May Greene Garden Archives

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

There are two Cape Girardeau landmarks across the street from each other at Themis and Fountain that I’ve passed hundreds of time while working at The Missourian and going to the library that never caught my eye much.

The first is Christ Episcopal Church, a tiny building with a bright red door. (The original building is relatively tiny, but Google Earth photo shows several larger buildings attached to it.) I’m pretty sure I was never inside the building, even though I had friends who went there.

May Greene Garden

Even more invisible was May Greene Garden, tucked in behind what used to be the Federal Courthouse. It was named after May Greene, who taught in Cape schools for 53 years and had a school in South Cape named for her.

These photographs were taken in the spring of 2011. Click on them to make them larger.

Cape Central High Photos

Ken Steinhoff, Cape Girardeau Central High School Class of 1965, spent half a century in the ink-slinging business for papers in Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida.

He retired in 2008 and has been spending time scanning hundreds of thousands of images because “photos once taken as news have grown enough whiskers that they’ve become history.”

Please comment on the articles when you see he may have left out a bit of history, forgotten a name or when your memory of a circumstance conflicts with his.

(His mother said her stories improved after all the folks who could contradict died off.)

Your information helps to make this a wonderful archive and may end up in book form.

Tag: May Greene Garden

Preservation Homework: Churches & Cemeteries

First Presbyterian Church

St. Mary’s Cathedral

Christ Episcopal Church

Evangelical United Church of Christ

St. James AME Church

Fairmount Cemetery

St. Mary’s Cemetery

Christ Episcopal Church

May Greene Garden