Dutchtown Archives

August 9, 2013August 9, 2013

Deer, Dear, We Had Fun

We were still celebrating the impromptu Mother Birthday Season on Thursday.

I know now why people have kids when they are young and not old. Two-year-old Graham loves going up and down Great-Gran’s basement stairs. Over and over and over again. Babies and toddlers wake up early, loudly and frequently. I’m in the basement, so I catch the THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! of little feet, but mostly miss out on the crying from Graham and Baby Elliot. I’m also far enough away that I don’t hear Matt snoring or Sarah poking him to make him stop snoring.

We Steinhoffs like to eat, so we loaded into two cars and headed up to the Pie Bird Cafe in Fruitland. Good home-cooking at a reasonable price.

After breakfast, Adam, Carly and their two boys headed in one direction and Matt, Sarah, Malcolm, Mother and I headed north into Perry County. Just about the time we got to the Altenburg Museum, the skies opened up, so we spent more time there than anticipated.

Steinhoff name shows up on 1901 plat map

Gerard Fiehler showed us a new acquisition: someone had donated a huge framed Cape County plat map from 1901 or thereabouts. It was full of names you’ve heard: Houck, Juden, Alt, Lorimier…. Then, down near where our property in Dutchtown is today, there is a plot marked W Steinhoff. Mother said the deed listed the property having been in the Steinhoff name long before we bought it, but this proves it.

Malcolm got to pull the rope that rings what used to be the church bell in the original Altenburg church that became a school and is now part of the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum. We drove down to show Malcolm Tower Rock, but it was raining too hard to get out.

Largest herd of deer I’ve seen

We took Rt CC, which led us over the ridges that I’ve written about before. We popped out near Proctor and Gamble where we spotted the largest herd of deer I’ve seen in SE Missouri. There had to have been at least a dozen of them. Matt stuck his head up through the car’s moon roof to shoot this with my telephoto.

It’s worth clicking on to make larger.

Lost interest quickly

It didn’t take them long to lose interest in us and go bounding away, white tails flashing.

Foggy at the lookout

Malcolm was small the last time he was at the Trail of Tears lookout. The rain had just let up when we got there, but the sky was still gray and hazy. We could barely see across the river.

Are we in the clouds?

As you can see, it was just as foggy behind us. Malcolm wanted to know if we were in the clouds. We said we were, but it’s not like when you are in an airplane.

Both boys wanted to meet different friends and family members, so they took off. I headed out for dinner, then stopped to chat with Altenburg museum director Carla Jordan and her husband, Doc.

Dad would have approved

When I got home, I could hear laughing and carrying on as soon as I pulled in the driveway. Everybody was gathered around the table snacking and drinking wine. It was voted the best part of the Early Birthday Season.

Dad died August 7, 1977. It was a great to hear laughter around the kitchen table on this week. Dad would have approved. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was there sharing the moment with us.

Elvis, who died on August 17, did not make an appearance. We didn’t care.

[Editor’s note and update: I got my Elvis dates mixed up in my original post. We flew out of Memphis the day after Elvis died. I picked up copies of the local papers at the airport, then took them back to show the photo staff how poorly the Memphis media covered the story. After we critiqued their work, I pitched the papers. I don’t like to think how much those papers are worth today.]

February 9, 2013October 23, 2015

Brother Mark Gets an Owie

Brother Mark came down from St. Louis to help me with some domestic repair jobs. Mother has two toilets that have taken to running at odd intervals and driving up her water bill. I’ve thrown new flappers at them the last couple of visits, but that doesn’t seem to have fixed the problem.

Let’s get one thing established: I am not a friend of plumbing. Like I’ve said before, I can go to change a simple washer and before long somebody is digging up the street in front of my house. Electricity obeys simple rules: It works or it don’t work. Plumbing is insidious. It’s a plotter. It appears to be perfectly happy for years, then picks 2 a.m. the day after you leave for a two-week trip to go berserk. I always peek in the window before I open the front door to see how high the water level is if I’ve been gone more than a couple of hours.

Anyway, Mark claims not to afraid of pipes, so I ceded the task to him. He says we need to replace the Douglas valves. He says that with such certainty that I feel comfortable until he adds, “It’ll go smoothly if the screws aren’t rusted (they are) and we don’t crack the ceramic (OK, thanks for telling me the kind of disaster we’re going to confront in advance). Oh, yeah, there’s one other issue. There’s no shut-off valve on the basement toilet, so I hope you can hold it until I can put one in.”

He’s going to be touching pipes that were installed 57 years ago. See any opportunities for problems?

Plumbing had to wait

But, plumbing had to wait. We had something else to tackle because it’s supposed to rain Sunday. The last storm ripped some tin from the roofs of our buildings in Dutchtown. There’s not much in them that can be hurt (the floods of ’73, ’93 and 2011 have pretty much taken care of that), but we didn’t want the wooden beams to rot.

We’ve got a short extension ladder down there, but I suggested to Mark that it would be faster and safer to rent a taller ladder that would get us (I use “us” in the royal sense) to the rooftop. I played the Medicare Card, telling Mark that once you have one of those in your wallet, you’re not allowed to prance around on rooftops. To my surprise, he agreed. That worried me. That must mean he was planning to drop heavy objects on my head.

I called a rental joint at 2 minutes past 5 only to hear the phone ring and ring and ring. Then I surmised that Wife Lila’s Brother John would have a ladder we might borrow. You might remember John from when he came to Florida to help us with some repairs.

He not only had a ladder, he was willing to loan me his manly pickup truck. I’m pretty sure he weighed the amusement value of watching the two of us try to figure out how to carry a 24-foot ladder in a Honda Odyssey against how much he liked his ladder and didn’t want to find it bent and broken on the side of the road. I thought I was going to need a stepladder to get INTO this beast. Wife Lila would have been appalled to see me cruising down the road with a pair of Truck Nutz dangling from the back of the truck if she hadn’t been the one to buy them for him as a gag gift. I don’t think she thought he would not only put them ON the truck, but he paints them to go with the season. They’re still red from last summer, but that’s OK because Missouri has had a warm winter, he justified.

We made it to Dutchtown and Mark tackled the main shed first. He said only a couple of panels of tin needed to be replaced or patched over. It turned out to be pretty much a one BLEEP! job when he discovered that a thumb that is caught between the nail and the hammer causes a large blood blister. He insisted on sharing his wound with me.

“This probably isn’t good”

We checked out a smaller row of sheds that we knew had some damage last summer. This turned out to be a two BLEEP!!! job. When he came down off the roof, he showed me his left glove thumb which was red at the end. “This probably isn’t good,” he said.

I assured him the red was simply the manufacturer’s way of color coding the glove so it was easy to tell which one was for the left hand.

When he went on the roof to make one final touchup, he wanted me to document his owie. I would have shown him more sympathy if I had known for sure that he hadn’t secreted a packet of ketchup in his coat pocket.

I can’t wait until we (meaning him) tackles the plumbing tomorrow. My job is defined as standing by with 9-1-1 entered into my phone and my finger poised over the SEND button. If you are the lowlands of Cape Girardeau or live along the Mississippi River between Cape and New Orleans, you might want to pay close attention to your alert radio. If John can do THIS – and he’s a trained professional – you can only imagine what Mark is going to do.

Mark would like you to click on the photos to make them larger so you can appreciate his sacrifice. Just remember: packets of ketchup.

May 29, 2012January 18, 2022

Dutchtown Cemetery on Ridge

There’s an old cemetery atop a ridge overlooking Dutchtown that I feel compelled to visit every time I come to Cape. There’s no particular reason to go up there. We have no family buried there. I’ve never followed a hearse up the steep, narrow road to the burying ground, but something calls me.

Cemetery over 125 years old in 1967

A Missourian story about the closing of Dutchtown’s St. Edward’s Catholic Church said the cemetery was more than 125 years old in 1967. That would put it between 175 and 200 years old today. I’m going to take that with a tiny grain of salt.

The cemetery was located on the hill because much of the surrounding land was swamp.

The first St. Edward’s, a frame building, was built in 1898, but burned January 29, 1928. The first mass in church that served the community for 69 years was offered in 1928. A nationwide shortage of priests was given as the reason for the 1967 closure.

You can see the steeple of the church in the background of a Frony photo of Dutchtown that Fred Lynch used in his blog. Librarian Sharon Sanders has two stories about the church in her column.

Coffins carried at shoulder level

The Missourian story said parishioners recalled seeing pallbearers. sometimes walking in the rain, bearing coffins at shoulder level up this steep hill. It’s paved these days, but it’s still a tough pull in my car. I’d hate to think of carrying a coffin up there. [I was trying to figure out whether “coffin” or “casket” was the correct term and have to admit I didn’t know the difference. A coffin, I found, is defined as a funerary box with six sides, generally tapered around the shoulders; a casket is generally four-sided.]

Photographed for years and different seasons

These photos were taken over several years and in different seasons. This was taken Oct. 27, 2011.

Cemetery well-maintained

The fenced part of the cemetery is well-maintained.

Path leads to ridge

At the top of the narrow road is a small space just barely big enough to turn around. If you walk to your right up the hill and through a gate, you enter the fenced-in cemetery. If you go straight up, you’re taken to a trail that runs along the ridge. That’s the part I find most fascinating.

Tombstones scattered all over hill

As you walk along the ridge, you encounter a dozen or more tombstones scattered apparently randomly all over the hillside. Some of them are large; some of them mark the final resting places of whole families. It’s daunting enough to think of getting a coffin up there; I don’t know what kind of effort it would take to haul a tombstone weighing several hundreds of pounds that high.

Markers from before 1900

One small stone marks the grave of an infant who was born in 1896 and died “aged 11 M 25 D.” The inscription reads, “A little infant of ours so dear lies sweetly sleeping here.”

Find A Grave has some information

The website Find A Grave has some information about the site. It lists two “famous” internments:

John Lockee – a member of Company H for the Illinois Artillery. He was killed in the Civil War.
L. Jackson Summerlin – born 1845, died 1916. His property became what is known as Dutchtown Cemetery. His family plot is one that sits outside the fenced area.

Here is a partial list of other internments from Find A Grave. Here’s a more complete list compiled by an individual.

Photo gallery of Dutchtown cemetery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery. Please chime in if you know anything about the place. I haven’t found much information on it.

January 30, 2012January 30, 2012

Shady Grove Cemetery

Shady Grove Cemetery between Cape Girardeau and Dutchtown at the deadend of CR 211 is the final resting spot for more than 250 members of the area’s black community. It dates to before the Civil War. A reader pointed it out to me after I did a story on the Pecan Grove School, which is at the corner of Hwy 74 and CR 211.

When I went there about two years ago, it was in pretty ratty shape. When I returned with LaFern and Shari Stiver on a beautiful fall day in 2011, the land had been cleared. I hope careful note was made of where the tombstones were located because they had apparently been moved to make the clean-up easier. I did note red flags scattered here and there.

More information about Shady Grove

The Missourian ran a fairly long piece about the history of the cemetery in the June 25, 2008, edition.
The Find A Grave website lists 131 interments and has a map that shows where Shady Grove is located.
Diana Steele-Bryant and Sharon Sanders, librarian for The Southeast Missourian, have published a book, “Dark Woods and Periwinkle: A Glance Back at Shady Grove,” which documents 240 burials. It is available from the Cape Girardeau Genealogical Society web site.

Photo Gallery of Shady Grove Cemetery

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