May 2011

May 31, 2011May 19, 2021

Last Model T Produced in 1927

Foodie Friend Jan Norris sent me a message Tuesday morning gleaned from some list that sends her daily minor factoids to clutter her brain.

Let me clear one thing up before we get to her post: I’m missing that piece of the male gene that contains an interest in automobiles. I have buddies that can ID every car on the road, what engine it has, how many throckmartins it puts out and whether that particular model has whingdings or not.

I do well to know how many doors it has and come close to guessing the color. That’s why I’m going to go out on a limb and say that these photos from Mother’s scrapbook are of a Ford Model T that Jan’s quote talks about. [You can click on the photos to make them larger.]

Last Model T

On this day in 1927, the last Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line. It was the first affordable automobile, due in part to the assembly line process developed by Henry Ford. It had a 2.9-liter, 20-horsepower engine and could travel at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. It had a 10-gallon fuel tank and could run on kerosene, petrol, or ethanol, but it couldn’t drive uphill if the tank was low, because there was no fuel pump; people got around this design flaw by driving up hills in reverse. [Like on Mill Hill.]

Model T cost $290 in 1927

Ford believed that “the man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.” The Model T cost $850 in 1909, and as efficiency in production increased, the price dropped. By 1927, you could get a Model T for $290….(But in 1927, with pay averaging $1000 a year, this still was likely a good chunk of change out of a salary.)

A car for the great multitude

“I will build a car for the great multitude,” said Ford. “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”

Some things don’t change

I don’t know who the folks are in the photos (maybe Mother will chime in), but they are all looking at the broken-down car in the way we STILL look at a vehicle that won’t start. The small child in the top photo has already mastered the if-I-stare-at-it-long-enough-maybe-it’ll heal-itself pose.

You can see another variation of the “Oh, Bleep!” pose in this fender-bender story.

May 30, 2011September 18, 2011

Stoddard County Confederate Memorial

In the shadow some of the most disgracefully tattered flags I’ve seen flying in a public venue is a fascinating memorial to the Confederate dead from Stoddard County, Mo.

Larry Arnold’s idea

Larry Arnold, a Civil War buff from Dexter, Mo., saw a Civil War tombstone in a St. James, Mo., cemetery that had the soldier’s name and normal dates, but on the back was inscribed, “killed by the Yankees at the Battle of Booneville, Mo. Whenever he saw a military stone after that, he was always disappointed not to see the detail of the serviceman’s death.

The Stoddard County’s Confederate Memorial’s website tells what happened next:

When Jim McGhee and Jim Mayo published their book, “Stoddard Grays“, (an informational book about Confederate soldiers from Stoddard County), Arnold started to get an idea. “I thought it would be neat to order grave markers for the 117 plus Stoddard Countians that died during the war and inscribe where and how they died on the back.

“When I conceived the idea there was 117 known Stoddard Countians. We now know of 121 soldiers, 9 civilians–‘Political’ prisoners who died in prison at Alton, Illinois, plus 22 non-Stoddard Countians who are buried in this location; their home counties are inscribed on the back of the stones.”

“Even though their bodies lie from Mine Creek, Kansas, in the West, to Petersburg, Virginia, to the East, on the battlefields of the South, and under the former POW camps of the North, their names and sacrifices will once again be remembered and spoken of in their home county they loved so much and were willing to die for.”

The Minton Brothers

Two stones bring home the horrors of war.

The website describes Stephan Minton, age 16, as “a curious Irish lad whom Capt. Brown made reference to in the ship’s log. Minton had stuck his head out of a gunport for a view and was immediately decapitated by an enemy shell.”

“I can’t, Sir. That’s my brother”

The Captain unknowingly ordered another Missouri gunner, Smith Minton (Stephan’s brother) to “throw that body overboard.”

Smith Minton’s reply was, “I can’t sir, that’s my brother.” Smith Minton would survive the war but die of illness in Texas where he lies buried in an unmarked grave. While the Minton brother’s remains lie elsewhere, their memory lives on in Stoddard County where they enlisted in 1861.

Terrorist or freedom fighter?

It’s been said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. That’s certainly the case with Pvt. John Fugate Bolin, a “noted guerilla captured, incarcerated in Cape Girardeau, 1964; hanged by mob 1864.”

The 2010 Cape Girardeau Historic Preservation Month Walk had this to say in its entry on the Common Pleas Courthouse:

During the Civil War, the Union provost marshal had his headquarters at the courthouse. The provost marshal was, in effect, the military governor for the area. The jail in the bottom of the building was used for disloyal locals, occasional captured rebels, disorderly Union soldiers, and people awaiting trials. In one episode, captured rebel guerrilla leader John Fugate Bolin was dragged from his cell by local people and soldiers and lynched from a farm gate on Bloomfield Road in retaliation for murders of unarmed Unionists.

Defending Missourians from “savage invaders”

The Missouri Partisan Ranger Virtual Museum & Archives has a different perspective on guerilla forces:

“These men rode hard and defended the innocent citizens of Missouri from the slaughter and carnage that had been committed by Federal occupational forces sent by Abraham Lincoln.

“Many Northern histories and spin doctors consider the Missouri Partisan Ranger to be bushwhackers and thieves. But in reality, they were only waging the type of war that had already been committed against them and their families for over a decade.

“The Federal occupational troops sent by Lincoln came from Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and mainly Kansas. They raped, pillaged, burned and destroyed much of Western, West Central and South West Missouri.

“The Missouri Partisan Rangers were at times the only defense the people of Missouri had from these savage invaders. Without doubt, the so called Federal armies were indeed illegal occupational invaders who simply had no right to occupy and violate Missouri’s autonomy.

“As issued on March 13, 1862 in Order Number 2, The Missouri Partisan Rangers were given ‘No Quarter’ when they were captured. Murder and death were the occupational armies sole solution.

“And in return, No Quarter was given to the enemy of The Missouri Partisan Ranger.”

Location of Bloomfield Cemetery

View Stoddard County Confederate Memorial in a larger map

May 29, 2011September 18, 2011

Advance’s Best-Kept Secret

On Memorial Day weekend, it’s appropriate to recognize salute the men and women who have served in our armed services to keep us free.

Advance has a Military Memorial in Maberry Park on the town square that lists Advance residents who made the ultimate sacrifice for us.

Advance Military Memorial

Advance High School sophomore Kathy Jenkins wrote these words which were engraved on a stone tablet in the park: “We salute the men and women who served in the armed forces. Their nationalism and loyalty gave us love and patriotism for our country. Our memory of their bravery will be everlasting.”

The memorial is a nice tribute, but that’s not what fascinates me about the park.

This tree probably knows the secret

This tree overlooking Maberry Park may know the real story of the town square. I mentioned in a story about the Advance train depot that Advance was founded when Louis Houck balked at paying $30 an acre for a depot in Lakeville. He instructed his civil engineer, Major James Francis Brooks, to “advance” about a mile west near a stand of mulberry trees and lay out a new town where he could buy the land for $10 an acre. That’s where the town’s name, Advance, came from.

Mayberry family cemetery

The land was originally owned by Joshua Maberry, and his family cemetery was located right in the middle of what was going to become the town. According to the sale agreement, the cemetery was supposed to be “forever maintained.”

Tombstones disappeared overnight

This aerial taken last fall shows the square where the Maberry cemetery was located. The stones you see aren’t tombstones, they are the Advance Military Memorial markers.

Sometime in the 1920s, all of the tombstones disappeared from the cemetery in the middle of the night. The graves are all still there, but any visible trappings of a graveyard vanished. Poof.

No one in town claimed any knowledge of what happened to the stones. Thomza Zimmerman, long-time family friend and editor of The Advance Advocate, said the theft was attributed to a women’s group which concerned itself with the “beautification of the city.”

In Advance, Missouri, A Look at the First Hundred Years, she wrote, “By that time (1920), the first and second generations of Maberrys were gone and any heirs who remained had moved away, but they (the Mayberrys) still owned the cemetery. When W.H. Whitwell and his wife, Mary Jane, bought the estate of Joshua Maberry in 1879, the deed reserved one acre of ground, ‘used as a graveyard.’

“Be that as it may, on a certain summer night, in the early 1920s, all of the gravestones disappeared. No one knew where they went or how they went. Many people wondered, but few asked.”

Sign adds insult to injury

Mother and my Grandmother were about as connected as you could get in a small town, but they always claimed they had never heard who was responsible for the tombstone thefts, and I’ve never heard any of the oldtimers fess up. It has to be the town’s best-kept secret.

I had never looked closely at this photo I shot in the fall of 2001. Not only did all of the tombstones disappear, but whoever put up this sign in the square labeled it “MABFRY PARK,” not Maberry Park, after the original family.

I’ll have to check to see if the sign has been corrected.

May 27, 2011September 18, 2011

Down by the Riverside

I wonder how long it’ll take before the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge stops being the “new” bridge and becomes just The Bridge?

I was going to take the night off for the holiday, but ran across these photos from July 28, 2002. It was dusk, both bridges were still standing, barges were running up and down the river and folks were gathering on the waterfront.