Cape Girardeau landmarks Archives

April 23, 2010November 24, 2016

Jefferson, Oldest Standing School in Cape

I went K through 8 at Trinity Lutheran School, so I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of Cape’s public schools. In fact, it was a bit of a challenge to locate Jefferson School, which turned out to the the oldest standing of Cape’s schools.

Located at Jefferson and Ellis

The school was built in 1904. You can read an excellent history of the school, which includes contemporary photos of the interior by downloading the National Register of Historic Places registration form. It’s a large document, so right-click on the link, then choose Save Link and open the file later with Adobe Acrobat.

Population quadrupled

The Civil War slowed population growth in Cape, but the population nearly doubled between 1900 and 1910, and had almost quadrupled by 1925 to 15,258. Much of the growth was in the working class neighborhoods in the area served by Jefferson School.

The building had four class rooms on each floor, with a central hallway and two narrow stairwells.

Was Black School 1953-1955

In 1953, Cape Girardeau schools were still segregated. Black students attended John S. Cobb School (originally named Lincoln School) until the school was destroyed by a fire. White students attending Jefferson were sent to May Greene School, and the 108 Black students were sent to Jefferson School.

Bob Miller wrote an interesting piece for The Missourian when classmates celebrated a school reunion in 2004.

When the school system was integrated in 1955, the school was closed.

Became apartment building

At some point, the interior was converted to apartments, with two apartments on each level.It also served as a union hall.

Much of the original wood trim, stairwells and windows are intact. Years of neglect, water damage and vandalism, have taken their toll.

I asked the developer who converted Schultz School into very attractive senior housing if he had considered taking on Jefferson School as a project. He said the building didn’t have enough possible living space to make it practical from his viewpoint.

Gallery of Jefferson School photos

Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo to move through the gallery.

April 15, 2010December 13, 2011

Snake Hill Untwisted

Negotiating the sharp turns and steep grades of Snake Hill was a rite of passage from the time it was built in the 1930 until 2003. The Cape Special Road District decided to fill in a ravine and straighten out a sharp curve in the road to make the road safer and to make road maintenance easier.

I can see where the less twisty road would be easier to deal with when it’s icy, but I would bet that speeds are a lot higher on the new road than the old one.

Google Earth Mar. 22, 1996

Google Earth June 28, 2009

April 10, 2010November 3, 2011

Train Crews Still Wave

My mother and I were cruising down by Missouri Drydocks at the end of the day, when I heard a train whistle off in the direction of downtown. I thought this might make a cool shot that tied together the river, auto traffic on the bridge and a train whizzing by. If a plane would just fly into the frame and someone would walk by, I’d have all forms of transportation covered in one photo.

I waited several minutes. No train. It was chilly and windy so I started back to the car.

The train whistled again. I waited several minutes. No train.

I started back to the car. The train whistled. This dance continued until I convinced myself that the train was northbound away from me.

Of course, as soon as I got under the bridge, I met a southbound short freight that had a caboose on it. I hadn’t seen a caboose on a working train in years. I wrote it off as a missed opportunity.

I’m a sucker for trains

I remember the trip to Chaffee in grade school. When I was 14, I went to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico by train; I rode the train to and from college in Athens, Ohio; I did at least a dozen stories about trains over the years, and that doesn’t count the crashes and feature shots like this one from Ohio I used to illustrate a rail strike. The unbroken frost on the tracks got the point across that the trains weren’t running.

I rode a freight train

I spent a few nights riding a local freight dropping cars up and down the Florida East Coast line. (I knew every car that approached a crossing in front of us was going to try to beat the train and we were going to hit it. I’m not cut out to be an engineer.)

I’ve done a story on a T&S Gang, the guys who used to swing sledge hammers driving spikes in the days before mechanization. Discrimination was alive and well: white workers ate on plates in a sparkling white car; black workers were served on tin plates in a car that looked like it was left over from the Civil War.

I went from West Palm Beach to Chicago and back on the Silver Meteor; my wife and I took the train to and from Washington, D.C. in 2003. Unfortunately, many of the stories were “last ride” ones marking the demise of rail service.

The caboose is back

We were in the downtown area when I spotted the caboose on the north end of a northbound short string of freight cars moving slowly. I sped ahead to the pumping station on N. Main where the shoe factory used to be and hopped out to shoot from the floodwall side of the tracks toward an old brick building that looked like it had been abandoned.

As the caboose pulled slowly past me, BNSF conductor Randy Graviett gave me a friendly wave.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe

I’m going to show my age by admitting that I think Frisco when I see those tracks. It took a Google search to find out that BNSF stands for Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Over the last 150 years, it’s the result of mergers that have gobbled up 390 different railroad lines.

Frisco, which was chartered as the Pacific Railroad of Missouri in 1849, looked like it was poised to take advantage of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California, but construction bogged down until the Civil War ended.

Cherokee Indians block Frisco expansion

In 1876, the southwest branch of the Pacific was purchased by the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, but Cherokee Indians blocked survey and construction work on the line, keeping it from establishing a transcontinental railroad. The Depression took its toll, but German U-boats sinking tankers in the Atlantic during World War II created a need for a way to transport Texas and Oklahoma oil to the East Coast. Frisco became a valuable contributor to the war effort.

Burlington Northern acquired the Frisco in 1980. You can read more of the history at the BNSF web site.

Railcars decorated with graffiti

While I was waiting for the train to clear the track, I was treated to a moving art show of graffiti. These weren’t just sloppy “tags” with a spray can. Some of the works showed a nice use of color and design.

Tom T. Hall was wrong

Tom T. Hall sings a lament with the chorus,

But the engineers don’t wave from the trains anymore
Not the way they did back in 1954
They’ve all got computers and diesels and things
And the engineers don’t wave from the trains anymore
No, the engineers don’t wave from the trains.

Tom should pay a visit to Cape Girardeau. When the engine came to a stop just about in front of me, brakeman Randy Stroup gave a wave and asked if I was working on the floodwall. I said that I was taking pictures of his caboose and tried to hand him my business card.

He stepped out of the cab and we had a brief chat while the train waited for a red signal to clear. The caboose is used on the local freight spotting cars between Chaffee and Proctor & Gamble. When I commented that it was unusual to see two engines on a train that short, he said they had just gotten the second power plant “because we’ve been dealing with more tonnage lately. We hope to be able to hang on to it.”

With that, the train was given clearance to pull ahead and he was gone.

A reader in the wild

I figured that was the end of it until I got home to see this email from Kim Richmond waiting for me:

Ken, my friend was on the caboose that you took picture of today, so if you will be so kind to e-mail me when you post it I would appreciated it. His name is Randy Graviett, you also spoke to Randy Stroup. I showed them your website and have told several other people about it since I found it. I look every day or every evening to catch up on all that I have missed. How long have you been posting? Do you have any pictures of the old Sunny Hill Hotel and Restaurant or the Country store? When I was younger that was a treat to go the the Country store and Sunny Hill for ice cream. If we had extra money when I was younger we would go to Woolworth’s and have a grilled hot dog and go across the street and visit my mother who worked at Montgomery Wards or as they use to say “Monkey Wards”

Wow. I wrote about the excitement of meeting a “reader in the wild” on my other blog.

This is a first for me. I’ve never had a reader chase me down for a photo I shot BEFORE it was published. Cape is truly the land of coincidences.

Frisco Railroad Library

If you’re a train buff, interested in railroad history or want to find out more about the Frisco Railroad, here’s a great site.

April 8, 2010February 15, 2015

Does Jessica Haunt Pike Lodge?

I’ve driven past the Pi Kappa Alpha Memorial Lodge many times, but I never knew much about it. I’ve always thought I’d like to the have the aluminum beer can recycling concession at the place, but that reflects my prejudices.

The parking lot was empty on Easter Sunday, so it seemed a good time to pull over for a quick mug shot of the building.

I had heard that the building on South Sprigg, just below the cement plant, had been a former school, so I didn’t think it would take long to get its history. Pickings were slim, though.

It was Lafayette School (Nope, see update)

The Pike web site had this to say about it: November of 1973: Pi Kappa Alpha had long been searching for an off-campus building for many functions. In the Fall of ’73 the chapter and its housing corporation found the Lafayette School house on S. Sprigg St. The Pi Kappa Alpha Memorial Lodge, as it would come to be known, serves as a social place as well as a post for weekly chapter meetings.

Paranormal Task Force investigates Pike Lodge

What was more interesting was a 2007 visit to the lodge by the Paranormal Task Force conducting a two-day Ghost Hunting 101 Class with the Adult Education Department of Southeast Missouri State University.

You can get the whole story by following the link above, but here are some highlights.

The SEMO Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE) Lodge is rumored to be haunted by the spirit of a girl ghost named Jessica who in the early 1900’s met ill fate when this was once the Lafayette Schoolhouse. The stories vary a bit, but the common denominator in all of them involved the old boiler, coal chute and the grate above them.

Eye witness accounts and various online legends report that neighbors have seen the spirit of a little girl through the windows playing jump rope inside or just standing at the front windows watching when a train passes on the nearby tracks. Another story tells of a young neighbor boy who came over when the Lodge was having a meeting asking if it was okay for him to be in there when they were all gone. When the brothers of the Lodge told him no and that was dangerous, the boy told them he came over many times in the past to play with the little girl there.

Other accounts include strange noises, the lights swaying excessively on their own, open windows slamming shut or shaking, strange rappings, the unexplainable malfunctioning of electrical equipment and sinister laughing manifesting where the boilers once were.

What did the PTF team find?

During our mini-investigation we experienced the following:

Traveling cold spots.
Unexplainable EMF spikes which moved about and reached levels near 10 milligauss.
While using two K-2 EMF meters and having two different people hold one each at a good distance apart, we were able to document interaction with an entity there through “yes” and “no” questions with one meter/person being “yes” and the other “no”. This interaction indicated that the entity we were in contact with was male, enjoyed us there and became lonely at times. There was further possible indication through this EMF process and sensitive investigators present that this may have been the spirit of a PIKE Brother who possibly passed away unexpectedly due to a tragic event or happening.

We didn’t spot Jessica

I may have missed Jessica when I looked away from the lodge toward the cement plant. All I saw was Spring starting to make the Winter blahs go away.

PIKE LODGE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Several folks have written to question my info that the Pike Memorial Lodge was the former Lafayette School. They think its the old Marquette School. That thought crossed my mind, too, but I assumed that the Pi Kappa Alpha frat boys would know what they had bought.

That was, of course, before I remembered that a buddy of mine, who was an enthusiastic Pike at first, quickly became disenchanted and dropped out when he was taken to task for “spending too much time on academics and not devoting energy to supporting the chapter.”

A reliable source sent me two links to Missourian stories about the dedication of the school in 1924 and the dissolving of the Marquette School District in 1968.

I’m going to go with the consensus that the Pike Memorial Lodge IS the old Marquette School and the Pike who wrote the history of the place was NOT one who spent too much time on academics.

November of 1973: Pi Kappa Alpha had long been searching for an off-campus building for many functions. In the Fall of ’73 the chapter and its housing corporation found the Lafayette School house on S. Sprigg St. The Pi Kappa Alpha Memorial Lodge, as it would come to be known, serves as a social place as well as a post for weekly chapter meetings.