Flooding Turned Dunklin Into Waterside Dock

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.

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019, with information from Gary Schmutzler, a Nieghorn descendant

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

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.

Hickory Street Neighborhood Park

Lots in the Southside’s Woodcrest Addition, between Monroe and Jackson streets and Hickory and Union streets, went on public sale in September 1914. The potential growth in this first platted addition to Jefferson City after cars became common prompted the Jefferson City School Board to consider opening a new elementary school there. The School Board purchased land for a new school in the 1200 block of Monroe. In 1919 Dr. Charles P. Hough donated four lots in the new Woodcrest Addition to the School Board for a playground, stipulating that it be named the “George W. Hough Playground” to honor his father. Hough also donated $1,500 for playground equipment. These four donated lots are on the southeast corner of Hickory and Adams streets.



As the years passed, the School Board never built a school on the Monroe Street land and sold it in 1946 to the Missouri Osteopathic Association to build Still Hospital, which has since become Capital Region Medical Center. The School Board, however, did not sell its playground at the corner of Hickory and Adams—it conveyed it to the City of Jefferson for management as a neighborhood park, an arrangement that continued for many decades. Then, in April 2016, the Jefferson City School District, concerned with potential issues of liability, deeded the land to the City of Jefferson for $10 for continued use as a playground.

Now 99 years old, the Hickory Street Park is one of the oldest tracts of public land in Jefferson City specifically designated as a park. (Charles’s brother Arthur Hough donated the land for Hough Park in 1917.) The well-maintained, shady, popular playground in Jefferson City’s Southside is today a shining example of what a neighborhood park should be.

By the way, Hickory Street was not named for the tree but for the 7th US president, Andrew Jackson, nicknamed “Old Hickory.” “Jackson” was already in use for the next street east of the park. Adams Street is named for the 6th president. The next street south of the park is named for the 10th president, John Tyler. The next street west of the park is named for the 5th president, James Monroe. Children using the playground are surrounded by US history—four presidents!

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2018

This piece originally ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 16, 2018.

How Atchison Street Got Its Name

Today we’re continuing with a short series about street names in the historic Southside.

Brothers Nelson and Oscar Burch moved to Jefferson City shortly after the Civil War. Oscar had fought proudly in the Union Army for years and had been imprisoned by the Confederates for months. He likely had no love for the Confederates. The brothers bought land and built their homes in the late 1860s on the southwest corner of Jefferson and Atchison Streets on the south side of Munichburg.

Here is the Nelson and Gertrude Burch house (115 W. Atchison) (photo taken June 30, 2012). Click to see the National Register of Historic Places paperwork. Click to read an article about historic preservation work done by the current owners.

And below is the Oscar and Mary Burch house (924 Jefferson) (photo taken June 30, 2012). Click to see the National Register of Historic Places paperwork. Click to read an article about the house’s history and improvements made by its current owners.

Did the Burches—who were Yankees from New York—know that Atchison Street, where they built their fine homes, was named in honor of a devoted pro-slavery Missourian who tried his best to lead Missouri into the Confederacy, the very enemy that they had just fought against so long and hard?

Possibly not. Although the street was named Atchison before the Civil War, names of streets and house numbers were not commonly used in the residential sections of town in the middle of the nineteenth century. Atchison Street was the southern limit of the platted city. The Burch houses were built on an outlot, outside the city. They were like country estates overlooking the rest of the small town.

So who was this famous Confederate Missourian named Atchison? Why was a slave-owning secessionist honored with a street name in Munichburg, settled by pro-Union German immigrants?

David Rice Atchison was born in Kentucky in 1807 and graduated from Transylvania University in 1825 at the early age of eighteen. One of his close friends and classmates was Jefferson Davis, who later became the president of the Confederates States of America.

Atchison moved to western Missouri in 1830 and acquired slaves. He was elected to the Missouri General Assembly in 1834 and served in the U.S. Senate from 1843 to 1855, for many of those years Senate pro tempore. He supposedly was the U.S. president for one day, March 4, 1849, when president-elect Zachary Taylor refused to take the oath because it was a Sunday.

As the national debate over slavery intensified, Atchison took the pro-slavery side. He fought hard for extension of slavery into neighboring Kansas and Nebraska as they approached statehood. He personally conducted a raid by pro-slavery men called the Border Ruffians into Lawrence, Kansas, where they pillaged the town. This act led abolitionist John Brown to begin his legendary retaliation of violence.

When the Civil War broke out, Atchison joined with the sitting Missouri governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, a secessionist. He continued to work with Jackson and Missouri general Sterling Price in their fight against the Union.

Atchison’s longstanding friendship with Confederate president Jefferson Davis since boyhood days in Kentucky helped Missouri to be acknowledged by the Confederate States of America as its twelfth state by a star in its flag.

As the war dragged on and the Confederacy’s cause faded, Atchison sought haven in Texas until 1867, when he returned to northwestern Missouri. Politically discredited, the bachelor turned to a quiet life of farming in Clinton County, but now without slaves. He died in 1886. There’s a statue of Atchison at the Clinton County Courthouse in Plattsburg, Missouri.

Atchison Street in Jefferson City was given its name well before the Civil War, certainly by the 1840s, when Atchison was second in leadership in the U.S. Senate. At that time, the Southern-dominated leadership of Missouri and Jefferson City would have been proud of him. His later notoriety as leader of the Southern, pro-slavery cause in Missouri would have been dismissed after the war as no cause for changing the street name.

Still, one wonders whether the fiercely Unionist Burch brothers—or, for that matter, any of the German immigrants who later moved onto Atchison Street and were pro-Union—could be very happy to live on a street named for such an ardent advocate of slavery.

Lincoln University, the historically black university founded by black Union veterans of the Civil War, also lies along East Atchison Street. How paradoxical this is!

Incidentally, David Rice Atchison, slavery advocate and defender, was honored in 1991 with a bronze bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians in the Missouri State Capitol.

Bonus info: David Rice Atchison helped found Atchison, Kansas, across the Missouri River from Missouri, which still bears the name of its pro-slavery, pro-secession founder. The city was originally intended as a pro-slavery enclave, in hopes that Kansas would not develop into the strongly abolitionist, pro-Union state that it did! The city had become anti-slavery by 1859, before the Civil War broke out.


Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

How Dunklin Street Got Its Name

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.


Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

How Did Ashley Street Get Its Name?

Ashley Street runs through the heart of Jefferson City’s Munichburg from Jackson Street west to Deeg Street. Central United Church of Christ is on Ashley at the corner of Washington Street. But how did the street get its name? Who has heard of a person by the name of Ashley?

Many famous Americans are commemorated with street names in Jefferson City. William Henry Ashley was one of them and is particularly important to Missourians for his contribution to the early development of the state.

Ashley was born about 1778 in Virginia and came to Missouri in 1802. He witnessed the change from a European colony to United States control. He made his first contribution by discovering an Ozark cave full of bat guano, which he recognized as potassium nitrate—saltpeter. Ashley processed the bat dung into gunpowder, a vital commodity on the frontier, especially when paired with the nearby lead mines for producing lead shot. Local gunpowder and shot—and an abundance of game—made the Missouri Ozarks a hunter’s paradise.

William Ashley had the right connections and was popular enough to be elected Missouri’s first lieutenant governor in 1820. As such he had a role in the selection of Jefferson City as the state capital. He was made a U.S. brigadier general in 1821. He was well-known and popular when Jefferson City was founded.

His real place in American history, however, came in the fur trade, which was then centered in St. Louis. He partnered with Andrew Henry to change the way furs were collected in the West and brought to St. Louis. Previously, Indians brought pelts to trading posts along western rivers, where agents of St. Louis fur merchants traded for them.

But Ashley and Henry did not use fortlike trading posts; they replaced the Indians and French traders with American trappers who acted as independent businessmen. Once a year, these trappers would bring their collected beaver pelts to a “rendezvous” in the Rocky Mountains. At the rendezvous Ashley and Henry’s agents bought the furs from the trappers, who came to be called “mountain men.” Among them were such legendary Westerners as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Jim Beckwourth, Hugh Glass, and Jedediah Smith.

Ashley and Henry’s enterprise was named the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Their system of using American men instead of Indians and French was hugely successful and greatly contributed to the rise of St. Louis in the 1820s and 1830s. And the mountain men explored the mountains and valleys of the West and populated it with the first Americans.

Ashley, for example, is remembered by the National Park Service at Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, in Montana and Wyoming, where mountain men and the rendezvous system played a prominent historical role.

Henry served as point man in the Rocky Mountains, while Ashley was the astute businessman in St. Louis.

William Ashley’s popularity in Missouri never waned. He served in Congress in 1831–1837 and ran for governor in 1836. Then he moved to Cooper County, where he died in 1838.

He was buried, according to his dying wishes, in an Indian mound atop a bluff where the Lamine River empties into the Missouri, a few miles west of Boonville. The site is impressive. From that bluff you can look up and down the Missouri River for many miles and imagine boatloads of furs returning downriver to St. Louis. William Ashley had no children.

It is highly fitting that Jefferson City honors the great Missourian William Ashley with a street name. Although today no one knows who Ashley was, it is certain that he was a household name to the early residents of Jefferson City.

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder. 

Bunker Garages of the Southside

Have you ever noticed all those cavelike garages built into the hills along Southside streets?




Before cars, houses in the Southside didn’t need driveways. Horses and carriages reached the back sides of properties by using the alleys behind the houses.

But when people started to have cars, there wasn’t enough space between houses for driveways on the narrow lots, so people built garages on the back ends of their lots and used alleys to drive their cars into them. One example is the sturdy concrete garage behind the Joseph Pope house (now Rosewood Music), at 222 West Dunklin.

The Pope garage faces onto the alley that’s now called Cedar Way.

Automobile traffic required cutting down steep hills to a lower grade. This caused houses, originally built at street level, to sit ten to twenty feet above the new street level. Rock walls were constructed on many hills to support the new terraces. A long flight of stairs led up to each house. When the street was lowered in the 800 block of Mulberry in 1912, the newspaper reported that Adam Deeg jokingly contemplated dividing his house. That is, he would cut off the part that hung high above the street and move it around to the back side of the building.

Creative homeowners turned the negative into a positive by digging into the high terrace in front of their houses to make underground or bunker garages for their cars. The 800 block of Mulberry has several prominent bunker garages below the houses.




The bunker garages were built to accommodate cars of Model T vintage, so they are generally too small and unsuitable for today’s cars. Now, these bunker garages are mostly used for storage, and cars are parked on the street.

Before the 1920s, West Dunklin Street stopped abruptly at a “dead end” barrier in the 300 block in front of what is now Kas A Designs jewelry store. A steep bluff with a small creek at its base prevented horses and buggies from going any farther west.

Pedestrians used a long flight of wooden steps to negotiate the bluff. One day the city was slapped with a lawsuit when a Mrs. Kingery fell off that long stairway. The rotten banister had given way, and “she was precipitated headlong into the washout below.” The city then decided to put Dunklin Street through to connect the Southside with the new Washington Park subdivision, along what is now Missouri Boulevard. After the bluff was cut down, the houses ended up twenty feet above the street. A bunker garage was built into the fifteen-foot terrace at the Schneider House, now Kas A Designs (308 West Dunklin).




Construction of bunker garages was possible because the properties were underlain by great depths of either wind-blown loess or alluvial material, which was easy to dig out without disturbing the house foundations.

However, where properties were underlain by solid bedrock—as at the intersection of Monroe and East Dunklin (near the Jefferson City Public School Administration Building)—the cost of excavating into the hillside was much too expensive without explosives. And explosives would have damaged the house above. Those homeowners had to find someplace else to park their cars.




Munichburg’s bunker garages offer an intimate, local perspective on the transportation revolution that defined twentieth-century America. As streets were altered to make our steep hills more accessible the new-fangled “horseless carriages,” local residents—new car owners themselves—were simultaneously presented with an opportunity to create storage space for their new machines.

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

Special thanks to Susan Ferber, who took all the great photographs!

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Don’t keep your love of Jefferson City’s historic Southside underground! Join the Old Munichburg Association, and help celebrate its heritage, preserve its history, and secure its future!

Past Winters in Munichburg

“Old timers” habitually claim that winters in the past were colder and snowier. That may or may not be true, but all of us remember what we did in wintertime when we were growing up.

It seemed that during every winter in the 1940s, we had several snows deep enough to go sledding on the hills in the Southside. There were no snowplows or trucks that spread cinders or chemicals on the streets. Only on some occasions did city workers spread cinders with shovels from a truck onto the busiest streets. Cars couldn’t make it up the steeper hills and usually got stuck; they simply had to back down to the bottom and try a different street. The police blocked off those hills as impassable, which allowed kids to go sledding on them without having to cope with traffic. That put mothers’ minds at ease.




The steep hill of the 500 block of Broadway, next to our house, was often blocked off. We kids took a running start at the top, at Elm Street, plopped down on our wood Red Flyers with metal runners, and whizzed down for two blocks, passing Miller and coasting all the way to McCarty Street. We marked the spot where we stopped and tried to go farther the next time. The Red Flyers had a steering mechanism, so we sometimes tried to crash into each other on the way down. We went faster with two on a sled, one lying on top of the other, but then we often fell off and the runaway sled jumped a curb or worse, went all the way to McCarty with us sliding and chasing after it.




When we got cold to the bone, we went inside. Mom had a pan of warm milk on the stove, and we poured ourselves cupfuls, stirred in some cocoa powder, and floated a big, fat marshmallow on top to sweeten it. We declared it ready to drink only after the marshmallow melted completely.

Because most everyone walked in the Southside, men shoveled their sidewalks before they went to work in the morning. If it snowed during the day, children were expected to have the sidewalks shoveled or swept with a broom before their fathers came home from work.

We made snowmen, of course. The front-yard terraces of the Southside came in handy for this. We started the snowball at the top and let it roll down the terrace so that it ended up as a big ball on the sidewalk. Three rolls down the terrace produced three big balls that we could stack. Maybe even a fourth. Small pieces of coal made eyes and buttons. All the houses on Elm Street had snowmen in front of them. They were like vigilant soldiers guarding the houses.

Speaking of coal, everyone heated with coal. Much of it was “soft” Missouri coal. It was cheaper, but it didn’t burn “clean” as hard, “smokeless” coal from Illinois did. Coal dust was constantly in the air, and when you blew your nose, whatever came out was always gray and discolored your white handkerchief. People coughed and cleared their throats a lot.

We got our hard coal delivered by October. During the war years, fear of coal shortages made people get their supply as soon as they could afford it. The big coal truck backed up to our basement garage doors. The men extended a long chute from the truck bed into the coal bin in our basement. Large chunks of coal tumbled down the chute into the bin. It was noisy, filthy work.




Mom did her best to prepare her house by shutting the registers and putting rugs over cold-air return vents, but coal dust still invaded through all the miniscule cracks and came to rest on her white window curtains and everywhere. Like most Southside mothers, she took pride in a clean house and spent the next couple of days dusting and washing.

The fire in our coal furnace would die down during the cold nights, and the first thing Dad did when he got up was put a couple shovels of coal into the furnace and get the fire blazing again. During the day, if it got cool in the house (no thermostats), Mom asked me to put a shovelful in the furnace, which I liked to do. I imagined the orange flames of the fiery furnace must have been like the gates of hell that people in church warned me about.

Dad removed the coal ashes every evening, put them in a metal bucket, and set the bucket on the curb of the Broadway Street hill. Alongside he stuck a shovel in the snow so that motorists who got stuck in snow or ice trying to make it up the hill would have some help. It worked, because the ashes kept disappearing, but never the shovel.




My brother and I slept on the third floor of our house, which was really an attic under the steeply sloping (uninsulated) roof. There was only one heat register up there for all that space. When it was time to get up on a cold morning, we would first hang our underpants over the hot air vent to warm them up; then we went back in bed for a few more minutes. Next, we did the same thing with our shirts, and crawled back under the covers under the shirts warmed up. Ditto with pants. When we were finally dressed, we closed the register vent and went downstairs to eat breakfast. It would be wasteful to heat the third floor during the day.

Most of the windows of our house did not have storm windows. Our second floor was high above Broadway and caught the strong, winter north winds, and the windows rattled endlessly. Mom stuffed a lot of newspapers in those windows to keep them from rattling and placed old towels around them to sop up moisture. Of course, we closed window shades and curtains on the coldest days.




Without storm windows, frost formed on the inside of the window panes, and my brother and I played endless games of tic-tac-toe with our fingernails, scratching in the frost. Though our house had extra-thick brick walls, it was not insulated, and once the bricks got cold, the coldness crept into the rooms. No one sat near the windows or the walls.




Broadway School, now the Carpenters’ Hall on Dunklin Street, had a cloakroom for each of the six classrooms. The first grade cloakroom is now the men’s restroom, and the sixth grade cloakroom is now the women’s restroom on the first floor of Carpenters’ Hall. Each pupil had a hook in the cloakroom for hanging his/her coat and a shelf above for caps. We all wore galoshes over our shoes on wet or snowy days, and we set them neatly on the floor beneath our coats. Doing that kept the floors of the classrooms nice and dry.

Parents made their kids wear galoshes to protect their shoes. We only had leather shoes (no athletic or canvas shoes in those days), and they were expensive and needed to last all year. Many of us wore hand-me-down galoshes, since galoshes hardly ever wore out. We even put on our galoshes to go outside for recess on snowy days, which made it hard to run.

Recesses in the snow were fun because we always got into snowball fights, although the teachers tried to stop the fights because the brown pea gravel from the playground would get caught up in the snowball. Since everyone walked, even teachers, school was never cancelled for snow.

Wear’s Creek froze over quite often. We could slide on long stretches of ice around the Washington Street bridge, and if we broke through, it wasn’t too bad, because the water was only a few inches deep. Not so on Wear’s Creek over by Washington Park. We first threw rocks as hard as we could to test the ice before going out on it, which was just as much fun. Hey, winter was a great time!


Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

If you liked this post, you might also like this one, from a Munichburg resident, on the Opulent Opossum blog: “Slippery Slope.”

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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!

Madison Street Becomes US Highway 54, and Central Dairy Becomes a Destination

Madison Street Becomes Highway 54

When planners laid out the first streets of Jefferson City in 1822, they made Jefferson Street the chief north-south road. Jefferson Street was anchored on its river end at the steamboat landing (Lohman’s Landing, now part of Jefferson Landing State Historic Site). The street extended in a straight line to the southern limits of the platted city, where it became a state road that went far out into the county. During the nineteenth century, farmers from Zion, Honey Creek, Brazito, Hickory Hill, Stringtown, Lohman, and other rural communities came in their wagons into Jefferson City along Jefferson Street as far as the German Southside (Munichburg), where they traded and stayed overnight.

Just after the Civil War ended in 1865, brothers Oscar and Nelson Burch built impressive, adjacent residences on the high ground of the 900 block of Jefferson Street on south edge of the German-immigrant Munichburg community.

The Oscar Burch house.

The Nelson Burch house.

In 1893 Louis Lohman built his elegant mansion on wooded acreage across Jefferson Street from the Burch residences. These three historic houses, all sitting high in the “suburbs,” had fantastic views of the city. The Lohman mansion has since been razed by the Salvation Army.

The Lohman mansion, prior to 1922.

In the 1920s, when cars and trucks replaced wagons and buggies, the federal government created a system of numbered highways and designated Jefferson Street as US Highway 54 in this new highway system.




Jefferson Street, however, soon presented challenges to increased motor traffic. Its public right-of-way south of Atchison Street narrowed from 80 to merely 50 feet, and houses pressed close up to the street. Also, the steep hill leading up to Swifts Highway was difficult to negotiate for heavy-laden trucks, like those heading south for construction of Bagnell Dam. The Missouri Highway Department realized Jefferson Street was obsolete for highway traffic and had to find another location to carry US 54 traffic.

In 1937, during the Great Depression and using what we would now call federal stimulus dollars, the Missouri Highway Department selected Madison Street, one block east, to be the location for a new Highway 54 South. At that time, Madison Street dead-ended at the end of the flat stretch in the 1000 block, just beyond where Freeman’s Mortuary now is. In this flat stretch, the public right-of-way could easily be widened, because the west side was all in Lohman’s Woods and not built on. Beyond the flat stretch was a steep hill that Capital Region Medical Center now sits atop. The Highway Department concluded it would be better to blast a roadway through the crown of that steep hill, where there were no buildings. Making a deep rock cut in the crown would reduce the street ascent and lower the street grade. This is the same hill that Jefferson Street went up and over at Swifts Highway.




Work was delayed until 1941. To blast such immense quantities of rock was something to behold because blasting on that scale was not common in those days. Few people wanted to go close to the site when the dynamiting was going on. From a couple blocks away you could see large rocks being thrown high in the air during the blasting, and folks feared rocks would shower down on their heads. Indeed, some nearby residents did find small rocks in their yards. There wasn’t much “crowd control” for safety in those days, and people, if they dared to, could venture quite close to such hazardous events, restrained only by their own common sense, or lack of it. My family could hear the dynamite explosions one mile away at our house on West Elm Street.

One Sunday, when no work could be done on the Sabbath day of rest, and a day when Dad was free, he took my brother Richard and me (I was seven years old) to see the progress. But Dad had a special interest. Labor unions had vigorously objected to the work on some grounds and had caused its start to be delayed for four years. Dad was a strong supporter of unions and president of Jefferson City’s Central Labor Union when this particular highway work began in 1941. He wanted to see firsthand what the controversy involved. With a violent war well underway in Europe, there was a shortage of male labor for the highway work and perhaps non-union labor was being used. That was a serious concern to the labor unions. But it sure didn’t concern us young boys.

That sunny Sunday afternoon, we walked to the end of Madison Street just past where Freeman’s Mortuary now is. There we left the city sidewalk and stepped carefully along the partially graded rock surface all the way up the hill to the top. No grading had begun beyond that place, and the rocks lay in great jumbled masses like the boulder field atop Pikes Peak (which I had seen in pictures; I imagined we were walking to the top of Pikes Peak). We picked our way among the sharp-edged limestone boulders and walked to the foot of the jagged face of a freshly dynamited fifteen-foot cliff to inspect bedrock that was gleaming bright white in the afternoon sun.

Richard and I found fossils that had just been exposed to daylight for the first time in millions of years, while Dad stood with his hands on his hips, staring blankly at nothing in particular, but thinking deeply about this and that. When we turned to look north and head back home, the vast panorama of Jefferson City lay before our eyes with masses of white limestone boulders that were soon to be transformed into a modern highway. For me, it was much too soon to leave “Pikes Peak.” I could have stayed among those white boulders for a long time.




The new, wide Madison Street carrying Highway 54 South was finished in late 1942, right smack in the middle of World War II. Jefferson City now had a concrete highway for five and a half miles to the Moreau River (to the crossing now called Twin Bridges), and I had personally witnessed its construction!


Central Dairy Becomes a Destination

When Madison Street became Highway 54, properties along it benefited from increased tourist traffic, due especially to the booming Lake of the Ozarks after World War II ended. Southside Conoco gas station arose on the corner of Madison and Dunklin, and Southside Sinclair arose on the corner of Madison and Ashley. Milo Walz developed a shopping center in the block of Madison between those two service stations, where Show Me Printing and Dollar General now are.

But it was Central Dairy that benefited most from the highway traffic. Before Madison became US 54, Central Dairy was already a favorite place to us locals, but when highway traffic began passing by, it became a destination for all those summer tourists on their way to and from Lake of the Ozarks who wanted some good ice cream.




The new highway made Central Dairy what we know it today—one of Jefferson City’s primary destinations. But even later, after Madison was no longer US 54, travelers kept detouring off the new highway onto Madison in order to reach Central Dairy and their wonderful ice cream and friendly service. Fame then spread to other tourists coming to Jefferson City.




Madison Street lost its designation as US 54 in 1965 when the Highway Department constructed the present dual-lane US 54 that cuts through the hill at the Jefferson Street overpass.






The next time you drive around that abrupt, sharp curve in the highway, remember that it is the third generation of US 54 leading south from Jefferson City.

Copyright 2011 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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Jefferson City is a wonderful place, and Old Munichburg is an integral part of its story. Help preserve and promote this German-settled district by joining the Old Munichburg Association!