The German Methodist Church of Jefferson City, built in 1874, stood at the corner of Broadway and West Elm, facing Broadway.
The congregation disbanded in 1918 and sold its property to member and neighbor Albert Thomas. In 1930 Thomas converted the church building into a duplex, which is still standing.
While excavating a basement beneath the church, workmen discovered a large, unusual boulder embedded in the dirt seven feet below the surface. Professor Alfred C. Burrill, curator of the Missouri State Museum in the nearby Capitol, was summoned. He thought it might be a meteorite, according to a newspaper article published the same afternoon of the discovery. He noted that it was rounded, “a feature peculiar to meteorites.”
The boulder turned out to be a huge chunk of red granite, clearly not a rock native to central Missouri. The particular granite can be traced to a source in Minnesota or the Dakotas. But how did it get from that northern location to a hill five hundred miles away in Jefferson City’s Southside?
It is much too large to have been carried in the current of the Missouri River, and besides, the hill it was found on is sixty feet above the present Missouri River. And it could not have been transported south by glaciers, because geologists maintain that the great ice caps of the past never spread south across the Missouri River in central Missouri.
Here is what likely happened. This theory also explains the existence of similar granite boulders found in the Osage River valley as far upstream as Tuscumbia.
When the thick ice caps to the north were wasting away, great quantities of water came down the Missouri River for centuries, causing it to run “bluff to bluff” like the great flood of 1993. Floating in the great mass of raging meltwater were huge chunks of glacial ice with boulders and other debris in them. Some of these ice floes got pushed into tributary valleys like Wear’s Creek and the Osage River, where they lodged in quiet water on the hillsides. The ice melted, and the boulders and debris were left behind and later buried in windblown silt, or loess.
These boulders are therefore called “ice-rafted glacial erratics.”
Originally thought to be a meteorite, that piece of Dakota granite is still there, in the hillside rock garden next to the excavated church basement where it was found. Albert Thomas had a whimsical nature, and he placed his unique boulder in the center of his rock garden, surrounded by peonies.
He cemented a German garden gnome, called a knusperhexe, to its top. For decades, the garden gnome smiled down on passersby on the sidewalk.
The boulder of granite still sits in that rock garden on Broadway but lacks its guardian gnome, and it is much reduced in size, due to chipping chunks away for family members and friends.
By the way, this wasn’t the first “meteorite” found in Jefferson City. Earlier, in October 1912, a supposed “meteor” was found where the new High Street viaduct was going up. The newspaper at the time quipped that meteorites were said to have diamonds in them, but that wasn’t the case with this one.
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.
Robert Pershing Wadlow, the world’s tallest man, was 8 feet 11½ inches tall, and many people remember when he came to Munichburg.
He visited Jefferson City on September 11, 1939. A crowd was already gathered when his car pulled up in front of Chicken Schmidt’s South Side Shoe Store, 124 East Dunklin. Al Case, who as a teenager worked at the shoe store for his uncle Chicken Schmidt, recalled the visit.
The front passenger seat of the car had been removed, and Wadlow sat in the backseat, his long legs extending all the way under the dashboard. It took a while for Wadlow to “uncoil” from the standard size, four-door sedan.
He stood to full height and walked with a cane to a wooden platform, which he mounted, though for him it was certainly unnecessary! There, he greeted folks and posed for photographs. Here he is with his hand on Chicken Schmidt’s head.
Mr. Case remembers Mr. Wadlow coming into the shoe store. Fortunately, the ceiling was ten feet high! When he went to use the facilities, he handed his cane to young Al to hold—it was almost as tall as he was!
Mr. Wadlow toured for Peters Shoes, made by the International Shoe Company, and Schmidt’s South Side Shoe Store was the local dealer for those shoes. Peters Shoes made custom footwear for Wadlow in exchange for his touring as a goodwill ambassador for the company.(Wadlow wore a size 37AA!)
Wadlow was born February 22, 1918, and grew up in Alton, Illinois. Due to an overactive pituitary gland, he was 5 feet 6 inches by the time he was five. At nine, he was 6 feet 2 inches. By 16 and still in high school, he was 7 feet 10 inches—taller than any of the tall men playing professional basketball today.
He was active in Boy Scouts and in his local Methodist church. He was a DeMolay and became a Freemason in 1939. He attended Shurtleff College in Alton.
His extraordinary height destined him to a life of public appearances, not as a sideshow attraction in carnivals, but for shoe companies. He toured throughout the United States mostly for the International Shoe Company headquartered at St. Louis. When he was eighteen, he appeared at the 1936 Missouri State Fair; by that time, he was 8 feet 4½ inches.
Above all (no pun intended) Wadlow had a gentle nature and was kind to everyone, despite his unusual appearance and difficulty of getting around. He always appeared in normal street clothes and was friendly and courteous with the public, regardless of the gawking and staring.
His father was his escort and manager. After all, he was just a teenager when he entered a life of public appearances. He was only 21 when he visited Jefferson City. Several persons in Jefferson City today distinctly remember his visit on Dunklin Street in 1939.
On June 27, 1940, just eighteen days before his death, doctors at Washington University in St. Louis measured him at 8 feet 11.1 inches. He weighed 490 pounds. He may have grown further before his death.
In July 1940 he experienced a blister and infection from a faulty ankle brace while appearing in Michigan. His condition worsened, and he died on July 15, 1940, at age 22. He was buried in Alton, Illinois. Today, a life-size statue there commemorates the world’s tallest man, certified by the Guinness Book of Records.
The Alton Museum of History and Art includes a special exhibit on Robert Wadlow, Alton’s “Gentle Giant.”
In keeping with the pleasant and unassuming nature of Mr. Wadlow, the exhibit is tastefully done with knowledgeable curators.
Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.
Jefferson City 1939 photo provided by Al Case. Other photos by Susan Ferber.
Suppose you went to the gas station today and bought one gallon of gas advertised at $3.299 a gallon. The clerk would expect you to pay $3.30 and would not give you back any change. But that’s not the way it was when we had mills for tenths of cents.
When we went to the Capitol Movie Theatre in the 1940s, a ticket for kids under the age of twelve cost 10 cents and 2 mills. Without the 2 mills, Mr. Arnold Gould would not let us in. If we gave the ticket seller 11 cents, she gave us 8 mills in change. The 2 mills were for the sales tax that Mr. Gould had to remit to the state of Missouri.
A mill is one-tenth of a cent, or one-thousandth of a dollar (it’s from the Latin word mille, which means “thousand”). Missouri had a state sales tax of 2 percent and issued sales tax tokens to help collect the tax when it came to tenths of cents. If you wanted to buy some dress material at the Southside Dry Goods Store, and Mr. Schmidt’s price for it was $3.70, he would add on the state sales tax of 7.4 cents, so the total bill would be $3.77 and 4 mills. You either gave him the 4 mills, or you gave him another penny and he gave you back 6 mills change.
Beginning in August 1935, Missouri issued tokens in 1-mill and 5-mill values in order to collect the sales tax. They were made of thin cardboard and called “milk-cap tokens” because they looked like the cardboard caps that were used for glass milk bottles.
Then Missouri tried metal tokens, which were slightly larger than a nickel, but thinner. They were lightweight, dull, and ugly and would never be mistaken for a coin. The 5-mill token had a hole in the center. Boys tried to use them in pinball machines, but they jammed the coin slot.
When World War II came, all metal went for the war effort, so Missouri turned to plastic tokens. The 1-mill token was bright red, and the 5-mill token bright green. The plastic easily warped, even under slight heat like sitting out in the sun, but even if they were curled, Mr. Gould accepted them at the Capitol Theatre.
They were useless for pinball machines! We boys laid them on the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks when we heard a train coming and watched the train’s wheels flatten them into half-dollar size.
Inflation after the war caused prices to rise quickly, and separate tokens for tenths of cents fell out of favor. Merchants didn’t like to fool around with tenths of cents, which required doing long multiplication on a piece of paper, so they simply rounded the sales tax to the nearest whole penny. This is what is done today when you buy gas at the gas station. Shoppers were glad not to have to fool around with a separate set of coins in their pockets and purses.
Missouri finally got rid of its sales tax tokens in 1961. It was the last state to do so!
Are Missouri sales tax tokens worthy anything today? So many millions were produced, and they were made so cheaply, that their value is trivial today. Collectibles dealers often sell them in boxes with miscellaneous paraphernalia.
The mills (and the milk jug cap!) in the pictures are from my collection. Some of the information was taken from the website of the American Tax Token Society.
Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.
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It’s not very taxing to join the Old Munichburg Association! New memberships cost just $25 (and no mills!)—click here for a membership form!
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!
We know about Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), but who knows about Fastnacht? The Germans also celebrate Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the fasting period of Lent. The Germans call that Tuesday Fastnacht, literally “the night before fasting.”
In Germany Fastnacht has evolved into Karneval, or Fasching, and it’s a big party like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Karneval in Germany can be weeks long, lasting from Epiphany to Fastnacht. Fastnacht has lost its religious significance for many Germans and has become another secular party like Oktoberfest, when folks can go a little crazy, wear masks, march in parades, and mock politicians. Big cities like Cologne and Munich have huge festivals.
But Germans who immigrated to Missouri in the nineteenth century retained the religious significance of that special Tuesday, while still having fun. And they have not turned it into a carnival.
Fastnacht was a day to use up all the cooking fats in the house, because fats were forbidden to be consumed during the forty days of fasting during Lent. How to use up the fat? Well, they fried doughnuts in kettles of hot fat. These pastries were called by names like mützen and, not surprisingly, fastnachts. The doughnuts came out of the hot grease and were sprinkled with sugar. Since people couldn’t eat them after Tuesday, they feasted on them before midnight until they were all gone. Some families made them several days earlier so they could have time to finish them off.
Another way to get rid of the fat was to eat up all the sausage on Fastnacht. In Hermann, Missouri, the tradition was to ride around on horseback to farms to collect sausages. Then everyone gathered at one place to cook it and eat it in one big community “sausage festival,” or wurstfest.
For many decades, the Hermann and Rhineland area has had a dancing group called the Wurstjaegers (“sausage hunters”) whose name reflects this tradition. They perform annually at Hermann's Wurstfest and at Jefferson City’s Oktoberfest in Munichburg.
In Jefferson City the German immigrants and families got together on Fastnacht evening and had parties with singing and dancing ending abruptly at midnight. The next morning all the fun and indulgence was over. The next morning, Ash Wednesday, the fasting, self-denial, and penance of Lent began and lasted for a long, sober, forty days until Easter Sunday. Come Ash Wednesday, the party was over! People went to church services on Ash Wednesday morning. Priests put ashes on the foreheads of Catholics; many still observe this ritual.
Today there are no public Fastnacht celebrations in Jefferson City. However, the Columbia United Church of Christ in Columbia, which has German roots in its founding, will hold its 28th annual Fastnacht celebration on February 21, to which the public is invited.
They serve a traditional Fastnacht dinner of brats and sauerkraut ending with a handful of the traditional Fastnacht doughnuts made from a century-old recipe from Pennsylvania Dutch (German) country. Plenty of dancing and singing to a German band will enliven your spirits.
WHEN: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 5:30 to 8:00 pm
WHERE: Knights of Columbus Hall 2525 N. Stadium Blvd. Columbia, Mo. (This location on Stadium Blvd. is north of I-70.)
TICKETS: In advance: $8 adults; $4 children 6-12; $20 family. (Call 573-445-7931 for advance tickets.) At the door: $10 adults; $5 children 6-12.
Hi, folks! Welcome to the Munichburg Memories blog! The Old Munichburg Association sponsors it, and the primary writer is Walter A. Schroeder, president of the association.
Until recently, members of the association have received these brief essays and stories in e-mails, along with the meeting minutes, but this blog enables us to offer an online archive of these essays.
If you get the Jefferson City News Tribune, you have probably seen the "Munichburg Memories" photos that we post before Oktoberfest to help publicize that event. Those installments have proven quite popular!
Clearly, people like to read about Munichburg history and look at old photos, but even though this blog might seem like it's "just for fun," it serves an educational purpose, too.
Also, with this blog, we hope to inspire you, our readers, to become active in improving and strengthening our historic neighborhood.
If you are interested in Jefferson City's historic Southside, we hope you'll join the Old Munichburg Association (we offer individual and business memberships), and become active in our group. Visit our official website to learn more about us!
We're also on Facebook, and if you "friend" us there, you'll receive updates on Munichburg matters as well as notices when new posts appear on this blog.
Originally thought to be a meteorite, that piece of Dakota granite is still there, in the hillside rock garden next to the excavated church basement where it was found. Albert Thomas had a whimsical nature, and he placed his unique boulder in the center of his rock garden, surrounded by peonies.
