Cape Girardeau History and Photos

December 13, 2014December 13, 2014

Mound City, Illinois

While researching the Saga of Sgt. Ginter, who is buried in the Mound City National Cemetery (as a sergeant, not as female camp follower in a Major’s uniform), I ran across some interesting tidbits of Civil War history about Mound City and Cairo, located about five miles apart on the Ohio River.

Mound City was the location of one of the largest Civil War hospitals in the western campaign. Even though no major battles were fought in the two cities, they received dead and wounded soldiers from Battles in Belmont, Commerce and Reed’s Point in Missouri; Fort Donelson and Shiloh in Tennessee; Fort Holt, Paducah and Columbus in Kentucky.

I was disappointed to learn that this brick building is all that’s left of what was described as one of the best administered of the military general hospitals.

Was also a naval depot

The National Register of Historic Places listing of Civil War Cemeteries contains the following information about Mound City. If you are interested in the cemetery part, here is a link to the full register.

Mound City, Illinois, was founded at the abandoned settlement of Trinity in 1854. The city was located at the confluence of the Ohio and Cache Rivers. With the coming of the civil conflict, the riverfront became an extremely important Union naval facility for the Mississippi Squadron. A repair facility for the squadron was moved to Mound City due to the lack of space at Cairo.

Built three ironclads

Throughout the Civil War, the Mound City naval depot was the only repair facility for the Mississippi Squadron, a fleet that numbered 80 ships. In addition to repairing and refitting vessels, the Mound City naval depot also shared in the construction of three ironclad gunboats. These were the U.S.S. Cairo, Cincinnati, and Mound City.

Heavy battles along the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers necessitated the establishment of hospital facilities to care for the wounded. Mound City was in a strategic location and the city’s hotel and foundry were converted into hospital facilities. High death rates from wounds and disease led to the establishment of the Mound City National Cemetery.

Red Rover hospital ship

On April 7, 1862, the gunboat, Mound City, captured a side-wheel river steamer named the Red Rover which had been used by the Confederates as a floating barracks. The Red Rover was taken to St. Louis to be refitted as a floating hospital for the Western Flotilla. The ship was assigned to the U. S. Navy Hospital at Mound City.

The Red Rover accompanied the flotilla through most engagements with the enemy, making many trips with wounded and dead to the Memphis and Mound City hospitals and cemeteries, treating the wounded along the bank of the Mississippi, scrounging for food and transporting medical supplies.

Important staging area

Although Mound City and nearby Cairo, Illinois, were not in the combat theater of the Civil War, their location near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers made these areas important staging points for the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers for the Union forces. Three of the famous Eads ironclad gunboats were built at the Mound City marine ways and shipyard.

These specially designed shallow draft ironclads played an important part in the western campaign, giving valuable support to the Union troops on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and at Vicksburg.

One of largest hospitals in the West

In 1861, a large brick building in Mound City was taken over by the United States Government for use as a general hospital. In service throughout the war, it was one of the largest military hospitals in the west. Another large hospital was established at Cairo.

Roman Catholic nuns of the Order of the Holy Cross at Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, were utilized as nurses to staff these hospitals. The establishment of these large hospitals at Mound City and Cairo was a determining factor in the location of the Mound City National Cemetery.

The hospital at Mound City was able to accommodate from 1,000-1,500 patients and has been described as one of the best administered of the military general hospitals.

First patients came from Battle of Belmont

The first patients at the Mound City General Hospital were the wounded from the Battle of Belmont, Missouri, November 7, 1861. Heavy fighting at Fort Donelson, February 13-16, 1862, and at Shiloh April 6-7, 1862, brought many more patients to the Mound City and Cairo hospitals.

The death rate from wounds and all prevalent diseases was high in the hospitals of the Civil War period.

Other bodies were removed from Cairo and its vicinity in Pulaski County; in Missouri from Belmont in Mississippi County; Reed’s Point and Commerce in Scott County; in Kentucky from Fort Holt in Bailon County, Columbus in Hickman County, and Paducah in McCracken County.

There are 2,759 unknown soldiers buried in the Mound City National Cemetery, as well as 27 Confederate soldiers who died in the wartime hospitals of the area.

Photo gallery of Mound City

Mound City, like Cairo, has seen better days. I was fascinated by a 1905 hardware store on Main Street. I was even more fascinated when I saw the roof had fallen in and the inside was returning to nature. Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the images.

December 12, 2014December 12, 2014

Bill’s and Hirsch’s Midtown

We’re dipping into Terry Hopkins‘ dad’s General Sign box again. This time I ran across two signs that shared a bunch of elements.

Bill’s Courtesy Cleaners was located at 1107 Broadway, more or less across from Houck Stadium. The cleaners were housed in one of two buildings built by Eddie Erlbacher shortly after World War II. I photographed the school board moving a big safe out of the second floor of the twin building to the east.

The property had an interesting past, detailed in a Fred Lynch blog in April 6, 2010.

Hirsch’s Midtown

The Hirsch’s sign’s has the same arrow and basic shape. I wonder how many other businesses in the area shared those pieces / parts?

I did a post on Hirsch’s Midtown in 2012, and it generated quite a few comments. So many, in fact, I followed up with another story about the Hirsch Bros. No. 2, otherwise known as Hirsch’s Northtown.

It was better known to later generations as the Mule Lip or Margarita Mama’s. It’s a casualty of the Casino, but the Midtown store is still standing.

Mystery sign

If you look closely at the bottom right of the Hirsch’s sign, there are some tiny red letters faintly visible. Blowing them up just makes them blurrier. The appear to spell COFERS. I looked at the 1968 City Directory and didn’t see any business in the 200 block of South Sprigg that came close to that.

Ideas?

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

I usually post the blog at about 2 a.m., and after I’m done I check to see if Fred Lynch has updated his f/8 and Be There blog. I didn’t check it before going to bed, so I was stunned this morning to see his topic was “Cofer’s Men’s Store.”

I emailed him to ask if he had seen my topic and decided to piggyback it (we exchange links, which builds traffic for both of us, and it helps readers fill in the gaps).

His response: “Are you kidding? I’m in bed by 10 pm. You retired folks amaze me with your sleeping habits. Anyway, I am two weeks or more ahead with finished blogs so yes, quite a coincidence.”

Working people can be SO organized. I usually don’t start thinking about the next days’ post until around 9 p.m. the night before.

December 11, 2014

Fire Station No. 4 Missing

When I looked at this old Polaroid photo of Mother, I thought there was something odd about it. Then it dawned on me: it was taken before Fire Station No. 4 was built at the corner of Kingsway Drive and Kurre Lane.

(If you wonder how I knew it was a Polaroid, look at the brown, irregular stain at the bottom right of the photo. This was one of the early generation cameras where you had to peel the photo off the roll, then coat it with a sticky, sharp-smelling chemical which would, invariably, get all over your fingers. The fix or whatever it was never applied evenly, so the picture had streaks, and if you missed a place, you’d get this brown stain.

Neighborhood from the air

Here’s an aerial photo taken at about this same time. I published it and some other pictures back in 2010, and it got lots of comments that are worth reading. There’s a more recent aerial here.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

December 10, 2014

Shakspere on Kent Library

Son Adam brought Grandkidlets Graham and Elliot over this evening to give their mother a few hours of piece and quiet.

That left me scrambling for something to post this morning. I came up with a long-forgotten (and poorly composed) shot of the front of Kent Library before a wraparound covered the names of seventeen writers chosen by English professor Dr. Harold Grauel and Dr. W.W. Parker, then president of the university.

Fred Lynch’s February 22, 2010, blog lists the names as “Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Virgil, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene Field, Victor Hugo, Homer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Kent Library in 2010

Here’s what the library looked like in 2010. One-Shot Frony took a picture from almost this same angle in the late 1940s if you’d like to make a comparison.

By the way, Wife Lila questioned the spelling in my headline. Fred’s blog talks about that:

Grauel recalled that the stone mason wanted to alter the spelling of Shakespeare. Grauel suggested “Shakespere,” one of several ways that the famous playwright spelled his name.

That spelling was used on the frieze. Soon after, letters arrived at the school from people critical of what they felt was the “misspelling” of the name.

“When the enlargement of Kent Library was undertaken in the ’60s, I saw to it that the name of Shakespeare appeared on the new facade as SHAKESPEARE,” Grauel wrote.