It’s a fact: a school is more than a building, more than books, more than the teachers and students within—and the farther you get from your school days, the more you appreciate the impact of school on you and your community.
The building on the northeast corner of Dunklin and Broadway was a public school from 1904 to 1955. Today, most people know it as the Carpenters Hall, since the local Carpenters union operated it as an office building longer than it was a school. Now, it has been remodeled into private apartments. Schroeder breathes life into the history we sense as we ponder this historic building.
Reflecting in his eighties, historian Walter A. Schroeder shares his personal experiences of attending Jefferson City’s Broadway Elementary School in the 1940s. It was a much different learning environment than what today’s schoolchildren experience. While public documents and newspaper accounts can present a basic outline of what public elementary schools were like in the past, only accounts like these—of personal experiences—can make history come to life.
A slim volume packed with information, Broadway School in the 1940s offers details like these:
All boys wore long pants; all girls wore dresses. All shoes were made of leather.
Class size was 30–35 children, and all the teachers were unmarried women.
All pupils had their weight and height recorded every six weeks.
Student desks had a round hole originally meant to hold an ink bottle, but the ink bottles used in the 1940s didn’t fit the holes. So kids dropped paper wads down the holes: “Bombs away!”
Students learned to write in cursive using the Palmer method.
Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were observed separately, on different days.
The playground had separate sides for boys and girls, with the same playground equipment on both sides.
The hand-held, brass school bell was wielded by the principal or by the janitor.
Report cards included notes on deportment, study habits, and attitudes.
Cloakrooms held coats, caps, gloves, scarves, and galoshes—but no actual cloaks!
All the students, and nearly all of the teachers, walked to school every day. School was never closed for inclement weather.
In addition to his detailed accounts of what Broadway School was like in the 1940s, Schroeder offers his reflections on the changes he’s observed after seventy years: decorum in the classroom, changing technology, evolving public educational policy, diversity, and more.
“I want people to have a detailed description,” Schroeder says. “Over a thousand kids were educated in that building. Early education leaves an indelible imprint in our lives. Elementary education was so different in the past. And there are few people left who have memories of Broadway School as it was.”
An entertaining, authentic collection of memories of a wartime schoolchild, Broadway School in the 1940s paints vivid scenes of a historic elementary school, inspiring readers of all ages to make comparisons to their own school memories.
Broadway School in the 1940s, by Walter A. Schroeder
Published in 2023 by the Historic City of Jefferson, Inc.
58 pp.; 28 photographs and illustrations
One thing we’ll remember about the summer of 2019 is the prolonged, extensive flooding along the Missouri River, its tributary Wear’s Creek, and other low areas in Jefferson City. Did you know that in 1844, a major flood allowed a Missouri River steamboat to float up the east branch of Wear’s Creek—whose course essentially ran along today’s 50/63 expressway—all the way to the 100 block of East Dunklin? The low backyard of Busch’s Florist is where the boat docked.
The watercraft, in this case, was a small, short steamboat—more like a river ferry, or a large steam-powered raft—not a monster like today’s “Delta Queen.” It was carrying German immigrants, including members of the Nieghorn and Hartenstein families, who were among the first Bavarians to farm in Cole County. After crossing the Atlantic, they had traveled on steamboats north from New Orleans on the Mississippi, then, on smaller craft, west on the Missouri. Boats were the best way to get to Jefferson City in its early years, since there were no railroads to town at that time.
The flood of 1844 was the Missouri River’s greatest flood ever in recorded history, by volume of water. The Great Flood of 1993 was actually somewhat less in volume, though it rose higher due to later channel engineering and levees. The 1844 flood, which occurred before the river had been contained, created 10-foot-high sand dunes in the Missouri River bottoms. The river channel changed its course in several places that year. River pilots navigated their steamboats over the tops of completely submerged trees and croplands in the river bottoms. Considering the floods of 1993 and 2019, it’s not hard to see how the backed-up water of Wear’s Creek, in a time before the Whitten Expressway, could allow a steamboat of German immigrants to navigate as far as where Busch’s Florist is today.
One thing we’ll remember about the summer of 2019 is the closure of West Dunklin Street! We’re glad the city’s making major improvements to the 300 and 400 blocks of Dunklin, including a new bridge over Wear’s Creek. But detouring around the construction zone has certainly grown wearisome!
Few people know that until the 1920s, the Southside was shut off from both east and west sides of Jefferson City, because Dunklin stopped at each end. A steep hill on the east side of Jackson Street closed off access to Lincoln University, and a steep bluff west of Broadway and Wear’s Creek closed off access to the west.
But when cars came in and subdivisions sprouted up around the city center, something had to be done. Dunklin was selected to become the Southside’s major through street. The steep hill in the 500 block of East Dunklin was graded down and paved to handle cars. Likewise, the bluff in the 300 block of West Dunklin was graded down and paved, and a substantial bridge was built across Wear’s Creek in the 400 block. These two street improvements simplified access to the emerging Fairmount Boulevard and Moreau Drive neighborhood on the east, and to the emerging Washington Park neighborhood, along the new US 50 (now Missouri Blvd.), to the west.
When city buses replaced streetcars in the 1930s, they joined thousands of local drivers in using the new beeline that Dunklin offered—and which we have missed using this summer. It’s easy to see why this summer’s improvements to Dunklin are necessary. Not only is Dunklin the Southside’s “main street”—it’s a critical east-west connector in Jefferson City.
What? A steamboat in the heart of Munichburg? How could this possibly be?
It’s true, and here’s how it happened.
The Nieghorn family of Cole County has in its family history an intriguing story of German immigrants coming to Jefferson City in 1844. This story was told to me by Gary Schmutzler of Jefferson City, a Nieghorn descendant. Gary heard it from his great uncle Andy Nieghorn, who heard it from his immigrant grandmother Hartenstein. It’s so unusual that it could not have been made up.
The Nieghorns and Hartensteins were among the first Bavarian immigrants to Cole County farms. The Hartensteins came through the port of New Orleans, then up the Mississippi by steamboat, then up the Missouri, also by steamboat. For the Missouri River part of the trip, they traveled in small, short steamboats more like a river ferry, not monsters like today’s Delta Queen or Admiral. The immigrants had to come by river, of course, because Missouri had no railroads in the 1840s.
When they reached the little town of Jefferson City, barely twenty years old, the boat left the Missouri River, entered Wear’s Creek, and continued upstream into its East Branch to where Central Dairy facilities are now, and then it moved south one block to Dunklin Street. That would put the boat with its immigrants into what is today the low "backyard" of Busch’s Florist. This is what that area looks like today.
The immigrant Hartenstein party got off the boat, transferred to wagons, and traveled southwest overland a few miles to the Zion neighborhood, where they settled among Nieghorns and other German Lutheran immigrants and became farmers.
If that family account is to be believed, how can it be explained?
The family account says the Hartensteins arrived in 1844. In that year, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Missouri River experienced its greatest flood ever in recorded history, by volume of water. The Great Flood of 1993, though somewhat less in volume, actually rose higher because of later channel engineering and levees. But the 1844 flood happened before the river had been so deeply channeled and walled in. The floodwater created ten-foot-high sand dunes in the river bottoms, and the river channel changed its course in several locations. Historical records tell of river pilots navigating their steamboats over the tops of submerged trees and croplands in the Missouri River bottoms.
With the Missouri River at such a high flood stage, water backed up into Wear’s Creek, as it always does in any Missouri River flood. If you remember the Great Flood of 1993 in Jefferson City, you remember water backing up in Wear’s Creek and flooding the Capitol Plaza Hotel and the parking lots around it. In fact, river backwater continued upstream in the East Branch channel past Central Dairy and even beyond Monroe Street. So the boat carrying the Hartenstein family could have come up into the Southside using the quiet Missouri River backwater just like moving into the arm of a big lake. In 1844 there were no bridges over the creek, either for a railroad or for wagons. The creek was totally unobstructed and would have been open water.
If you stand on the Dunklin Street sidewalk behind Busch’s greenhouse and lean over the railing, you will see how low the ground is there.
A small creek, visible in an 1892 photo, used to flow behind Busch’s greenhouse. Water from a flooded Wear’s Creek readily backed up into that low ground. In fact, the 100 block of East Dunklin, between Jefferson and Madison, was originally at that low level you see behind Busch’s.
It wasn’t until 1912 that the city decided to fill in the north side of Dunklin ten feet or so, to build up the street and make it relatively flat in that block.
If you lean out over that sidewalk railing and look back under the Dunklin Street sidewalk, you will see the original 1912 limestone retaining wall the city built to hold up the dirt fill that Dunklin Street is built on.
My conclusion is that the Nieghorn family story of the Hartensteins coming all the way to Dunklin Street by steamboat in 1844 is entirely believable. It shows that the stories we hand down from generation to generation may not be distorted or inaccurate retellings, tall tales, or figments of someone’s imagination, but actually could have happened, however unbelievable it seems at first.
But wait! There’s more to the story! When John Nieghorn (1819–1899), who came to Cole County about the same time as the Hartensteins, retired from his business as a tailor and farmer in the Zion community at age seventy-one, he came back to the same place on Dunklin Street where the Hartensteins disembarked from the boat in 1844. He built a three-story brick hotel there in 1892, called the Nieghorn Haus, and he spent his final retirement years living in it.
That hotel building, at 120-122 East Dunklin, and later called the Bassmann Apartments, was thoroughly renovated and updated by Phil Kolb and Steve Rollins in 2010 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places as the Nieghorn Hotel. Thank you, Nieghorns and Hartensteins, for giving us great Munichburg memories!
Broadway School, located on the northeast corner of Dunklin and Broadway streets, opened in 1904.
In the next half century, some 1,600 children in the Old Munichburg neighborhood of Jefferson City’s Southside attended the elementary school. They read Dick and Jane books in the first grade reading circle and had spelling bees in the second grade. In the third grade, they learned to write in longhand (now called cursive) by the Palmer penmanship method, using a scratchy ink pen dipped in an ink bottle. In the fourth grade, they memorized multiplication tables and then added long division and fractions in the fifth grade. By the sixth and final grade, they were sprouting bean seeds in glass jars on the window sills and drawing pictures of the sprouting process in their tablets.
After World War II, Jefferson City schools grew overcrowded. In addition to classrooms being cramped with thirty or more pupils, Broadway’s playground was much too small and bordered on two busy streets. When the school was built in 1904, Dunklin and Broadway streets carried horses and buggies, but by 1950 the same streets carried a couple thousand cars daily. Traffic posed a serious danger for pupils who ran into the streets to avoid being tagged during a game of “it” or to chase softballs.
In 1952 Jefferson City citizens voted by an astounding 86 percent to approve school bonds, which included the replacement of the Southside’s two historic schools, Broadway and Central, with two new schools. Broadway would be replaced by the new South School, four blocks father south on Broadway. South School was finished in February 1955 and ready to be occupied.
The last day of school at Broadway was Wednesday, February 9, 1955. It was an unusually balmy day for February, and during recess, pupils played in their shirtsleeves.
Boys made one last assault on the cinder pile next to the coal chute and played on the school’s back steps.
Mrs. Bonnie Haigh posed with some of her fifth grade pupils.
And for the final time, the janitor let the boys ring the handbell to signal the end of recess before they filed through the front doors.
During that night an unexpected cold front moved in, dropping temperatures below freezing! It had snowed! Moving day would have to be done in the snow! Boys and girls arrived at school dressed in coats and caps with earflaps and wearing sturdy shoes and galoshes, because they knew they had to hike in snow the four blocks south to their new school.
Grade by grade, starting with the youngest first graders, the pupils filed out of the school carrying their books and tablets, pencils and erasers, pens and ink bottles, as well as scissors, rulers, paste, and other school supplies in brown paper bags. (There were no plastic bags or nylon backpacks then!) Boys put their marbles in one pants pocket and their pocketknives (for whittling and playing mumblety-peg during recess) in the other. Each class of thirty or so pupils was led by its teacher, assisted by a few mothers.
Some classes sang as they marched through the snow. The schoolboy patrol halted Dunklin Street traffic for the procession of about two hundred persons to cross over. While they marched, the wind and snow started again and became, according to the newspaper account, “a near blizzard.”
The last to leave the old school were Miss Frances Elizabeth Smith, the current principal, and Miss Lily Andrae, who had been Broadway’s first principal in 1904 and had continued in that position until 1926. Miss Andrae had the honor of locking the front door and shutting down the school. To celebrate the new beginning, Miss Andrae presented to South School a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens.
Broadway School became a white elephant. What do you do with a fifty-year-old elementary school? That question was answered when the Carpenters Union 945 bought the building and lot a few months later, in August 1955, for $32,000.
The Carpenters converted it into an office building, but they retained some of the original furnishings. The original wooden stairways and banisters are still intact and polished, and the century-old wooden benches used for seating in the lunchroom remain in that same room, which is now a meeting room. The Old Munichburg Association occupies the former fourth grade room.
Thanks to my mother, Mrs. Edna Schroeder, for taking the photos of the last day and moving day of Broadway School. Her youngest son, my brother Tom, was in the fifth grade at the time. My mother, two of her sisters, and her three sons were among the approximately 1,600 who attended Broadway School.
Has Jefferson City forgotten one of its most eminent musicians?
Franz Josef Zeisberg, organist, violinist, pianist, composer, and teacher, was born in 1862 in the Sudeten mountains of Prussian Silesia, now part of Poland. Raised on a farm by musical parents, the teenager emigrated to Jefferson City in 1881 (he was only eighteen!) and first worked as a manual laborer in a brickyard where he learned English.
He began his musical career in Jefferson City in 1884 by opening the City Conservatory in the Conrath House on Madison Street in partnership with immigrant Carl Preyer. Zeisberg was organist at the Central German Evangelical Church (now Central United Church of Christ).
In 1887 he married Clara Hugershoff, stepdaughter of Fred H. Binder (who had been elected mayor in 1884). That marriage allowed Zeisberg entrance into the highest levels of Jefferson City society, because of Binder’s prominence in civic affairs. Zeisberg’s career took off.
I wish I could find a photo of Zeisberg. Here, at least, is his physical description at age forty-four, according to his 1906 American passport:
Zeisberg went to Lexington, Missouri, to teach at the Elizabeth Aull Seminary for women, then to Chicago, where his musical talents became more widely known and appreciated. With a solid reputation in the musical world, in 1892 he began a thirty-year career as conservatory director at Martha Washington College in Abingdon, Virginia.
He retired at age sixty in 1922 for health reasons, and the Zeisbergs returned to Jefferson City, leaving their three grown children in good professions on the East Coast. He retained a home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, to which he returned annually in summers until the 1940s.
In Jefferson City, the professor and Clara moved into the substantial Fred Binder house at 210 East Dunklin, unoccupied after Papa Fred Binder’s death in 1911 and Mrs. Binder’s death in 1920. The Zeisbergs continued to live there in the Southside until their deaths.
The Binder property included the southeast corner of Dunklin and Madison, catercorner from Busch’s Florist. While the Zeisbergs lived there, it was a wooded tract with a small creek running through it before going out of sight into a long tunnel under the street intersection.
This is how the corner looked around 1951. Madison Street is in the foreground; Dunklin is in the distance. The view is almost true east.
Here is the same view, as of September 2, 2012:
Professor Zeisberg gave organ concerts at the Southside’s Central Evangelical Church, where the Zeisbergs were members, and other local churches, always to full and appreciative attendances. He was the first in Jefferson City to broadcast organ music over the new WOS radio station, directly from Central Church’s organ.
He taught students in piano, organ, and violin. His best-known student, by far, was Carl E. Burkel, who received his first organ lessons as a preteen on Central Church’s large Möller pipe organ. Burkel is well remembered in Jefferson City for his forty-one years of teaching music at Jefferson City High School and directing the Jefferson City Symphony and Capitol Caroling at Christmas. Carl later told me about sitting as a boy on the church organ bench with “that old German” teaching him the intricacies of a multiregister organ.
I was one of Professor Zeisberg’s piano students from age nine to eleven. The nineteenth-century Binder house was spacious and had a big, airy sunroom with windows on three sides overlooking the corner woods and little creek.
Mrs. Zeisberg filled the sunroom to overflowing with pots of ferns and other large plants, making it a tropical paradise just as luxurious as Busch’s greenhouses across the corner.
Professor Zeisberg gave his lessons at an upright piano in an adjacent room, and as I sat on the piano bench I could see the great abundance of Mrs. Zeisberg’s ferns and the woods beyond. I imagined I was playing a piano in a park!
You can see the sunroom in this sketch that my wife, Pat, made of the Binder house in 1950 while an art student in high school.
Professor Zeisberg emphasized German music, especially Beethoven sonatas. When I got reasonably proficient in one, the professor uncased his violin and played the melody with embellishments along with me on the piano.
At times he would lean over me to get close to the music to read it, and the backs of his hands showed the huge, bulging veins of an active eighty-two-year old man. When I made a mistake, he rapped my hands gently with his violin bow and slipped into German to say “Es ist nicht so, Walter!” (That isn’t right, Walter!) In 1944 he gave me a manuscript copy of one of his compositions for children, titled “Kris Kringle,” composed in 1922.
Professor Zeisberg promenaded daily throughout the Southside. He was tall, bearded, and very much the proud German professor. He wore an old-fashioned black suit and top hat, which made him look like Abraham Lincoln. Though in his eighties, he walked very erect in long strides, tapping his black cane as he went briskly along.
Professor Francis Joseph Zeisberg died in 1951 at age eighty-nine. Clara, his wife for fifty-nine years, had died five years earlier. They were buried in the large Binder plot in Riverview Cemetery.
The Zeisbergs’ unmarried daughter Elsa had returned to Jefferson City to care for them when they were aging. She continued to live in the house in the woods at 210 East Dunklin until 1958 (she died 1985), when the property was sold to the Milo H. Walz family, which saw an opportunity to develop the corner commercially.
Here is another view of that corner. This time the view is almost true north, toward the intersection of Madison and Dunklin. The brick building at the left is the Madison side of the Wel-Com-In. The horizontal white structure to its right are the greenhouses for Busch’s Florist. The upright storefront for Busch’s is to the right of that.
Here is the same view as of September 2, 2012:
The beautiful, sturdy Binder/Zeisberg house is now encased within a modern commercial building at 210 E. Dunklin, with its nineteenth-century brick chimneys projecting bizarrely above a flat, modern roofline. Here are some views of the building.
. . . And the shady woods has been totally cut down. The pretty little creek now runs underground as a drainage sewer.
That corner of Madison and Dunklin became the Bolten Southside Conoco and most recently is Doug’s Blvd. Motors. Fred Binder’s well-preserved 1800s black surrey (with a fringe on top!), which was still housed in a carriage house on the property when it was sold in 1958, was given to the Missouri State Museum in the Capitol, where it was on exhibit for many years. Most recently it has been displayed at the museum at Lohhman’s Landing, but as of Labor Day weekend 2012, that museum is closed for renovations and the surrey will be placed into storage indefinitely.
Professor Zeisberg’s legacy endures not only in the huge number of students he taught in Jefferson City and Virginia, but also in his enormous volume of compositions. He began publishing in the 1890s with the Theodore Presser Company of Philadelphia. He composed numerous children’s songs for both piano and violin, transcriptions of well-known American melodies like Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” and other, longer works.
He composed secular and church music for male and mixed choruses. Central United Church of Christ still uses some of the anthems and choral responses he composed or arranged for it more than eighty years ago. Most impressively, he composed two full-length masses and at least eighty-five—yes, eighty-five!—fugues for the organ.
His immense trove of compositions, some published and others in manuscript, was given to his star student, Carl Burkel. A few of the organ fugues are in the music library of Central Church.
Special thanks to Albert Case for sharing his personal memories of Professor Zeisberg. Mr. Case drove the “Dutchy” professor to his summer home in Virginia in the Zeisberg touring auto. Thanks also to Shirley Klein, organist at Central United Church of Christ, for sharing the manuscript copies of Zeisberg’s fugues. Thanks also to the late Don Walz for his photographs of the Binder woods. The photo of Carl Burkel is from Carl’s collection and was made by Bob Elliott; it is used with permission. And thanks to my wife for sharing her schoolgirl artistic talents. I cannot find a photo of the Binder house!
Today we’re continuing with a short series about street names in the historic Southside.
Munichburg’s busiest thoroughfare, and one of the busiest in Jefferson City, is Dunklin Street. It’s a curious name, and it makes some people think of doughnuts! Have you ever wondered where the name “Dunklin” came from?
When the state commissioners laid out Jefferson City into streets and lots in the 1820s, they came up with an ingenuous plan for naming the streets of the nation’s newest state capital.
The north-south streets, leading to and away from the Missouri River, were to be named for the presidents of the United States in historical order. So we have Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams (for John Quincy), and Jackson.
There was a hitch in the plan: The Southerners who ran Missouri refused to honor Yankee John Adams, the first President Adams, so he was skipped between Washington and Jefferson. Then the commissioners ran out of presidents after Jackson (who was president 1829-1837) and had to turn to other famous persons at the time.
For the east-west streets, running parallel to the river, the plan was to use names of Missouri governors in historical order. So it would be national presidents one way, and state governors the other! What a neat plan for a capital city! It may be unique in the United States.
But there was another hitch to the plan. Missouri’s first governor, Alexander McNair (1820-1824), refused to let his name be used, so the first street along the river was named Water Street instead of McNair. And then, of course, there were no other governors at the time (they didn’t count territorial governors such as Meriwether Lewis and Benjamin Howard).
And then High Street, like Water Street, was named for obvious topographic features.
As the years passed, only two more of the east-west streets received names of governors. Missouri’s fourth governor, John Miller (1826-1832), got his name on the fifth street from the river, the beginning of the 500 block.
John Miller, Missouri's fourth governor.
The seventh street (the beginning of the 700 block) was named for Daniel Dunklin, the fifth governor of Missouri (1832-1836).
So when German immigrants began settling in Munichburg in the 1840s, the main commercial street already had its name.
Who Was Governor Dunklin, and What Did He Do?
Dunklin was born in 1790 in South Carolina and came to Missouri when he was only twenty years old. (The age of a college sophomore today!) He got involved in the booming lead-mining business in Washington County. His interest in politics took him to the legislature in 1822 and then to the governorship in 1832 (at age forty-two).
Daniel Dunklin, Missouri's fifth governor.
During his term Missouri established a public school system to be supported by local taxes. Historians call him “the father of public schools.” As a fitting legacy to Dunklin’s educational efforts, Dunklin Street at one time had three of Jefferson City’s then seven public schools along it: Broadway School at Broadway Street (now the Carpenters Hall); Central School between Monroe and Adams (now the Jefferson City Public Schools Administration Office); and, until segregation ended, Washington School for black pupils between Lafayette and Cherry (demolished and replaced by Elliff Hall of Lincoln University).
The Carpenters Building, formerly Broadway School, corner of Dunklin and Broadway.
Next year, 2013, Jefferson City will mark the 175th anniversary of its public schools, established in 1838 as a result of Governor Dunklin’s state leadership.
In addition to Dunklin’s work in education, the Missouri Penitentiary was constructed 1833-1836 during his term, which was critical in keeping the state capital at Jefferson City. Dunklin presided over the addition of the six counties to northwest Missouri (the Platte Purchase), which gave the state is present boundaries.
After leaving office, Daniel Dunklin had nothing more to do with Jefferson City. He became federal surveyor general for Missouri and a commissioner to adjust the state boundary with Arkansas. He died in 1844 and is buried on family property on a bluff near the Mississippi River near the old lead-smelting town of Herculaneum. His grave is now a Missouri State Historic Site: You can visit it, watch the Mississippi flow by below, and ponder the life of this great man.
When Dunklin was governor, Jefferson City had fewer than one thousand residents, who were clustered between the river and High Street. Dunklin Street existed only on paper, although inlots along it had already been bought by speculators expecting fast growth of the new capital city. Governor Dunklin very likely never had the opportunity to walk on the street that bears his name.
Governor Daniel Dunklin may not be much remembered in Jefferson City today, but thousands of cars use Dunklin Street every day in Munichburg.
On November 18, 1914, Southsiders learned that a large theater was to be built at 115 East Dunklin Street. The proprietors were George Bartholomaeus, who worked in a state office, and Frank E. Jones, who was shortly to become county assessor. The builder was Carl Franke, and the cost was projected at $12,000–$15,000.
This is how the building looks today.
The building faces about 50 feet on Dunklin and extends 120 feet to the north. The theater had a sloping floor of one inch to one foot, taking advantage of the natural slope of the ground north toward Wears Creek.
The seating capacity was 1,000–1,200, including the balcony (a later estimate, however, was 900 seats). Newspapers reported that plans for “opera chairs, inclined floor and an ample stage, as well as electric fixtures of the latest design, will all go to make the house a thing of beauty, convenience and comfort to guests.” The facade, 22 feet high, was “finished in buff brick, trimmed in light cream and terra cotta.” Windows and doors had decorative framing, and the facade was topped with five ornamental urns.
Photos of the building when it was a theater are lacking, but a slightly later photo, taken in the early 1920s when the building housed the Jefferson Moline Tractor and Implement Company, gives an idea of the original look.
The theater opened to a full house at two performances¬¬—that is, nearly two thousand attended—on May 29, 1915, with the name Southside Theatre. The opening show featured the silent film Damon and Pythias.
The film, six reels long, was one of the first feature-length films produced in the United States. It was evidence that the proprietors were bringing to the Southside the most up-to-date entertainment using the newest technology. Admission was 5 and 10 cents.
St. Peter’s Orchestra and vocalist Mrs. Louis Rephlo provided local musical talent during intermissions, as film reels were being changed. Background music during the silent film came from an Orchestrion, an instrument like an oversized player piano but intended to sounding more like a full orchestra. Orchestrions generally came complete with “bells and whistles” and were attached to organ pipes for greater volume.
Here are a few examples of some vintage Orchestrions, so you can imagine what going to a movie was like back then.
A contest was held in June to find a name for the theater. Four Southside women entered the same name, “Dunklin Theatre,” and had to share the five-dollar prize.
A lot happened at “the Dunklin,” as it came to be known. Two Southside youths, Winnie Bassmann and Otto Busch, rented space in the lobby to sell candy, ice cream, and soft drinks. Harold Doty won the prettiest baby contest. Seventeen-year-old Southsider Carl Walz, later to be county sheriff, won a pie-eating contest. All of this was great fun for Southsiders!
In September 1915 the theater showed the first motion pictures of the laying of the cornerstone of the new State Capitol and also rare “pictures” of bayonet charges in the “Great European War” (World War I) into which the United States had not yet entered.
Bartholomaeus sold his share of the theater to partner Jones in August 1915. The theater closed for a while for repairs, then reopened to a big show on January 3, 1916. Broadway School children attended a special show for them and their friends.
In addition to silent movies and vaudeville, the Dunklin held wrestling matches and other common entertainments of the day, including acrobatic and black-face minstrel shows.
In April 1916 Jones sold the entire building for $30,000 to Starrel McCall, a Fulton banker. The spacious basement was to be fitted up for an overall factory, which would employ a “large number of girls” and “add another splendid industry to the Southside.” However, the factory never came about.
In June 1916 the Dunklin Theatre showed the multiple-reel film The Birth of a Nation, possibly the most famous (or infamous) of all American silent films. It had just been released in 1915 and created widespread controversy because of its racism. In film promoted the growth and popularity of the Ku Klux Klan nationwide, including Jefferson City.
On September 27, 1916, the Republican party chose the Dunklin Theatre for a rally because “this is the largest available place in the city. More people can be seated there than in the hall of representatives.” Judge Henry Lamm, Republican candidate for governor in the forthcoming November election, spoke. Local journalists described the scene: “The spacious theatre was crowded to overflowing and people stood in the lobby trying to get a look at the candidate and hear his speech.”
Later in that important election year, African American Republicans also held a rally at the Dunklin; this event was called “one of the biggest rallies in the history of the city.”
In November 1916, local papers announced that the Dunklin had come under control of the International Theatre Company of Chicago, with David Miller and Edward Mann, both of Chicago, as managers. A grand reopening was set for Saturday, December 2, 1916, with the five-reel silent film Prince of Graustark and vaudeville entertainment. Flowers were given to ladies; admission cost 10 and 15 cents.
For nearly a month, the new owners filled the Dunklin by showing films and vaudeville five nights a week, and playing Charlie Chaplin films in the afternoon for children.
Edward Mann, one of the new managers, must have been a pretty good singer, too:
Here is one of the songs Mann performed, sung by John McCormack, the fellow who made it famous:
The Dunklin was competing with three other theaters in Jefferson City, all uptown: the Jefferson, the Gem, and the Grand. When the Grand on High Street showed The Unborn, Mayor Thomas spoke out strongly against movies that are “simply lascivious and appeal to the sensuous.” “The vamp movie and sex movie must go,” he proclaimed. Already in those early years of movies, local sensibilities were being pushed to the limit. (At least in some respects.)
Apparently, the Dunklin Theatre showed no movies after Christmas 1916. Managers instead turned to hosting popular wrestling and boxing events, promoted by the newly formed Athletic Association of Jefferson City. The first was on January 19, 1917, and featured the world welterweight champion Joe Cutrer against Jefferson City’s own Bill Bemboom. The matches drew a large crowd, and, with no radio yet, the newspapers reported action, hold by hold, and blow by blow.
The Dunklin Theatre could not compete with High Street movie houses, in part because it was not on the streetcar line. In spring 1917 it closed forever as a theater, after less than two years of operation. The big building with its ornate facade became a vacant “white elephant” on the Southside’s main street.
But Southsiders were not totally deprived of movies, which were rapidly gaining in popularity. On July 13, 1920, Central Evangelical Church (now Central United Church of Christ), just a couple blocks away, began showing silent movies in the spacious auditorium of its new Sunday School building and provided orchestra music, minstrels, and vaudeville while reels were changed, just as the Dunklin Theatre had. The Apple Tree Girl opened to a large crowd and was the first of a long series of films at the church during the 1920s.
On July 14, 1920, Southsiders learned the Dunklin Theatre building would become the Jefferson Moline Tractor and Farm Implement Store.
After being a farm implement store, the structure served a variety of other purposes, including Griesedick and Budweiser beer distribution centers; restaurants (where a man was murdered!); a novelty company; the Glad Tidings Tabernacle, an Assembly of God Church; a grocery; and a photography studio. Most recently, the building housed Coleman Appliance. In 2010, Central Dairy acquired it.
Stay tuned to this blog for the continuing story of “the Dunklin”!
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Much of the information for this post comes from four Jefferson City newspapers: the German-language Missouri Volksfreund, the Daily Post, the Daily Capital News, and the Democrat-Tribune. Photo of the building as a farm implement store from the collection of Don Walz.
