Historical Preservation Archives

April 7, 2014April 7, 2014

Preservation Homework: Parks and Buildings

This is a continuation of the links I’m posting to help students in a SEMO Historical Preservation class. They’ve been given a list of Cape landmarks to research. It turns out I’ve written about most of them, so I’m going to give them a some background information about some of the parks and random buildings they’re looking for. I posted churches and cemeteries yesterday.

I’m doing a presentation to the class on April 8 where I will tell the students what I do and why I do it. After that, I’ll talk about how I do it. I hope I can get across there is no better way to find out things than to knock on doors and talk with people like I’m doing with The Last Generation project. I won’t swear that I get all the facts right, but you readers do a good job of setting me straight when I’ve miss the mark.

Cape Rock Overlook Park

Old Bridge Overlook Park

Cape Girardeau City Hall

Indian Park

Louis Lorimier and his Indian cohorts, battling the Americans, captured Daniel Boone.

Houck Field House

KFVS TV Studio/Tower on Broadway

This story has lots of links about KFVS

Fort D Park

Cape Girardeau Regional Airport

April 6, 2014May 1, 2014

Preservation Homework: Churches & Cemeteries

Dr. Katy Beebe invited me to speak to her historical preservation class at Southeast Missouri State University last year. Dr. Lily Santora asked if I would come back April 8 to meet with her class.

Dr. Beebe’s class was researching Main Street, so I put together a list of the stories I had done about downtown. Dr. Santora gave her class a wide variety of local landmarks. I’ll spend the next couple of days helping her students by posting links to stories I’ve done about their topics. I’m going to concentrate on churches and cemeteries today. (Maybe I can make up for all those assignments I didn’t turn in when I was a student.)

[Hint to students: don’t just read what I’ve written. The comments are generally more interesting than my copy. Feel free to post questions and comments of your own. My readers are a friendly group who love to share Cape’s history. Click on the photos to make them larger.]

First Presbyterian Church

St. Mary’s Cathedral

A Day in New Madrid

I shot a march and Mississippi River baptism in New Madrid in the summer of 1967. I spent a week in 2011 trying to identify the people in the photos, to no avail. The few adults that were named are all dead and nobody recognized the young folks.

Altenburg Lutheran Heritage Center intern Jennifer Schwent volunteered that she had worked in a small museum in New Madrid and had some contacts who might be able to help. We journeyed to the Higgerson Landing Gift Shop where site director Riley Bock gave me some leads, but we struck out on names. He WAS able to help identify exactly where on Main Street one of the photos was taken.

Main Street 1967

Here is the group marching down Main Street in 1967.

Main Street 2013

The Claire Hotel Coffee Shop has become The Corsage Shop these days. The white building in the old photo is now the Main Street Market.

Higgerson School

I’ve put this project on the back burner until I get some others finished. Here, by the way, is Jennifer in front of a neat timeline of the Higgerson School she helped put together. It lists key events in the history of the one-room school and has photos of the teachers who taught there.

I like her because she argued successfully that this blog should be accepted as a resource in historical preservation classes at SEMO.