s portrait does not appear between the portraits of Roger Wilson and Jay Nixon. Neither he nor anybody else has commissioned one.

There are no doubt some who think the circumstances of Greitens’ departure should prohibit his portrait from being placed in the building.

We respectfully disagree.

Refusing to allow a Greitens portrait amounts to trying to erase history.  He was elected.  He did serve.  He quit.  We cannot deny that by some arbitrary decision that his portrait doesn’t belong among portraits of statesmen.  And spies. And traitors. And drunks. Human beings are elected to the governorship.

Let’s consider Trusten Polk, Sterling Price, Claiborne Fox Jackson, and John Sappington Marmaduke for example.

Polk, who served the shortest time as governor, became a U. S. Senator and was expelled from the Senate for disloyalty at the start of the Civil War when he cast his lot with the South. His portrait is in the collection and we’ve never heard anybody suggest it should be removed.

Sterling Price was a Confederate general during the Civil War and once led an army that threatened to try to capture Jefferson City by force of arms.  His portrait shows him wearing his Confederate uniform.  We’ve not heard anybody say he shouldn’t be recognized.

Claiborne Jackson was the governor who fled from Missouri when a U. S. Army general rejected his efforts to keep federal troops out of the state. Jackson set up a Confederate government in exile in Arkansas, where he died. He, Price, and Polk had taken oaths to defend the United States Constitution but then took up arms against their state and nation.

John S. Marmaduke is somewhat different.  He was a Confederate general who was nevertheless chosen by the people twenty years after the end of the Civil War to be the Governor of Missouri.  Haven’t heard any objections to his portrait being at the capitol.

James Wilkinson, twice a Revolutionary War General who was involved in shady deals and kicked out of the Army later became a general again and was involved with Aaron Burr’s plot to foment a western frontier revolution. He was a spy for the Spanish government when he was the governor.

Robert M. Stewart was known for his drunken escapades, one of which involved riding his horse into the governor’s mansion and feeding it from a sideboard that is in the present mansion.  He was a bachelor who sometimes employed female prisoners to work at the mansion. No, we don’t know what they did while they were there.  But nobody has suggested that character issues should keep his portrait from being provided.

Guy B. Park, a product of the Pendergast political machine of Kansas City, was just a Platte County Circuit Judge three weeks before his election as governor.  When the Democratic candidate died, Park was plucked from his bench, put at the top of the ticket, and won by a big margin.  His ties to Boss Tom Pendergast were supposedly so strong that the mansion became known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

But his portrait is in the capitol.

These and other governors were humans, political animals of one stripe or another, who did what they had to do to get elected and to serve, or get elected to a lower office and move up to the governorship when the job became vacant for one reason or another.

The portraits are not intended to provoke unwarranted admiration for the men who have held this office. They are there to mark Missouri history.

So it is with Eric Greitens. He deserves some wall space because he was elected to fill some office space. Somebody, some day, will paint his portrait.  There won’t be a historical gap in the images of our governors.   People can look at his portrait as they look at the portraits of other governors and perhaps wonder what he did.

Or, most likely, they’ll glance at it and then move on to something more interesting—the big map of Missouri soils or the stagecoach or the big kettle used by the Boone family to boil salt water.

Going where the story takes you

Posted on by
2

One of the best parts of being a reporter or an author or a historian or a detective (we suppose) is discovering where a story takes you.  Sometimes the real story is not the original story.

Such is the story of Daniel M. Grissom of Kirkwood.

Your reporter, author, and historian ran across Daniel in a letter he sent to Governor Arthur Hyde in 1924 saying he was honored to have been invited to the dedication of the Capitol that Daniel described as “one of the most chaste and beautiful structures in the world—equal in the exquisite symetry [sic] of its proportions to the once matchless now dismantled Parthenon at Athens, Greece,” perhaps a reference to the structure’s condition after a 1687 explosion.

He could not attend the dedication because “the infirmities of 94 years debar me” from being there. He concluded, “I send up my faint shout of gladness to join in the glorious and mighty outburst of patriotic joy that bursts from Capitol Hill this day.  If it be a cause for pride to be an American, the very next thing to it is being a Missourian.”

The letter was interesting enough to raise a question: “Who was this guy?”

And this is where the story took this author to a completely different place, a completely different time, and to one of Missouri’s most tragic moments.

The first question was how much longer he lasted.  He already was 94 but he seemed from his letter still to be at full mental strength.  A source for that information is the state death certificates on the Missouri State Archives webpage.  And there was Daniel M. Grissom, dead at the age of 101 on May 17, 1930.  But the certificate had another piece of information: “retired news paper editor.”  Two words.

The Missouri Press Association founded the State Historical Society of Missouri in 1898 and for many years, the society’s magazine, The Missouri Historical Review, carried obituary notices of editors and former editors who had been society members. And sure enough, there was Daniel, in the October, 1930 issue.

Daniel M. Grissom, it said, was twenty-four years old when he arrived in St. Louis from his home state of Kentucky to become a reporter for the St. Louis Evening News.  That would have been 1853.  He worked for the News for a decade, becoming the editor on a newspaper with a staff of two while still in his twenties.  When the News merged with the St. Louis Union, creating the Evening Dispatch, he became the editor-in-chief of the combined papers.  The Dispatch eventually merged with Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening Post to create today’s Post-Dispatch, which is probably when he joined the St. Louis Republican which later became just the Republic and lasted until its merger with the Globe-Democrat in 1919.

Then the eyebrows went up when the article reported, “While working on the News he was sent on the famous Pacific Railroad excursion train to Jefferson City, November 1, 1855.”

Suddenly, Daniel becomes even more significant.  That train would inaugurate passenger service between St. Louis and Jefferson City.  The legislature had put up bonding money for the Pacific Railroad and the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad and was to consider in the upcoming session whether to issue more bonds for more railroads. There was some doubt that it would because construction had been slower than expected and more expensive than expected on both lines.  Governor Sterling Price was skeptical.   The legislature was to come into session on November 5 so the arrival of the first passenger train at Jefferson City just ahead of the session was considered extremely important for the railroad interests. The capitol had been decorated for a big welcome. A huge banquet was to be held for the passengers.

But a violent and long-lasting rain storm swept in that afternoon.  And the train did not arrive.  The banquet went ahead solemnly in Jefferson City, attendees fearing something bad had happened.  But the storm had knocked out telegraph service and it was not until the next day that word arrived of what had occurred.

A separate locomotive and tender had been sent ahead of the train to make sure the not-quite-compete Gasconade River Bridge about nine miles west of Hermann was strong enough to support the train.  The locomotive made it safely across and was waiting on the other side when the passenger train steamed into sight.

The locomotive and a few cars made it across the first segment when, suddenly, that segment collapsed. Some of the cars fell thirty feet into the Gasconade River, pulling the engine and tender back on top of them.  Other following cars crashed on top of that wreckage. Only a few cars failed to go into the river. “Mr. Grissom was one of the survivors,” said the Review obituary, “and assisted in the rescue of many persons and became widely known for his reports of the catastrophe.”

Thirty-one people were dead, including two State Representatives.  About two-hundred more were injured.

There are three online resources that we use for newspaper accounts of historic events: Newspapers.com, Newspaperarchive.com; and the Smithsonian’s “Chronicling America” webpage.  There also are more than fifty-million pages of Missouri newspapers on microfilm at the State Historical Society in Columbia. Newspaperarchive.com produced the Liberty Weekly Tribune for November 16, 1855 and a gripping account of the tragedy.

In those days before wire services as we know them, newspapers exchanged issues with one another, which is how the Liberty newspaper came to have this account more than two weeks after the event.  “Yesterday was a sad day for St. Louis—a day whose events have cast a shadow over many a heart and made desolate many a bright hearthstone,” the story began in a manner typical of reporting in those days but far different from our times.

There was no byline. Bylines did not catch on much for another forty years or so after reporters became more popular with the public although correspondents at the time of the disaster sometimes signed their stories, usually with nom de plumes such as “Publius,” the Liberty newspaper’s Jefferson City correspondent who had a brief story about the tragedy on another page.

At the end of the eyewitness account in the Tribune was another surprise.  The article originally appeared in the St. Louis News.  It was Daniel M. Grissom’s account—which a survey of other newspapers in the “Chronicling America” website shows became THE nationwide story of the event.

Betty Johnson Douglas, writing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on March 6, 1927 described him as “a young newspaper man who had come to St. Louis from Kentucky only a few years before and was already editor of a paper which had given much support to railroad building projects in the state… blue-eyed, eager for new experiences and already making a reputation for himself as a writer of strong editorials.’

Climb aboard that ill-fated train and ride into a disaster with 26-year old Daniel M. Grissom:

Yesterday morning, at the seventh street depot of the Pacific railroad, a large crowd of happy persons were gathered, prepared for the excursion to Jefferson City, to celebrate the completion of the road to that point. It was a happy hour. Gay greetings were spoken and congratulations were joyously interchanged between friends who were glad each to find that the other was going.  Many who did not go came to wish a pleasant journey and God speed to those who did.  Some who could not go then promised to join the excursion to-morrow (today).  Two military companies, with stirring music and gay uniforms added to the pageant.  At half past eight the train started, freighted with six hundred happy hearts, followed by the good wishes of all whose hearts beat responsively to those “of the parting ones.” All was bright and pleasant, and although the twelve cars constituting the train were crowded to such an extent that many had to stand in the aisle between the seats, and others on the platform outside, yet there was a universal good feeling and “all went merry as a marriage bell.”  The people at the stations and villages along the road cheered us onward and shouted and waved hats and hand’cheifs in response to the merry music our Brass Band entertained them with.  As we came into Herman, a cannon pealed forth the glad greetings of the hearty citizens.  But how soon was the scene destined to be changed!  How soon were so many of those founding hearts to be pulseless. No one dreamed that death was near, yet it lurked for us only a few miles further on.  At 1 o’clock we left Herman [sic], preceded by a locomotive and tender which had been sent forward, to see what that the way was clear, and no danger impending.  Soon we came in sight of the bridge across the Gasconade river, about nine miles from Herman, and thirty-five from Jefferson City.  The bridge is approached by an embankment thirty feet high which terminated in a massive stone abutment.  Forty yards from the abutment, and just at the edge of the river, stands another staunch pillar, three more of which reach the other side of the stream, and support the bridge. The river is about two hundred and fifty yards wide and the bridge thirty feet high, at least.  The Pioneer locomotive had crossed the structure safely and was waiting at the other side to see the result of our attempt.  There was no fear of danger, nor thoughts of peril.  We slowly moved along the embankment and came on to the bridge.  The locomotive had passed the first span and had its forewheels above the first pillar beyond the abutment—there being then rested on the first span, the locomotive, baggage car and two heavily loaded passenger cars.  The weight was too much for the long, slender timbers which supported the rails and the enormous load above.  Suddenly we heard a horrid crash—it rings in our ears now—and saw a movement amongst those in the car in which we were seated; then there came crash-crashcrash as each car came to the abutment and took the fatal plunge.  The affair was but the work of an instant. We were running slowly at the time and the successive crashes came on at intervals of nearly a second.  We were seated in the seventh car—there being three behind us—and when we heard the horrid sound that came up, as each car slowly and deliberately took the leap, we hoped that our car might stop before it reached the precipice.  But no; it seemed that the spirit of ruin was beneath, determinedly dragging each car to the spot, wrenching it from its fastenings, and hurling it to atoms beneath.  Six cars fell in one mass, each on the other, and were shivered into fragments.  The seventh fell with its forward end to the ground; but the other end rested on top of the abutment.  Those in it were only bruised.  The eighth and ninth cars tumbled down the embankment before they reached the abutment.  Such a wreck I never saw and hope never again to see.  It was one undistinguishable mass of wooded beams, seats, iron wheels and rods, from beneath which came up groans of agony. Those who could, crawled out of the ruin immediately, and either sought to relieve their own wounds or the wounds of their friends.  Some wept tears of joy to find their friends alive and others shuddered to find their friends dead, the uninjured organized themselves under the lead of Mr. Pride, the conductor, and endeavored by chopping to extricate those who were yet alive from the wreck. Here a beam was cut into to disengage a broken arm; there an iron axle was pryed up to relieve a mutilated leg. There was no shrieking and screaming, though all begged for the love of heave to be extricated from some mass of iron or beam of wood which pinned them to the earth. All begged for water, drank it when brought and prayed for more.  There was hardly an entirely uninjured man to be seen.  Most of those who had escaped had streams of blood flowing over their faces from splinter wounds.  Others limped and hobbled about, looking for their friends.  A board shanty was the only shelter to be had and that was soon filled with the wounded, whose silent speechless agony was enough to make the stoutest heart shudder.  Soon after the accident the heavens grew dark and black as though in twain, and from the crevice gleamed the white lightning, and the harsh thunder bellowed its cruel mockings at the woe beneath. It seemed as if the elements were holding high carnival over the scene of slaughter. 

Grissom wrote a second version of the story, cited by Douglas in her 1927 article:

Suddenly there was an awful crash, a sickening lurch—another crash—another—another. We were moving forward jerkily, sickeningly.

Horrid sounds came from ahead. We realized in a flash what must have happened—the bridge was gone—we were being pulled into the river by the weight of the cars ahead, which had already crashed over the bank! Then—our car was going too. The violent motion threw us to the floor.

I was the first to gain my feet. I may have been unconscious for a moment, for the movement had stopped. When I got up and looked around not a soul was in sight. I was staggered for another second, but then I called aloud and one by one the passengers began to crawl out from under the seats, behind doors, through the debris of the wreck. No one in my car was seriously hurt, though we were all badly shaken up and some of us were bleeding and so weak from shock that we were hardly able to walk…

When a relief train from St. Louis came to our aid it was a very different kind of crowd which started on the return journey from that which had set out so gaily a few hours before. Hardly a word was spoken as we leaned our heads on our hands, some uttering groans and low cries of despair caused by their own sufferings or by the realization of the loss of a friend or relative in the disaster.     

(We pause for a while until the mental images of this extraordinary writing fade enough for us to continue.)

Jen Tebbe wrote on the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis  (not to be confused with the state Historical Society of Missouri that is based in Columbia) last November about some things other survivors had to say. http://mohistory.org/blog/what-survivors-had-to-say/

Grissom built an outstanding career in the years ahead. Historian and journalist Walter Stevens wrote a long time ago that Grissom was “among the foremost editorial writers in the West for a third of a century. He…wrote in a virile, lucid style.”

During the Civil War he and his Evening News were critical of General John Fremont, the commander of the Army of the West at the start of the war.  Fremont became so upset at the newspaper’s criticism after the fall of Lexington that he jailed Grissom and fellow editor Charles G. Ramsey.  They were released two days later.

The microfilmed old newspapers in Columbia tell us Daniel Grissom was 82 when he moved into the Kirkwood Old Folks Home where, said the St. Louis Globe-Democrat he “delighted to regale willing listeners with tales of the Civil War, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the capture of Camp Jackson, and other events, the formal accounts of which may only be found in histories.”

When he was in his nineties he wrote a dozen articles for the Missouri Historical Review about the famous people he had known, personal intimate sketches of people such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Governors Sterling Price and Claiborne Fox Jackson (who tried to take Missouri South at the start of the Civil War), James S. Rollins, and artist George Caleb Bingham, among others.  The last article was published when he was 98.

It was a surprise to him when he turned 100.  He thought he was only 99 until a week before the landmark birthday when he got a letter from a relative who had dug into an old family Bible and found that he had been born a year earlier than he thought.  So, actually, he was 95 when he wrote to the governor.

The Post-Dispatch reported he carried on a “voluminous correspondence with friends and relatives into his 90s but complained on his 100th birthday, “My pencil won’t do what I want it to now.  It wanders all over the page.  I used to walk up and down the corridor here by myself up to the last ten months but I just can’t make it alone any more.  I’m getting old and my legs just won’t support me the way they used to. I’m beginning to feel my years.”

More than one-hundred friends and relatives joined him at the home for his next, and last, birthday where he cut a thirty-two pound cake decorated by one candle symbolizing all of the others there wasn’t room for.

He survived one of Missouri’s greatest tragedies to live a long and historic life for another three-quarters of a century.  But his tombstone in Kirkwood’s Oak Hill Cemetery says only “Daniel M. Grissom, 1829-1930.”

When he thought he was 94 years old he wrote a letter to the governor of Missouri and another journalist read it after another ninety-four years and wondered, “Who was this guy?”  This is where the story took us.

Capitol credit

Posted on by
1

State Senate leader Ron Richard has had a goal for the State Capitol for a long time and he’s hoping his last year in the legislature is the year that goal is reached.  And it should be.

Richard loves the Capitol as the symbol of a state’s greatness and power, of its stability and beauty.  But he has watched as the Capitol has deteriorated during his almost sixteen-year career and how appropriations that have finally started providing some rehabilitation of the now century-old building are not nearly enough to get the job done.

He has seen the state struggle with meeting its budgetary responsibilities for education, health and mental health, social services—you name it.  And as the state has struggled to meet those responsibilities, the state’s greatest symbol has deteriorated.

Millions are being spent as a continuation of exterior restoration that has been underway for about three years.  Some critical problems in the basement have been attacked. But millions of dollars more are needed to do what needs to be done now and to meet the costs of ongoing expenses later.

Richard has been hoping to get a bill passed setting up a tax credit program that would encourage people and organizations to donate money to fix our Capitol.   He is the sponsor of one of two bills in the Missouri Senate addressing the problem.  While he could be putting the muscle of his position behind his own legislation he has decided to let Senator Dan Hegeman from the northwest Missouri community of Cosby carry the issue.  The bill already is out of committee and is ready for Senate debate. It started the week twenty-seventh on the debate list, a good position for early approval.

It’s Senate Bill 590 for those of you who keep score. It does two things.  It creates tax credits for people who donate to restoration and repair work at the Capitol complex, and it creates tax credits for those who want to contribute to restoration and repair work on other public buildings.

A lot of deep-pocket people and companies have representatives in the capitol hallways every day that Richard, Hegeman, and their colleagues on both side of the rotunda are meeting.  It would not be surprising if those hallway denizens carried word back to their employers that their workplace needs some help.  Some of the money raised can be used to increase general public awareness of the need for donations for which private citizen-donors would get credit on their state taxes.

Richard has several times shared this dream with your correspondent and it’s time the dream comes true.   Richard already has created a legacy as the only person in the almost-two century history of the state to serve as the leader of the House and the leader of the Senate.  But that accomplishment is more a legislative distinction.  Leaving behind a program that can raise money for the capitol’s upkeep is the more important thing.  It could be a legacy.

But times have changed a little since Ron Richard first established this goal.  Historic Tax Credits are not as popular as they once were.   The legislature established caps on those tax credits a few years ago—no more than an aggregate total of $140 million.  That cap drops to seventy-million dollars on July 1.  Local historic preservation organizations can point to buildings and districts in their communities that have benefitted from those tax credits.  Now, as the cap is cut in half, there could be two new causes trying to attract tax credit seekers.

Historic preservation tax credits aren’t very sexy.  Some lawmakers question whether they create enough new jobs to justify the reduction in state revenue that they produce.  Others with little interest in history might see little value in them to begin with.

But they ARE important.  They’re important for the towns where we live because they encourage us to think of how far we have come while making sites usable, even inhabitable.  They’re important for our capitol, a place intended to inspire those who visit and who serve there.  The fact that some who visit and who serve do not find the intended inspiration cannot be an excuse to let our capitol decline into a symbol of decisions not made, responsibilities not met, and needs not acknowledged.

Our capitol is better than that.  And the Richards dream and the Hegeman legislation is the best chance for our lawmakers to prove it so.   We hope they don’t miss the chance this year.

Never before in the history of the world—

Posted on by
5

Only a small percentage of visitors to Missouri’s Capitol get to go up to the Whispering Gallery, a place where a person can stand facing the wall and whisper something that is clearly heard by someone facing the wall on the other side of the gallery.  It is unlikely that those who have been there or those who have noticed from their position far below the railing high up in the dome that is the gallery’s home have ever heard that the Missouri Capitol Whispering Gallery was unique in the history of architecture when it was designed.

Never had anything like it been done before.  And as far as we know, the story has never been told before. Or if it has, it hasn’t been told for a long, long time.

Deep in the files of the Capitol Commission Board at the Missouri State Archives is a letter written September 29, 1924 by Egerton Swartwout, the architect whose firm designed our capitol, a few days before the building’s dedication in 1924.  This letter, as is the case with so many of his letters, is an incredibly human document these ninety-plus years after that event.  In it, he recalls his company getting the bid to design the building, the struggles with the contractor over the stone to be used, and other issues that had to be dealt with.  Toward the end of the fourth-page of the five-page letter, he writes of his partner, Evarts Tracy, who had left the firm to help create the Army’s Camouflage Corps during World War I and who had died in Paris in 1921 while helping the French with their postwar reconstruction effort, “Poor Tracy, he was extremely interested in the Capitol and very proud of it and one of the things that appealed to him particularly was the whispering gallery, the only one, by the way, that has ever been made artificially, or rather made on purpose, and that was done by Professor Sabine.   Poor chap, he is dead now but he talked to me about it often and mentions it in his Memoires…”

That mention sent us off in search of Wallace Sabine and his memoirs.  Wallace Sabine was a physics professor at Harvard when Tracy and Swartwout were students there.  When Harvard built the Fogg Auditorium, the school quickly learned the audience could not hear what was being said on the stage and asked Sabine to find out why.  Sabine’s research made him the father of architectural acoustics. The measurement of sound absorption today is the Sabin.  When Tracy and Swartwout were designing the capitol in 1913, they sought Sabine’s advice for ways to make sure members of the House and Senate could hear the speakers in their cavernous, stone-lined chambers.  The sound-absorbing curtains and fabrics in both chambers, including in the ceilings, are the result of Sabine’s study of the original plans.  Some old timers your reporter talked to a long time ago recalled that debate could be heard in the pre-public address system days quite well.

Sabine was only fifty when he died in 1919. His successor at Harvard as the Hollis Chair of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, Theodore Lyman, edited a volume of Sabine’s papers and speeches and even some unpublished presentation, one of which was about whispering galleries.”

Sabine began that paper, “It is probable that all existing whispering galleries, it is certain that the six most famous ones, are accidents; it is equally certain that all could have been predetermined without difficulty and like most accidents could have been improved upon.”  There six he wrote about in his paper were the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Statuary Hall at the Capitol in Washington, The vases in the Salle Des Cariatides in the Louvre in Paris, St. John Lateran in Rome, the Ear of Dionysius at Syracuse, and the Cathedral of Girgenti.  Statuary Hall in our nation’s capitol was the original chamber of the United States House of Representatives until it was outgrown.

Eighteen pages into his discussion of whispering galleries, the father of architectural acoustics wrote that the whispering gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London could have been more efficient had the walls been “slightly, indeed almost imperceptibly curved.” And then he continues, “Such a gallery will be in the dome of the Missouri State Capitol, a gallery unique in this respect that will have been planned intentionally by the architects.”

By the time this paper was published in 1921, editor Lyman added, “The building is now complete. One of the architects, Mr. Edgerton [sic] Swartwout, reports that the whispering gallery in the dome exactly fulfills Professor Sabine’s prediction and has been the cause of much curiosity and astonishment.”

There was some technical stuff in the paper that explained why our whispering gallery works so well and was better than any of the “accidental” ones in previous world history that we won’t get into.   But the fact remains—-

The Missouri Capitol’s whispering gallery was the first one in the entire history of world architecture that was designed specifically to be a whispering gallery.

We just dug that story out in the last ten days or so to put in the next capitol book (don’t ask us when it will be out—maybe 2019 if things work out but look for it when you see it).  But we couldn’t wait that long to tell it.  We’ve known our capitol is an extraordinary place.  But this feature puts it on a whole new scale.

There have been several intentional whispering galleries built in this country and internationally since then.  But the Swartwout/Sabine Whispering Gallery in the Missouri Capitol was the first of its kind.

Ever.

Next time you’re in the rotunda. Look up.  Climb up, if you have permission.  And step through a door to world architectural history.

(The photo is from the blog, “Opulent Opossum,” by Julianna Schroeder, who said some nice things about the Capitol art book back in 2011.  She was a great editor to work with.)

Folk lore

Posted on by
1

Several good stories about the Missouri Capitol were dispatched to the cutting-room floor when the original 727-page typescript of the next Capitol book was pared down to a size the publisher can handle and this is one of them. Well, actually, two.

This particular segment is only sixteen lines long.  The story behind it is much longer, as you will see if you endure the telling of it all the way to the end, and a forerunner to the today’s highways and transportation issues.

(“The cutting-room floor” is a movie industry term that refers to the footage that is cut out of the final version of the film during the editing process.  But you probably already knew that).

One of the stories began with an old postcard. Old postcards can be fascinating reading. Many are pretty mundane but sometimes the brief messages on the back are flash views into someone’s life and there have been times when I’ve gone to the internet to see if I can track down the person who received the card all those years ago or the person who sent it to learn the story to which the brief message refers. Sometimes the reader of the back of an old postcard can mentally create a scenario around that message.  Robert Olen Butler did that several years ago in his book, Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards. It’s a fun read.

But the postcard that led to the following story that has wound up on the new Capitol book’s editorial cutting-room floor had nothing on the back.  The front did have a short message, mentioning that Governor Joseph Folk was standing on the front steps of the capitol, the one that burned a few years later.  He’s the one on about the fifth step who appears to be talking to a bearded man named Ezra Meeker.

One of the stories here  is of the image and the other is the sixteen lines about Folk that have been excised from the new book.

This postcard shows Meeker’s covered wagon next to one of the first automobiles in Jefferson City.  Old Ezra was a heckuva guy.  His legacy is the Oregon Trail.  And Joe Folk has legacy in Missouri transportation history.

Ezra Meeker, his wife of one year, Eliza, their newborn son, Marion, and his older brother, Oliver, went west from Iowa to Oregon with an ox team in 1852. The trip took six months.   Ezra became the first postmaster and the first mayor of Puyallup, Washington and he and Eliza raised five children.  A sixth died in infancy.

When Ezra was seventy-five years old, he became convinced that the Oregon Trail and its stories were being forgotten as plains farmers plowed up its ruts and communities were built over sections of it.  He decided the way to bring that part of our history back to public attention was travel it backwards.  He got a couple of oxen named Dave and Twist, a collie dog named Jim, and a covered wagon and retraced his path of a half-century earlier.  He encouraged the communities he visited to put up monuments marking the trail.

Twist died in Nebraska, perhaps having eaten something poisonous, and Meeker replaced him with another ox named Dandy.  By late November, 1907, Meeker was in Washington, D. C., where he showed his wagon to President Roosevelt and spent more than a month urging Congress to mark the Oregon Trail.

He left D. C. in January, 1908 and went into winter quarters in Pittsburg until early March.  By then, Congress was considering a bill to spend $50,000 to mark the trail. Other legislation called for a federal-state partnership to build a national highway along the Oregon Trail as a memorial road.  He got a frosty reception from the Mayor of St. Louis and left after staying a few days, “greatly disappointed.”

“I had anticipated a warm reception. St. Louis, properly speaking, had been the head center of the movement that finally established the Oregon Trail. Here was where Weythe, Bonneville, Whitman and others of the earlier movements…had outfitted, but there is now a commercial generation, many of whom that care but little about the subject.”

He did, however, find some ‘zealous advocates’ of the effort to mark the Trail, including the automobile club and the Daughters of the American Revolution.” His drive from St. Louis to Jefferson City “was tedious and without results.”  But, “Governor Folks came out on the state house steps to have his photograph taken and otherwise signified his approval of the work, and I was accorded a cordial hearing by the citizens of that city,” he wrote in his 1916 book.

And that’s what we see on that postcard.  Dave and Dandy, the wagon, a car, and Governor Folk talking to Meeker, who made it back to Seattle, Washington on July 18, 1908.  He travelled the Trail again by oxcart, 1910-1912, and by 1916 he was writing, “A great change has come over the minds of the American people in this brief period of eight years.  Numerous organizations have sprung into existence for the betterment of Good Roads, for the perpetuation of ‘The Old Trails’ and the memory of those who wore them wide and deep.”

Ezra traveled the Oregon Trail for the last time in 1924—by airplane, when he was 93.  He died in December, 1928, about three weeks short of his 98th birthday.

Now we switch focus a little.

The Good Roads movement traces its beginnings to a 1902 proposal to build a memorial road from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to the University of Virginia in nearby Charlottesville.  By the time Ezra Meeker started his second trip on the Oregon Trail, numerous local efforts to establish a good roads program were underway, leading to the national good roads movement.  Richard Weingroff of the Federal Highway Administration wrote that one of the pioneering efforts was the National Old Trails road, “an outgrowth of two movements in Missouri.”  The first of those efforts was promotion of a road linking St. Louis and Kansas City.  The second of those movements was spearheaded by the DAR to mark the Santa Fe Trail.  “In the summer of 1907, Governor Folk…expressed an interest in a cross-State macadam highway,” he wrote.

But, actually, Folk had spoken on the subject earlier when he announced in August, 1906, a plan to finance road development in Missouri, first linking Kansas City and St. Louis and a second road from the Arkansas border to the Iowa border.  He said he would ask the 1907 legislature to require Missouri dramshops to pay a state license fee of $200 a year.  The Automobile magazine commented in its August 23 issue, “As there are 650 saloons in Kansas City alone, it may be easily seen that the revenue derived would be large.”  Folk told a group in Kansas City, “It is my view that the highway department of the state should be organized after the same manner as the public school system, to the end that there may be good roads in every portion of the commonwealth.”

And this is where we finally get to the sixteen lines that won’t be in the book—and the story of Folk’s misadventures behind the wheel of an automobile, as reported by The Cole County Democrat on June 20, 1907.

Folk, who had called in his 1905 inaugural speech for a constitutional amendment setting a tax to finance a road building system in Missouri, was the first Missouri Governor to call for a cross-state highway which led the State Board of Agriculture’s Highway Department to suggest three routes.  His interest in roads might have motivated him to become the first sitting Governor to drive a car, secretly negotiating an outing with Ed Austin, the commissions clerk in the Secretary of state’s office.  Austin drove about four miles from the capitol on a road known as “Ten Mile Run,” then switched seats with Folk, who “proceeded to violate the speed limit going down the very first hill,” as newspaper reporter Charles B. Oldham reported.  Folk estimated they had been traveling at least thirty miles an hour. But by the time the car reached the top of the next hill “it was not traveling at the rate of a mile a week.”

He also observed that no court of justice would fine him for the speed he made going down hill, because the machine was not obeying his will.

While this conversation as going on the automobile stopped to listen.  The Governor could not make it start.  Mr. Austin commanded it to go, but it refused to budge.  When he had worked an hour on the intestines of the vehicle, the Governor inquired the distance from town. 

Mr. Austin thought that as the bee would fly, it was about four miles.  Just then the vehicle commenced throbbing and sputtering.  The Governor yanked the lever about and they went straight into a deep ditch.  The occupants did not take the usual time to alight.  As the ground was soft, neither was injured.

Meanwhile, some parties in town had learned of the departure of the two gentlemen, and a relief party was fitted out in charge of Col. Wm. Irwin.  When they reached the Governor and Mr. Austin the latter were still working to get the vehicle out of the ditch.

The relief party came to their assistance and presently got it back on the highway.  The Governor consented to ride back to town in the automobile, providing the relief party would follow immediately in the rear with a buggy.  In this way the party reached home safely.

The three-road idea also went into the ditch during Folk’s term but was pulled out by his successor, Herbert Hadley.

 We don’t know if the car next to Meeker’s wagon in that April 1908 postcard is Austin’s car.  But it might be. Pictures of REOs from 1907-08 show cars looking like that one and steered with a lever, not a wheel.  The REO was built by Ransom E. Olds, whose cars later became, of course, Oldsmobiles.

It’s a little hard to pinpoint where Folk’s great adventure happened.  Jefferson City developed a North and a South Ten Mile Drive as it spread west. North Ten Mile Drive became Truman Boulevard in the Capital Mall area.  But the area in 1907 was ‘way out in the country, so far out that the state’s chief executive would be away from the public eye when he tried out Ed Austin’s contraption.

Old postcards.  Love the stories they tell.