Munichburg Memories: The 1880 Tornado and 218 West Elm

Monday, September 23, 2019

The 1880 Tornado and 218 West Elm

The tornado of May 22, 2019, wasn’t the first to hit Jefferson City. Just after 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, 1880, a tornado struck nearby Cole County and the far west side of town. The injuries and ruin it caused were described in the Peoples Tribune and the Evening State Journal. The quarter-mile-wide tornado ravaged the Centertown, Elston, and Scruggs Station neighborhoods and continued as far east as the present Jaycees Fairgrounds, Country Club, and Capital Mall.

Lengthy newspaper accounts named forty families and individuals affected by the tornado, detailing their injuries and property damage. About twenty-five frame and log homes were damaged or destroyed. Farm animals were killed or blown away, orchards were downed, and people were hurled from their homes as far as forty feet. A house was blown onto the Missouri Pacific tracks, and a train crashed into it in the dark, nearly killing the engineer and fireman.

One of the tornado’s frightened survivors was eighteen-year-old Nannie Pollock, who lived with her parents and sisters on a farm near present-day Turnberry Drive (just west of the Country Club). Eleven years later in 1891, when she married John C. Renner and moved to Jefferson City’s Southside, she insisted that the house he was building for them, at 218 West Elm, have double-thick brick walls. She wanted it to be able to withstand a tornado!

That solidly built 1891 brick house with extra-strong walls is still standing, 128 years later, testimony to a young woman scarred by the terrible 1880 tornado on the west side of Jefferson City.

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019, with information from Pat Renner Schroeder

This piece originally ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 25, 2019.

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This is not a horror novel—far from it!

Following his popular memoir Buddy’s Stories, historian Walter A. Schroeder presents another warm and colorful collection of more than 90 essays about growing up in Jefferson City in the 1940s.

With humor and insight, Schroeder provides a personal glimpse into his family life and his experiences as a child growing up in Jefferson City’s Southside neighborhood—a Germantown district also called Old Munichburg. It’s a treasury of essays describing his childhood growing up under the same roof as his immigrant grandparents, parents, two brothers, and renters, and surrounded by a vibrant, supportive community.

In the title essay, Schroeder shares a whimsical story of the time when all the kids on the block saw the movie Revenge of the Zombies and spent the next week staggering around the neighborhood's sidewalks, arms outstretched, wearing vacant expressions—causing passing motorists to do double-takes!

Schroeder’s crisp details revive scenes of the past so we can better understand and imagine Jefferson City in the 1940s. As he explains, “In every generation . . . young people learn only the skeleton of the past. I want to put meat on the skeleton’s bones.”

This new book by Schroeder, a beloved Missouri geographer and historian, is not to be missed!

Published in 2023 by the Old Munichburg Association

304 pages; 85 photographs and illustrations; index

$25

Available at Downtown Book and Toy, J Street Vintage, and ECCO Lounge

Everyone has a story. This is Buddy’s.

Meet Buddy: a bike-riding, towheaded, everyday kid growing up on Elm Street during World War II. Everyone he knows is a proud American, including his German-immigrant grandparents. Life on the Southside isn’t rosy, but people do what they can to get by—and Buddy and his friends grow up learning to reduce, reuse, and recycle . . . to be self-sufficient . . . and to help others.

Generous with details, the geographer and historian Walter A. Schroeder—nicknamed “Buddy” in his youth—shares his personal memories of growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri. His descriptions will resonate with people who remember those simpler times, and they will cause others to reflect on what we lost as the years went by.

These 42 brief essays cover an array of topics about Jefferson City places, everyday life, the effects of World War II, and expressions of patriotism. How did families make ends meet? How did kids participate in the war effort? What was it like to have bread, eggs, milk, and coal delivered, to make sauerkraut in the basement, to be fitted for shoes with commercial X-ray machines? What did kids do for fun? How did the old Missouri River Bridge rotate, and what was it like to go to the dime store?

Engagingly written, enhanced by the judgment of a professional historian, and illustrated with 72 photos, maps, and scrapbook mementos, Buddy’s Stories is a vibrant perspective on Jefferson City history . . . and a fond commemoration of the way things used to be.

“I helped my grandfather make beer while Doctor Hill came to our house and brought my brother Walter Albert Schroeder into the world. He cost twenty-five dollars. My parents got a bargain, and I got a ‘buddy.’”

—Richard A. Schroeder, older brother

“This book is a real treasure. Buddy treats us to recollections of our community. It is as if he, Richard, and I are sitting together talking about the old days.”
—Thomas K. Schroeder, younger brother

Published in 2018 by the Old Munichburg Association

200 pages; 70 photographs, maps, and illustrations

$15

Available at Downtown Book and Toy, ECCO Lounge, Samuel's Tuxedo, Schaefer House, and Central UCC

Read the Book!

Southside Sketches: Essays on Jefferson City’s Old Munichburg
by Walter A. Schroeder

During his tenure as secretary of the Old Munichburg Association, Walter Schroeder “spiced up” his monthly mailings of the group’s minutes with brief essays on the district’s history. What began as a side project became a collection of essays illuminating the Southside’s history of organizations and people, and of its very environment. At turns humorous, nostalgic, poignant, questioning—but always keenly insightful—these “sketches” draw upon personal memories as well as archival research.

Schroeder shares detailed recollections about life before air-conditioning, shopping at mom-and-pop groceries, using sales-tax tokens, and many other memories of his youth. Other stories came from interviews with his mother and other old-time Southside residents, who spoke of visits by gypsies, the time a steamboat managed to dock some six blocks south of the Missouri River, and explorations of the area’s legendary tunnels and caves. Schroeder gleaned several other interesting tales from archival sources, including the German-language newspapers favored by the Southside immigrants—yet read by few today.

200 pages, paperback
OUT OF PRINT

Also by Walter Schroeder

Breweries and Saloons in Jefferson City, Missouri
by Walter A. Schroeder

Got Gemütlichkeit? The German immigrants to Jefferson City certainly did, and from the time they started arriving in the area in the 1840s to the present day, good-natured beer drinking among friends has fostered social connections, spurred economic growth, fed the city’s hospitality industry, and nourished a sense of ethnic identity.

Historian, geographer, and native Southsider Walter Schroeder grew up in the shadow of Capitol Brewery, a grandson of German immigrants and an enthusiastic supporter of Munichburg’s history and future. After exploring the written record, including old German-language local newspapers, as well as collecting oral histories from local residents, he relates what he has learned about the city’s breweries, saloons, beer gardens, and other beer-related history.

From the earliest years of Jefferson City, its ethnic Germans have run breweries, gathered in beer gardens, and established saloons, taprooms, and taverns. In these pages you will learn about the following and much more:

—The George Wagner Brewery, which started in the Southside of Jefferson City in 1870, produced an impressive seventy barrels a day, and was one of the first companies to freeze its own ice.
—The Capitol Brewery, which offered authentic Bavarian beer and dominated the region’s beer sales from the 1890s through the end of World War II, grew to become the city’s Coca-Cola bottler.
—The Franz beer garden in the 1870s occupied the hilltop that is today the home of St. Mary’s Health Center. It was a grassy, breezy gathering place for relaxing, dancing, and singing, offering a tremendous view of the young town—plus sausage, cheese, crackers, and freshly made Franz beer.
—The ECCO Lounge, the city’s longest-running taproom and restaurant, has roots going back to 1860, when it offered food, libation, and lodging to out-of-town farmers who had carted their goods for sale in the capital city.

Although “having a beer with one’s friends” is certainly no longer a way to profile someone as “German” in Missouri’s capital city, everyone with an interest in the art and history of brewing, the many stories of the city, or German heritage will enjoy this celebration of the city’s German immigrants, their ethnic beverage, and its magical capacity for bringing people together.

Published by the Old Munichburg Association.
Paperback, 50 pp., 38 illustrations, 6 x 9"
$8, plus $3 shipping and handling (please include $1.50 s&h for each additional book sent to the same address).

Note: The Breweries and Saloons book is available at the ECCO Lounge.