Friday, December 22, 2023

Zombies Invade the Southside! New Book by Walter A. Schroeder

Hi, everyone, it's Julie, the daughter of Walter. He's the author of this blog, but I'm the one who posts his essays here online. I'm also the editor of his publications for the Old Munichburg Association, and I wanted to let you know he has a new collection of memoirs!

We just picked up the books from the printer a few days ago. Are we in time for Christmas? Not quite, but Downtown Book & Toy and J Street Vintage will soon have copies for sale. I'm sure there will be other places, as well. We are also anticipating some booksignings and perhaps some public author talks, too.

Why is it called “Zombies”? you may ask. Well, this is collection of essays about a number of different topics. Would people pay attention if it was titled “More Essays by Walter”? We went with a title that grabs your attention. So: the title comes from a whimsical story about the time when all the kids on the block saw the 1943 comic-horror movie Revenge of the Zombies . . . and then spent the next week staggering around the neighborhood's sidewalks, arms outstretched, wearing vacant expressions—causing passing motorists to do double-takes! Worse, as they muttered "I will do thy bidding. . ." their mothers caught on to the trick and told them to clean their rooms, or do the dishes!

But perhaps more to the point, it has to do with the magic of details. In his introduction, my dad talks about how “history” comes to us as a collection of facts, but we all have a hard time picturing how things really “were.” His goal in Zombies is to revive scenes of the past so we can better understand and imagine what Jefferson City was like (at least for him) in the 1940s. (Was his experience “representative”? Well, if not his, whose would be?) As he explains, “In every generation . . . young people learn only the skeleton of the past. I want to put meat on the skeleton’s bones.”

In other news:

  • Dad's book Buddy's Stories, published in 2018 by the Old Munichburg Association, sold out this year, so we reprinted it. So it's still available, too!
  • His Breweries and Saloons book is also available. It's a relatively small book, but it's packed full of interesting information about the early breweries and saloons/taverns in Jefferson City. Sure, it's got lots of cool photos, old ads from the local German newspapers, and other illustrations, but it's also got a lot of colorful information in the text—the text is substantial, so don't let its compactness fool you. Be sure to check it out!
  • Dad's book Southside Sketches, published in 2016, is now out of print and unavailable.

One more note: Zombies, Buddy's Stories, and Breweries and Saloons are all published by the Old Munichburg Association, which is a nonprofit neighborhood association dedicated to the revitalization of Jefferson City's historic Southside. We are a group of homeowners, business owners, and others who share a love of the district and a desire to promote, preserve, and protect it. Proceeds from the sales go to OMA.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

New Publication: Broadway School in the 1940s

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

Monday, May 16, 2022

Ward Dorrance, Jefferson City's Distinguished Creative Writer

C-SPAN visited Jefferson City June 4, 2012, to prepare a TV program that was aired nationally on July 8. Producers said the program was to showcase the “literary life” of Jefferson City. It turned out that C-SPAN was interested only in nonfiction writing. Except for Jean Carnahan’s brief account of her fine book on the Governor’s Mansion, the other fifty minutes of the program had nothing to do with the “literary life” of Jefferson City! Two segments described some rare holdings of the Lincoln University and the University of Missouri–Columbia archives, none of which had to do with Jefferson City. At least half of the TV hour was devoted to three abstruse works that had nothing to do with Jefferson City, and they were written by university professors unknown to Jefferson City residents.

Unfortunately, by restricting Jefferson City’s “literary life” to nonfiction writing, C-SPAN overlooked one of Jefferson City’s most distinguished creative writers. For not only did the program omit the many distinguished writers at Lincoln University, they ignored Jefferson City’s native son Ward Dorrance: Guggenheim fellow, folklore preserver, prolific creative writer, who rubbed shoulders with Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. He taught at the University of Missouri, then advanced to professorships at Cambridge, Oxford, and Georgetown universities. He was a World War II veteran, and he won the prestigious O. Henry Prize. And he was born and grew up in Jefferson City.

Ward Allison Dorrance was born in Jefferson City April 30, 1904, and raised in Jefferson City’s Southside, at 602 Madison, next to Wear’s Creek. That site is now a Central Dairy parking lot. At that time, the Southside was nearing completion of its transition from German-speaking Muenchberg to the English-speaking Southside. Young Ward attended Jefferson City public schools (probably Central School around the corner on Dunklin Street) and graduated from Ernst Simonsen High School in 1922. He was valedictorian of his class and editor of both the Marcullus yearbook and the Jeffersonian student newspaper. Here is his photo, at age 18, from the Marcullus.

Dorrance went to the University of Missouri in Columbia where he majored in French and English and began teaching French there immediately upon receiving his B.A. in 1926. He received his M.A. in 1928. He then went to Paris to study for a doctorate at the Sorbonne, but he returned without it in 1930 when his mother died. He resumed teaching at the University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. from MU in French in 1935. His dissertation, Survival of French in the Old Ste. Genevieve District, was published by the university in its academic series, which was quite an honor for a graduating student.

His published dissertation, based on field work especially in the rural Ozarks community of Old Mines, Missouri, brought attention to the remnants of Missouri French culture and became one of the foundations upon which the revival of French heritage and tourism in Missouri was based. Dorrance located a few hundred people who spoke a vanishing French Creole dialect and meticulously documented their speech and culture. The work also greatly helped promote the study of Missouri folklore in general, as later folklorists readily acknowledged.

But Dorrance’s broader fame was yet to come, and very shortly. Now an MU professor, he bought a historic Civil War–period mansion in Columbia and named it “Confederate Hill” (also known as the Guitar Mansion, it’s now on the National Register of Historic Places). As he continued to teach French and English at the university, he began a prolific period of creative writing.

Three Ozark Streams: Log of the Moccasin and the Wilma appeared in 1937 (Richmond, Mo.: The Missourian Press). Dorrance floated the Black, Current, and Jack’s Fork and captured the flavor of the rivers and the people who lived along them. The lyrical beauty of his writing caught the attention of many. It was among the first of a long string of expressive writing by others on Ozark streams that led to popular support for the establishment of the National Ozark Scenic Waterways in 1964.

We’re from Missouri (Richmond, Mo.: The Missourian Press) appeared the next year. Thomas Hart Benton, who had just completed his murals in the Capitol, supplied a special frontispiece, possibly because Dorrance’s previous book caught Benton’s attention as a soulmate in portraying the nature of the real Missouri and everyday Missourians.

Though only 97 pages in length, We’re from Missouri is a rich collection of thirteen short essays about the good life in Missouri. One essay, “Repulse of Texas at Potosi,” has been frequently cited. It tells the story of audacious Texans’ nighttime attempt to steal the body of Moses Austin from its grave in the Ozark town of Potosi. Another is “Preëminent Sons of Bitches of Boone County, Missouri,” a title that speaks for itself. The delightful collection ends with a prayer to the Lord: “With due respect, I hope you will do nothing more for me but just go away and leave me alone. . . . The time you might have spent on me . . . can be used on the Legislature. Or the D.A.R.’s. Singly they’re fine folks. But collectively they pass resolutions.”

Where Rivers Meet (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons) came out in 1939, a third consecutive year of book publishing! Dorrance noted that leaders in St. Louis never had been to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and didn’t appreciate the huge role of the confluence of interior rivers in the nation’s history. He personally traveled seven major rivers (Osage, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, and Wabash) to report, in beautiful prose, the rich history and life along them.

By now, Dorrance was well established as a “river man” in American literature. These three works, appearing in 1937–1939, captured the beauty and essence of Missouri. Yet Dorrance’s Southern heritage and his pride in Southern ways also impelled him to bring folklore into his creative writing.

In 1940 he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to write The Sundowners (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942). Here is Professor Dorrance at age 36 when he received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Sundowners is a novel about a boy of French descent growing up in the Callaway County bottoms (Cote Sans Dessein, Tebbetts, Cedar City) across the Missouri River from Jefferson City. The young boy in the novel walks across the Missouri River Bridge into Jefferson City and pays a dime at the tollbooth. Dorrance includes a lot of his hometown Jefferson City in this novel. He describes, from a young boy’s view, Dallmeyer’s big store (a skylight and balcony at the far end, with “cash baskets riding up to the glass booth in the balcony”); Linhardt and Delmonico grocery stores; the Madison House bar; Tolson’s Drug (where the “town sports read westerns, opened pimples by the mirror over the magazine rack, and told one another how they had got ‘fixed up’ last night”); the Busy Bee Candy Kitchen (where his banana split cost a quarter); the Cole County Courthouse (with its “lariat of pigeons” and a cannon on the lawn); the Monroe House; and the fire station on High Street (where firemen shadowboxed on the sidewalk).

The boy in the novel goes to the Carnegie Library, where he is introduced to a world of fascinating books. He walks along the railroad tracks, looks at river boats and explores the old, original jail and stone warehouses along the tracks. In September, he enters Ernst Simonsen High School and, as a freshman, he studies English, algebra, Latin, ancient history, and music.

Dorrance’s extraordinary seven years of published creative writing were interrupted by military service in World War II from 1942 to 1946. He served as a lieutenant in the Coast Guard in Newfoundland.

After the war, he returned to his position at the University of Missouri and resumed writing, this time shorter pieces. They were published in major literary journals like the Hudson Review, the Sewanee Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. “The White Hound,” about the death of a little boy, received the O. Henry Prize in 1949.

In 1959, the University of Missouri Press, just founded by his colleague, English professor Henry Belden, selected for its first publication a collection of four of Dorrance’s short stories and four of a Tennessee friend. The book was named The White Hound from the title of the republished prizewinning essay. Two other Dorrance stories in the collection, “A Stop on the Way to Texas” and “The Devil on a Hot Afternoon” had previously been selected to appear in Best American Short Stories for 1954 and 1956 respectively. One reviewer noted that Dorrance “is a writer with a sixth sense of things hidden in the ordinary course of events.”

Professor Dorrance encountered major personal difficulties with the Missouri University administration and withdrew from the faculty in 1953. He gave up his comfortable, historic Confederate Hill home in Columbia and abruptly left the state he loved so deeply, never to return. He lived in England for a while, teaching at both Cambridge and Oxford as a visiting professor. He moved to Washington, D.C., and in 1958 joined the English Department of Georgetown University, where he remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1974.

After leaving the University of Missouri, Dorrance’s creative writing changed significantly. There was much less of it, and it consisted primarily of short pieces. The dual themes of the social history of the state and its environmental beauty waned. Once he left the state and lived as an exile, his former sources of inspiration—the land and people of Missouri—dried up.

In 1969 his novel The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s appeared, about a flood on the Missouri River in central Missouri, and in 1972 the University of Missouri Press published A Man about the House, a novella of 116 pages, which was set in Jefferson City. Dorrance also carried on correspondence with some of the most notable contemporary writers like Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor.

Ward Allison Dorrance, Jefferson City native, died at age 92 in Washington, D.C., on September 16, 1996. His body was cremated; a memorial marker next to his mother’s parents’ graves in Jefferson City's Woodland/Old City cemetery notes his military service, but there is nothing on it about his distinguished career as a creative writer. Nothing about his great love of his native Missouri.

Missouri’s late, beloved wildlife writer Joel Vance was a student in the last French class Dorrance was teaching at MU when he abruptly left. Vance spent a decade researching the life of Dorrance—whom he had admired as a teacher and as a writer—and wrote a biography of him. In it, he exposed the reason for Dorrance’s MU departure (Dorrance was run out of the university, and the state, because he was gay) and the university administration’s subsequent cover-up. Vance could not find a publisher for the manuscript, and the monograph is archived at the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Still awaiting a publisher.

Thanks to the State Historical Society of Missouri for allowing use of the two photographs of Dorrance and the Benton frontispiece.

Copyright © Walter A. Schroeder, 2012

Monday, April 25, 2022

What Could Have Been: The Missouri State Capital in Sedalia

After American independence had been won, President Thomas Jefferson and associates used rationalism and geometry to plan how the trans-Appalachian west was to be occupied. To administer the new lands, they focused on the principle of centrality. Administrative centers were to be located in the center of the land being administered. County seats were to be in the center of counties. Schools were to be in the center of the township on a designated “school section.” State capitals were to be in the center of their states. Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Springfield, Illinois, served as examples of centrally located capitals before Missouri.

State commissioners located the site of the Missouri capital in the center of the state, on the Missouri River, and named it Jefferson City. That choice was a real winner for “centrality,” because two centuries later (2010 census) the center of Missouri’s population was just outside Wardsville, or only seven miles south of the Capitol. The center of Missouri’s geographic area is just west of Etterville in Miller County, 21 miles southwest of Jefferson City.

Over the years some Missourians have questioned the suitability of Jefferson City as the location of the state capital, and all would-be rivals were in the state’s central part. In the early decades of state history, Columbia, Fayette, and Boonville were proposed as better locations. But it was Sedalia that mounted the most determined effort to remove the capital from Jefferson City.

Sedalia had grown rapidly in the post–Civil War years, thanks to its railroad connections and development of the surrounding rich farming and stock-raising lands. In contrast, river-located Jefferson City grew more slowly after railroads superseded steamboats as the primary transportation mode. By 1890, Sedalia had more than double the population of Jefferson City (14,068 to 6,742), and promoters of that booming railroad town mounted a vigorous campaign to relocate the state capital to their town.

The Commonwealth Land Development Company of Sedalia, composed of those promoters, proposed a “Capitol Addition” in the southwestern part of the city. It was an irregular polygon of 211 square blocks that lay between Broadway on the north, 32nd Street on the south, and west of Barnett Street.

A tract of six square blocks was reserved for the Capitol and surrounding grounds. Locations were also designated for a Governor’s Mansion, a Supreme Court building, and an armory. A divided lane parkway, named Capitol Avenue, connected the Capitol to Sedalia’s chief thoroughfare, Broadway. Laid out in the days of horses and carriages, it was designed to be a ceremonial esplanade.

Apparently the entire addition was to be residential, since the company provided no information about land for commercial, industrial, or even neighborhood parks and churches. Capitol Addition comprised approximately 9,000 lots of different sizes, sufficient for more than 25,000 people. Most lots were only 25 feet wide! That narrow width allowed the promoters to maximize the number of lots in the addition, and thus the promoters would maximize the amount of money they would raise from sales. It was necessary to raise as much money as possible from lot sales because money raised from sales was to pay for the retirement of bonds sold to finance the capital removal, which was estimated to be a whopping $3,810,000 ($114,300,000 in 2022 dollars). For comparison, construction of the new Capitol and expanded grounds in Jefferson City in 1915 cost Missouri taxpayers less, $3,500,000 ($94,800,000 in 2022 dollars).

By means of clever parliamentary maneuvering, Sedalia was successful in getting passed a concurrent resolution in the Missouri state legislature requiring the state to vote at the general election in November 1896 on removal of the state capital—the Capitol building and all associated state functions—to Sedalia. Eighteen ninety-six was also the year the Missouri River bridge was opened, which greatly enhanced Jefferson City’s position. Despite Sedalia’s efforts, the statewide vote went solidly against removal by a vote of 65 percent to 35 percent. The initiative won approval in only 19 counties, most of which were around Sedalia.

Fifteen years later, 1911, when fire destroyed the Capitol in Jefferson City, the issue of keeping the state’s capital at Jefferson City once again came up, but the legislature’s quick decision to rebuild the Capitol in Jefferson City effectively ended all questions as to whether the city would remain the capital of Missouri. Nevertheless, some Missouri government officials, politicians, and lobbyists continue to grumble about smallish Jefferson City as their capital city.

Missourians could have had a capitol on uninteresting topography overlooking nothing but flat land. Instead, Missourians today are proud of their magnificent state Capitol rising majestically on a high bluff in Jefferson City overlooking our state’s namesake Missouri River.

Map courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri

Text ©Walter A. Schroeder, 2022

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Schwartze Blacksmith and Wagon Shop Building, 630 Jefferson Street

Below is the text and image for the "Munichburg Memories" ad that ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune on September 19, 2021, as a promotion for the Old Munichburg Association's annual Oktoberfest, which was held September 25.

The image is from the Missouri State Archives. To see it in more detail, click on it to enlarge it.

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The intersection of Jefferson and Dunklin streets is Munichburg’s center. By 1873, Mauritz Laudel had a blacksmith shop on the northwest corner, catty-cornered from Farmers Home. Henry Schwartze bought Laudel’s shop before 1900 and turned it into one of Munichburg’s major businesses. Schwartze added wagon making and repairing, which became more important than the blacksmith business. The large, two-story brick building on that corner, still standing today, was erected in the 1890s, possibly in the 1880s. The photo, circa 1912, shows the wagon business occupying the ground floor; above, the large Schwartze family, who lived upstairs, are peering out the windows. The family had a separate recessed, arched entranceway on Jefferson Street. A separate paint shop was affixed to the north side on Jefferson Street in 1912. When autos began replacing horses and wagons, Schwartze—seeing the writing on the wall—moved his business to Vienna in rural Maries County in 1914.

In 1914, the building was completely renovated and repurposed for retail business downstairs and offices above. The original wide doorways were bricked in and replaced with new entrances and windows. The original limestone foundation was preserved. The former paint shop addition was also converted into retail space below and offices above, with separate entrances to both. Very important, the soft-brick exterior walls from the nineteenth century were covered with new wire-brushed, resistant brick to give the building the completely different appearance you see today that belies its age. The former paint shop was similarly rebricked. It was incorporated into the original corner building so seamlessly that the two buildings appear as one today, although at slightly different elevations.

The Southside Post Office (the city’s first branch post office) and Southside Drug Store were the first to occupy the renovated buildings, with doctor and dentist offices above. In 1921, the corner building became the ill-fated Cole County Bank, which was forced to close in 1938 during the Great Depression.

This more than 130-year-old building, now owned by Prairie Farms, is one of the signature historic buildings in the Southside.

Text ©Walter A. Schroeder, 2021

Photo credit: Missouri State Archives

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

The 700 Block of Jefferson Street in the Southside

Below is the text for the "Munichburg Memories" ad that ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune on September 12, 2021, as a promotion for the Old Munichburg Association's annual Oktoberfest, which was held September 25.

The image that this post refers to is the property of C. Trenton Boyd, who graciously allowed us to use it in the newspaper promotion. He did not provide permission for any other use, so the image does not appear here. A verbal description of the image appears at the end of this post.

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Jefferson Street has always been a major street in the Southside. However, its 700 block—the hill from Dunklin past ECCO up to Ashley—presented problems for traffic. When it had a dirt surface in the nineteenth century, wagons used every bit of its 80-foot right-of-way to zigzag up the steep grade through deep ruts. The hill was so troublesome, going both up and down, that horses and wagons often detoured over to Washington Street past Central Church.

A chief impediment was a rock ledge in the middle of the hill and an oozing spring above it. This spring was associated with a natural cave just to the east of the street, which Farmers Home used for natural cooling. The constant seepage in the street was not overcome until the mid-twentieth century.

The steepness of the hill was lessened by grading down the road bed. The photo (ca. 1910) shows thirteen men (all with hats) removing several feet of rock from the crest of the Jefferson Street hill at Ashley Street. They are using a single pneumatic jackhammer (used by the man in back, right), plus picks and shovels. Men in suit coats are hauling away rock in two mule-pulled wagons. Central Church is visible in the left background. Today’s Calvary’s Gifts is located where the black steam boiler is. The two-story, frame Kielman house (no longer there) is on the right, atop undisturbed rock; when the grading was done, it was eight feet above the new street level.

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Image description: The black-and-white photograph was taken from roughly east-southeast of the intersection of Jefferson and Ashley; the view is roughly north. Central Evangelical Church is at the far left, in the background, and a clapboard-sided, two-story house is at the right. The center foreground is dominated by a wide area of excavation into bedrock. Within the excavated area are two mule-drawn, open-bed wagons (in line, with both facing toward the left) and thirteen men standing at their various work locations to pose for the picture. Several of the men are leaning on their shovels or other tools. In each wagon, a teamster stands holding the mules' reins. At the right, a man at a higher level of the excavated area appears to be jackhammering and is the only person not facing the camera. A large steam-powered generator stands in the background, with smoke coming from its exhaust stack and drifting toward the south. A shadow, apparently cast by an off-camera structure to the left, falls on the lower left portion of the image, shading the front part of the front mule and the south part of the excavated area.

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2021

Friday, September 27, 2019

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.