Mississippi River Archives

June 18, 2013

Interested in Cape Calendar?

I’ve been pulling together enough photos from the ’60s to fill a calendar from October 2013 through December 2014. If you are a regular reader, there’s a good chance you’ve seen most of the pictures. I’m racing to get it done and a sample run printed before I leave for Cape June 25.

One of the tasks is to narrow down the photos to ones that you could stand to look at for a month. For example, here are three shots of Cape Rock. (I mean, you CAN’T have a publication about Cape without showing Cape Rock, right?

Do you like the one of the Towboat Albert M?

Towboat Issaquena

Or, do you like the Towboat Issaquena passing the water plant intake north of Cape Rock better?

Submarines vs towboats

Maybe you think submarines and not towboats when you remember Cape Rock. Anyway, if you had to make the choice, which one do you think best represents your memory of Cape Rock. (No, a totally black page won’t work.)

Lots to work out

I have to finish a photo exhibit for the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, get photos together for a future gallery show in Cape next year, rough out a couple of Ohio calendars and assemble a portfolio for some folks in St. Louis. If the blog is a little light for a few days, I hope you’ll understand.

Back to the calendar

So, who is interested? I’m estimating them to cost about $20 each. I have to see if there is anyone in Cape who will handle them locally. Since you folks are scattered all over the country, I’ll have to find out what it will cost to mail them. I think the folks at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum found it was about $5, including shipping materials, but don’t hold me to it.

If there’s enough interest, I may try to knock off a color calendar of contemporary SE Missouri photos for this fall or next year.

Is it worth the effort?

Earlier Calendars

I’ve published three so far.

Glimpses of East Perry County

Ordinary People

Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg

Trinity Lutheran Church (same link as Ordinary People above)

June 16, 2013

Cape Rock Scenic Overview

This photo was taken in 1966 or 1967. I read somewhere that this is one of the best views of the Mississippi River you can get without leaving the comfort of your car.

If you don’t mind a short walk, I like the overlooks at the Trail of Tears State Park north of Cape or the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in Cairo.

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013

Traffic Bridge at Night

There’s something magic about shooting after dark. The light bounces around in ways it doesn’t during the daylight hours. There must have been some low clouds the night I shot these time exposures because the sky reflected a lot of the city’s lights.

When you were driving across the bridge, you probably didn’t notice there was a little bit of a curve to it. I shot this photo the same night as this one.

There’s a lot of steel here

You can see why it was a challenge to demolish the bridge. In one of those strange coincidences, I was scanning these photos on the same day Fred Lynch’s blog carried photos of the 1957 bridge-freeing queens.

St. Vincent’s steeple

You can see St. Vincent’s steeple just barely peeking up at the bottom right of this shot. The exposure was long enough that the tree branches are blurry, but too short for the car headlights to streak all the way across the bridge. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

May 6, 2013

Cape Gets New Floculator

The Missourian ran one of my pictures and a story about construction resuming on a new floculator settling basin at the city’s water plant on East Cape Rock Drive. The caption said Missouri Utilities planned to build an additional clarifier,similar to the basin at top right. Water mixed with chemicals was pumped into tanks and the mud settled to the bottom.

Preparing for population of 50,000

The July 8, 1967, story said the expansion was to prepare for the day when Cape’s population would reach 50,000. [The 2011 Census pegged Cape at 38,402. It still has a ways to go.]

The expansion was going to increase the city’s water output by 150 per cent. The original water plant was designed to hand about 3 million gallons of water a day, enough for about 31,500 persons. During the previous summer’s heat wave, the plant hit a peak of 3,880,000 gallons a day, exceeding its theoretical capacity. The improvements were to boost capacity to 4-1/2 million gallons a day.

Water comes from Mississippi River

Production engineer Fred N. LaBruyere said a pump used to pull water 1,900 feet from the river to the treatment plant would be replaced. The last major construction work took place in 1954, he said, and it was to improve the quality of the water, not the quantity.

[I hate to think what it tasted like before 1954. Cape water used to taste like chlorine with a few drops of water added.] I believe I read recently that all of Cape’s water comes from wells, not the river, these days.

Over the years, I got to cover the whole range of Cape liquids from the water treatment plant at the head end to the sewage treatment plant at the —uhhhh— other end.

Here are a few of the posts: