Cairo Custom House

Cairo Custom House Museum 10-28-2008The Missourian has been full of stories of late about proposed courthouse shuffling and new facilities here and there. One consequence may be that the Common Pleas Courthouse may cease to be a courthouse. That raises the question of what will happen to one of the most iconic structures in Cape Girardeau.

Here’s a suggestion: turn it into a museum like the Cairo Custom House Museum in Cairo.

For all the time I’ve spent in Cairo, the last time I was in the old Custon House was when it was being used as a police station at the time of the riots in the late 1960s. I’ll have more about that on a later date.

A serious  “Wow!” factor

Cairo Custom House Museum 10-31-2014Mother, Curator Jessica and I really weren’t expecting much when we walked into the museum right before closing time. We weren’t two steps into the building when my friend, the curator for the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, broke the Coveting Commandment into a whole bunch of pieces.

First off, the building itself is a magnificent piece of architecture with features like arched brick ceilings that I’ve never seen before.

Because there are so many rooms, it was possible to create amazing grouping of exhibits. It would be easy to spend days in the place and still not see everything.

By the way, this website points out that the fireplaces like this one weren’t used for heating, but were used for ventilation.

Cairo Custom House Museum gallery

Here’s a taste of what you’ll see in the facility. I’ll talk about the darker history of the building in another post. I’ll also follow up with more photos on my next visit when I have more time. Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

Eclipse – A Company Town

Eclipse Company Town 08-23-2014Back in 1955, just about the time I was becoming aware of music, Tennessee Ernie Ford came out with the song 16 Tons that contained the lines

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

I ended up living in two parts of the country where company towns and company stores were common: Southeastern Ohio and North Carolina.

The Eclipse Company Store

Eclipse Company Town 08-23-2014There is an excellent website that gives the history of the Eclipse Company Town, built by the Hocking Valley Coal Company between 1900 and 1902. This building, now occupied by Kiser’s Barbecue, was the pay station and general store for the miners. Married miners without children rented the two front rooms on the second floor.

Curator Jessica said that workers were frequently paid in “scrip” that could only be spent at the company store. The Athens County Historical Society and Museum has some coins and one very rare $2 scrip in its collection. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Building saw various uses

Eclipse Company Town 08-23-2014The mine operated from 1900 until the early 1930s when it and other area mines fell victim to the Depression. It was called back into service in 1940 as part of the World War II effort, and continued to operate until 1948.

After the mine closed, the store was used as a barn, a machine shop, and then a VFW Hall in the 1950s. It is a very popular restaurant these days.

Located on Hocking-Adena Bike Path

Eclipse Company Town 08-23-2014One reason for its success is its location on the rail-to-trail Hocking-Adena Bike Path. Live music was playing the evening Jessica and I went there. Bikes of every description – a triplet, recumbents, cruisers, beater bikes and kid bikes with training wheels – were parked all around.

Eclipse Company Town today

Eclipse Company Town 08-23-2014The website says the town is comprised of 12 company houses, one shotgun house and the company store.

Company towns came about for several reasons.

  • The mines were in relatively isolated areas with little transportation available, so the work force needed a place to live.
  • Because they were self-contained, the use of scrip was common. The stores allowed workers to buy on credit, so they came to “owe their soul to the company store,” making for a captive labor force.
  • At the first hint of any union organizing, workers would be put out of their company houses, so they not only didn’t have jobs and were in debt, but they and their families were homeless.

Nearly 2500 company towns

Eclipse Company Town 08-23-2014I’ve read that the United States had more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3 percent of the U.S. population at one time.

I remember the neatly-kept company town of McAdenville just outside Gastonia, N.C.. It was incorporated in 1881 to house workers at the McAden Mills, which has been known as Pharr Yarns since 1939.

It’s still known as Christmas Town USA, for the huge Christmas lighting displays that attract some 300,000 automobile visitors a year.

 

 

 

Department of “Why Bother?”

Skinny brick building in Glouster OH 11-09-2014I didn’t pay much attention to this building when I was northbound through Glouster to the Burr Oak Lodge where I was staying the last time I was in Athens, Ohio, but I did a double take on the way south. (Glouster is the place where I shot the epitome of a small-town football game last fall.)

That is one skinny building

Skinny brick building in Glouster OH 11-09-2014I had to stop to make sure it wasn’t an optical illusion.

No, it really WAS that skinny. It got bigger at the other end, but I could easily span the back wall without having to stretch my arms out as big as I had gestured before to describe the size of a fish that got away. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Only eight bricks wide

Skinny brick building in Glouster OH 11-09-2014That wall was only eight bricks wide. If a standard brick is eight inches long, and you figure the space for the mortar between the bricks is half an inch or less, that would be, let’s see 8″ x 8 bricks x 7 mortar rows @ 1/2 inch equals just 67.5 inches or a little more than 5-1/2 feet wide. Allowing for the thickness of the walls, the open space inside the thin end would have had to have been less than four feet.

Why would anybody use that many bricks, not to count the labor of laying them, for such a small return of space?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but my guess is that both bricks and labor were cheap in Glouster when that building was constructed.

Bricks were a big deal

Hocking Block - Ray Charles Plaza - 05-14-2014Here’s a really good history of the region that explains how important the iron, coal and brick industries were.

Curator Jessica is somewhat of a brick expert, so she’s always looking for SE Ohio bricks like this Hocking brick she spotted when we were walking around the Ray Charles Plaza in Albany, Ga.

Pumpjacks in Athens County

Athens County natural gas wellI was all excited back on September 18, 2014, when gas in Jackson dropped to $3.03. On December, 14, I celebrated that gas in Florida had fallen below $2.50. This week, I gassed up for $2.13, and Neighbor Jacqie got it for seven cents less two days later

That got me to thinking about this pumping rig I spotted in Athens County last summer. I was hoping I would run across one because they used to be pretty common in that area.

Other names for pumpjack

In case you aren’t familiar with the term “pumpjack” (I wasn’t), it is also called “oil horse, donkey pumper, nodding donkey, pumping unit, horsehead pump, rocking horse, beam pump, dinosaur, sucker rod pump (SRP), grasshopper pump, Big Texan, thirsty bird, or jack pump). It is the overground drive for a reciprocating piston pump in an oil well.”

In the old days, you’d drive by a field that was covered with a thick sludge of oily goop and see pipes running to a central collection point. For some reason, I don’t think I ever shot one. Maybe it was just too ugly in a not-neat way.

Here is a site that explains how those old “jackline”operations work, along with a lot of other interesting history. That sounds like what I remember. They’ve pretty much become obsolete.

Drilling rig hit gas

Drilling rig fire 03-29-1969The closest I came to photographing anything like that was this fire. I don’t know why this drilling rig was working right next to the road on a chilly day in March of 1969, but it must have hit a pocket of natural gas, and all it took was one spark to light it off.

How does thing work?

Athens County natural gas wellCurator Jessica and I found this while we were running around looking for neat stuff. I asked her how it worked.

Curators are supposed to know everything, plus, she’s married to T.J., who is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio University. I figured she’d have picked up this kind of knowledge through osmosis.

Instead of breaking a stick off a tree and sketching out the whole thing in the dirt alongside the road, she said, “Wait until dinner and have T.J. explain it to you.”

Natural gas is the target

Athens County natural gas wellT.J. is an effective teacher. The first thing he explained was that the target is natural gas, not oil, as I had always thought.

His description pretty much matched this explanation given on Wikipedia. He’s known on campus as a tough grader, so rather than try to parrot what he said, I’m going to let this illustration explain it. (He doesn’t tolerate students who copy the work of others, so I may STILL be in trouble.)

When I asked why they went to all the trouble to use the walking beam with its horse head for a small operation like this (I’ve seen giant ones out West), he explained that the walking beam with a counterweight can do all the heavy lifting, enabling the use of a much smaller motor than if it was connected directly.

I don’t have any idea what kind of volume the wells produce nor how many of them are in operation. A lot of them were sitting idle when we passed by, but we saw one large one that looked like it was fairly new.