It’s not the only one, of course, but this story is an example of how traditionally told history ignores the importance of some people and why there is nothing wrong with broadening our understanding of the past and re-orienting our view of it.
There is nothing to fear from a more holistic understanding of our history.
This is the story of a black life that mattered. Except it HASN’T mattered until recently.
While Cole County was celebrating its bicentennial in 2020-2021, your persistent researcher started trying to learn about Stephen Cole, the “pioneer and Indian fighter” for whom the county was named (supposedly). A couple of 1823 newspaper articles about Cole County recounted that it really was named for Stephen’s brother, William Temple Cole, who was killed in a central Missouri Indian ambush a decade before the county was organized.
The traditional telling of the story of the settlement of Cooper County has Temple’s widow, Hannah and their nine children, joined by Stephen, his wife and their five children, in a pirogue (a hollowed out log) paddling across the icy Missouri River from Howard County to the area that’s now Boonville in February 1810. They supposedly arrived on the south shore of the river but all of their supplies were still on the north side and they couldn’t get back to them for several days.
Hannah is memorialized as the first white woman to settle in Cooper County (meaning, we presume, the first non-Indian). There’s a statue of her in Boonville. A big rock in a cemetery along Highway 5 about 13 miles south of town marks the approximate location of her burial.
It’s a nice story. Except that the usual telling of it has Hannah as a widow seven months before she became one.
And it ignores the fact that she was not the first white woman to settle that area. She was ONE of the first two. Stephen’s wife, Phoebe, disappears from the narrative. It’s almost as if she’s never left that pirogue.
But it’s likely there was a THIRD woman in that not-so-little boat.
Her name was Lucy.
She doesn’t show up in the traditional narrative until Hannah’s death many years later when she’s mentioned. It’s likely she’s not mentioned along with the other family members because she wasn’t family.
Our traditional story-telling doesn’t spend any time talking about chairs and cooking pots and beds—–the property settlers took with them. Lucy was Hannah’s property, her slave.
She apparently had been with Hannah since Hannah and Temple were married. She probably helped with the birth of the nine children. She came west from Virginia to Kentucky, to the wilds of Missouri, and then across the river that day (whenever it was) and helped with the settlement work on that river bluff. And she remained with Hannah until the end of Hannah’s life.
Supposedly she’s buried in the same cemetery as Hannah, perhaps at the foot of Hannah’s grave.
If Hannah was the first white woman to settle south of the river and west of Montgomery County, then Lucy had to have been the first African-American settler of a county that was 36% enslaved at the start of the Civil War. But that’s not recognized in the usual story of Cooper County or of the city of Boonville.
She was every bit the “pioneer” as Hannah (and Phoebe). She faced the same dangers the Cole family faced, especially during the years when Indians were marauding in the area during the War of 1812. But she never drew a breath of free air. We don’t know when she was born, or where. We don’t know when she died, or where. Maybe she’s buried near Hannah. Maybe not.
Cooper County makes a big deal of Hannah. But in a county where six percent of the population today is black, there’s no recognition of Lucy. No statue. No gravestone in the cemetery south of town.
It’s this kind of cultural oversight that some folks think needs to end. That wish, however, has been coopted by what has happened to phrases such as “The 1619 project” and “Critical Race Theory” that call on us to recognize this nation was more than what has been in the standard national narrative. They have become politicized phrases to be attacked vehemently.
We should not fear the challenge that 1619 and CRT give us to see our history more broadly because understanding the history of people whose origins are not rooted in northern Europe lessens their marginalization, recognizes their humanity, and makes all of us more American.
And Lucy?
Last September, we told her story to the Cooper County Historical Society. Afterwards, one of the descendants of Hannah Cole got up and promised that there would be a proper stone for her installed at the cemetery before the next reunion of the Cole family in Boonville next summer.
Lucy’s life mattered in the early part of our state history but her story is an example of some of the shortcomings in the telling of that history. Her life matters today. To all of us.
Perhaps if as much energy could be expended to end the shortcomings of our traditional history-telling as is spent attacking those who say it’s about time we told it more holistically, all of us would be richer people and we would live in a greater nation.
