Dunklin Street Closure Reminds Us It Wasn’t Always a Beeline

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.

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019

This piece originally ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 22, 2019.

When a Steamboat Docked on Dunklin Street

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!

Exploring the Miller Street Tunnel

In the second decade of the 1900s Jefferson City’s population was increasing, cars had replaced wagons and buggies, and a beautiful new state Capitol was under construction. The city’s progressive leadership saw the opportunity to make radical changes in what we call today the city’s “infrastructure.”

One of the major infrastructural improvements was to “reclaim” the low ground along the east branch of Wears Creek in the heart of the city. Development had lagged in that low ground, which consisted basically of the three square blocks bounded by McCarty on the north, Miller on the south, Washington on the east, and Walnut on the west. These blocks are now occupied by the proposed convention center, the Capitol Plaza Hotel, and parking lots, with the elevated Whitton Expressway on the south edge. These blocks included some substantial buildings, but they were dominated by unpainted frame houses and outbuildings—some of them ramshackle and some were former slave cabins—and they were an eyesore, especially lying in the heart of the city.

The east branch of Wear’s Creek made two big loops through these blocks, which cut up the surface into pieces. The plan was to get rid of the big loops by straightening the creek channel. This would open up those low-lying blocks to modern housing and development. The plan, it should be noted, was not to manage creek flooding but to reclaim land for development.

Channel straightening was done ca. 1913–1915 by putting the creek into a straight canal with concrete floor and sides and putting a concrete Miller Street on top, which made it a straight, box-shaped tunnel. It stretched for 2½ blocks from the 200 block of West Miller (on the east side of present Zesto’s at Broadway) to its junction with the main branch of Wears Creek at Walnut Street. A section of the concrete tunnel ceiling collapsed ca. 1923 in front of where the Mediterranean Plaza is today and had to be replaced.




Otherwise, the original tunnel is still there today nearly a century later, hidden under Miller Street and parallel to the south side of Whitton Expressway. It carries the full discharge of the creek.

Though the city fathers built the tunnel to carry creek water, we neighborhood boys thought it was built for us to play in. Without any barricades on its ends or even any “keep out” or “danger” signs, the tunnel was an open invitation for young boys to explore.

To enter the tunnel in the 1940s we grade-school-age kids skittered down the dirt bank at the tunnel entrance where Miller Street now dead-ends just east of Zesto. The tunnel is ten feet high and twenty feet wide, which is the width of Miller Street on top. To us kids it was big and roomy. We entered when the creek was just a little stream of water flowing on one side or the other of the floor. We usually didn’t tell our mothers what we were doing, because we would think of doing it on the spur of the moment, but they probably knew anyway. Mothers know a lot of things by intuition. Older boys warned us about wild animals in the tunnel, like skunks and snakes and even monsters. They said there were dead bodies of hoboes trapped in the dark tunnel, but we weren’t fazed. Neither were we fazed by the hundreds of bats we saw coming and going in the evenings.

In earlier times, building foundations, retaining walls, and creek bridges in Jefferson City were built of quarried stone, but by the time the tunnel was built in the 1910s poured concrete using wood forms had become the way to build retaining walls. The walls and flat bottom of the tunnel were very coarse concrete, but the floor was layered in places with washed-in creek gravel that made footing tricky in the darkness. Occasionally we had to pick our way through brush and small tree branches, but mostly the tunnel was swept clear of debris. (In those days there was no trash in the creek, because there were no plastic grocery sacks, plastic bottles or cups, aluminum cans, or Styrofoam.) We were always hoping to find some treasure with our flashlights, but we never found anything that we couldn’t have found on the city streets above ground. Not even a dead cat.

Once inside and away from the entrance, the tunnel was pitch black just like a real cave. We could barely see the opening at the far end as a small spot of light, two and a half blocks straight ahead, and it served as a goal. Every hundred feet or so we could see some indirect light coming in through the storm drains in the Miller Street gutters. When we passed under the drains, we thought: What if a storm happened while we were inside the tunnel? The rush of water would sweep us through the tunnel and on out into the Missouri River clear down to St. Louis, and we’d be goners for sure! Such thoughts didn’t last long because we had to pay attention to our footing on the rocks and gravel that we could hardly see with our small flashlights.

Naturally, there were places where we couldn’t stay on the concrete or gravel, so we slogged on through water a few inches deep with the pants legs of our overalls rolled up. Our flashlights picked out bats on the ceiling, but not enough of them to bother us and we didn’t do anything to bother them. The bats we saw in the tunnel during the daytime were probably the same ones we saw in our back yards on Elm Street in the evening.

On most tunnel expeditions we didn’t go all the way to the end at Walnut Street. We got too bored going so slowly and seeing too much of the same stuff in the first block or so. Actually, we didn’t know exactly where we were, except by comparing distances to the opening in front of us with the opening behind us.

We had heard there was a huge drop-off at the far end where the concrete tunnel emptied into the main branch of Wears Creek and that we would fall into it and drown, just as Columbus was told he was going to do when he set out sailing across the ocean. The first time we reached the end we found no drop-off, but a continuation at the same level, except it was thick, gooey mud instead of the clean gravel in the tunnel. Periodic flushing of the tunnel by heavy rains kept the tunnel free of mud. No one wanted to walk in deep, sticky mud, so we backtracked.

When we got home, Mom looked at our wet leather shoes and flashlights and asked us where we had been–as if she didn’t know–and we casually said, “Oh, in the tunnel.” She didn’t make any fuss about it. She knew how young boys liked to spend their time exploring.

Copyright 2011 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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Munichburg is Jefferson City’s historic Germantown neighborhood. Help support our efforts to restore and promote it by joining the Old Munichburg Association!