October 2011

October 27, 2011May 29, 2016

Seventysix – the Town, Not the Trombones

A cold front blew through Cape this afternoon, bringing with it some spotty rain and wind. Hoping that I could get some colorful leaf photos between the clouds, Mother and I headed up to Perry County. We checked in at the Altenburg Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum, then headed over to Tower Rock where the river is low enough to expose an old stone quarry I hope to get to when the skies are sunny. Mother ate her fill of persimmons from our normal spot (and even found another tree down the road).

Then we decided to explore. My GPS said we were headed northwest, but it felt like we were going south to me. Finally, we hit a road where we could go right to the Mississippi River or left to somewhere off the screen. That still didn’t feel right, but I opted to go to the river.

Seventysix or Seventy-Six, take your pick

Right after we got on the road, I said, “I wonder if this is going to take us to Seventysix. I’ve heard about it, but have never been there.” By the way, the town is spelled both Seventy-Six and Seventysix. I’m going with the latter because that’s what the Conservation Department calls it on their display above. I first heard of the town when I was researching what is said to be Missouri’s last train robbery.

After bumping over a railroad track, we came to the river and this marker. We had arrived. Click on the display to see that Severtysix was once a quite sizable town.

River gives, river takes away

Like Wittenberg to the south, the benefits of being on the Mississippi River come with a terrible shortcoming: higher and more frequent floods as man tried to control the waterway. By 1940, the town’s population had dropped to 35 people; in 1957, the Post Office closed. The train depot was also abandoned.

Two sources for more information:

The Missourian’s James Baughn wrote about the town in his blog, which has good directions, a link to a Google map and another link for a Conservation Department map of the area. I’ll send you there to give him a traffic bump and to save me the trouble of duplicating his efforts.
This site has some excellent information about Seventysix, plus some photos. I’ll quibble with a few of his facts (he says Seventysix was the only area Post Office; Wittenberg had a Post office, too), but it’s an interesting read.

Little remains of town today

A few foundations and a railroad spur where the depot used to be are about all that would let you know the town with a curious name ever existed here. By the way, you’ll have to follow one of the links above to find out how the town was named.

Mailbox was worth the trip

On the way out of town, I did a double-take, stopped the car and quickly put it in reverse. This mailbox was worth the drive. It’s not every day that you see a saluting cowboy made out of chains, wearing real cowboy boots and accompanied by his faithful dog.

October 25, 2011September 17, 2015

Ed Unger’s Stylerite Barber Shop

I had pictures of Ed Unger cutting hair as one of my earliest blog posts. I’m not sure which of the shops this was taken in, but the story had some of his background and some good comments from folks who knew him.

Stylerite Barber Shop

After I finished shooting the photos of the Pure Ice Co., I took a cruise by Good Hope. I’ve been meaning to do a spread on the Haarig District, as it’s called, but keep putting if off.

As I walked down the 300 block of South Sprigg looking in the windows of empty shops, I noticed the back door of the old Stylerite Barber shop was open. My feeling is that an open door in an empty building says “Come In” unless there’s a No Trespassing sign next to it.

The 1968 City Directory lists Edwin Unger’s name under the Stylerite, so this must have been his shop in that era.

Stepping back in time

As it turned out, luck was with me. Just as I got behind the building, a guy pulled in with a long ladder and I offered to help him unload it. (Declined, by the way.) We got to talking and it turned out he owns 329 Good Hope and the buildings in the 300 block of Sprigg, including my target at 312.

Even better, he removed a chain that would have kept me out and said to “have at it. Just lock it up when you’re done.”

As I stood in the barber shop taking this self portrait, I wondered if I had looked into that very mirror when I was the age of the kid on the booster seat. Dad had an office upstairs in the old Farmers and Merchants Bank across the street, so Ed was probably our barber of choice for convenience sake.

Recessive art gene comes out

I never had never been out the back door, so I didn’t know there was what appears to be a concrete patio behind the building. The warm colors of the shop, the neat tones of the old tin, the cool textures brought out the art geek in me. It’s a recessive gene, so it doesn’t show often.

Stylerite Barber Shop photo gallery

Here’s a collection of photos taken in and around the Stylerite. We’ll look at the other buildings in Haarig another time. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

October 25, 2011January 30, 2024

Pure Ice Becomes Home City Ice

Ray Boren posted a note on two of the Central High School email newsletters that Pure Ice Co., a Cape institution since 1926 has been sold. I’ve always had a fascination with the place, located at 314 South Ellis, east of where St. Francis Hospital used to be.

I think it started when I’d go to work with my dad. He’d stop by when it was still dark to get ice to fill up the water cans for the job sites. The ice plant made the most delicious noise: there was the Clunk! SLLLLLLLLLLNNNNNNNNKKKKKK WHAM!! sound the ice made as it was released from the bowels of the building, slid down a chute and landed at the end. One experience was all it took for you to learn to NOT to have your fingers where the ice came down the chute.

Finally, there was the Chink! Chink! Chink! as dad chipped the 25-pound blocks into smaller pieces, using a wooden-handled ice pick with Pure Ice printed on it.

After breaking up the ice, he’d halve six or eight lemons, squeeze the juice into the water and throw the peels into the cans. “Lemon juice cuts thirst,” he’d proclaim. (And, he was right.)

Photos date back to 2000

I’m not sure when I started taking pictures of the place. I shot these in 2000, 2010 and 2011. There are others, but I couldn’t put my hands on them right away.

The one thing I HAVEN’T been able to do is talk my way inside the ice plant. I gave it a try this summer, but the owner turned me down because of “safety and insurance” reasons.

When I heard that the ice company had been sold, I gave Home City Ice a call to see if I could get in. Rumor had it that they weren’t making ice there because the product was being trucked in from elsewhere. Surely there can’t be any safety issues to go where equipment isn’t working, right?

After being passed around a couple of times, I was told the Chief Financial Officer, Jay Stautberg, was out of the office, but if I left him a voice mail, he’d get back with me. I did, and much to my surprise, Stautberg returned my call within a couple of hours.

Here’s a shot through the window

He confirmed that they had, indeed bought Pure Ice Co., but he couldn’t give me the OK to shoot inside because they only bought the business and signed a lease for cold storage. The Pure Ice folks had held onto the building. Stautberg also confirmed that the ice sold in Cape was being trucked in from two of their facilities, “but I’m not in operations, so I can’t tell you which ones.”

All in all, he was friendly and helpful. “We’re a family business and they were a family business, so we were a good fit,” he said. Pure Ice signs will gradually be replaced by Home City Ice ones.

A Cape resident said the sale may cause problems for one of his friends who does ice sculptures. He needs blocks of ice weighing as much as 800 pounds. The new company, it was thought, may only supply crushed ice. I hadn’t heard that in time to ask Strautberg, so I don’t have an answer to the question.

Sign was for how much ice to leave

While it’s true that Pure Ice on Ellis dates back to May 26, 1926, I discovered that it actually had its origin in Morrison Ice and Fuel in 1903 in a building that was just torn down for the new casino. Morrison became Riverside Ice and Fuel and was eventually bought out by Pure Ice. When refrigerators first started coming out, Pure Ice sold Coolerator iceboxes, but marketed them as a replacement for the old-fashioned wooden iceboxes (with a $5 trade-in), not as refrigerators as we know them today. Home ice delivery went on in Cape until the 1960s.

The sign above was to be placed in the window so the iceman would know how much ice to drop off. Note the phone number – 44 – only two digits.

Pure Ice photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

October 24, 2011

A Shadow of M.E. Leming Lumber Company

Mother and I took a cruise down to South Cape to see if Sprigg Street is open where the sinkholes closed the road near the Cape LaCroix bridge during the spring flood. (It isn’t.)

A roundish, triangular-shaped structure caught my eye to the east of Giboney Street, right around where the railyards are. I thought it might have been a kiln of some kind, but a quick call to Keith Robinson, who knows everything there is to know about anything that comes close to a railroad track, came up with the answer. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

It’s a sawdust burner

The object was a sawdust burner, left over from the days when M.E. Leming Lumber occupied a good part of that stretch of the river. The river was a good thing and a bad thing for the lumber company. It provided a convenient way to ship trees and finished lumber to and from the mill, but it also meant that it was susceptible to Mississippi River floods.

“The river put us out of business,” Missourian associate edtor Ray Owen quoted Howard C. Tooke, president of the company from 1956 until it closed in 1992. Tooke said in the Feb. 28, 1993, story that “In 1973, we had a major flood. Over the next three years, we had seven floods. It got to the point where we were running only about eight months a year.” Ironically, the company closed before the big flood of 1993 that pretty much marked the end of Smelterville and the Red Star District.

Swamp replaced busy lumber yard

The Missourian story has an excellent photo taken during the company’s heyday in 1939 showing the area covered in stacks of lumber. This aerial, taken from a Cape Air Flight this summer, shows the area today. The light green patch across from the passing barge is where the sawdust burner is located. Most of the wooded area around the green swamp was once the lumber yard.

Directly south of the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge is the Missouri Dry Dock. The orange, cleared land to the west of it is the space that folks were speculating might become a minor league baseball field.

Leming Lumber founded in 1893

The company, founded in 1893, was one of Cape’s largest employers for many years. Today, about all that’s left is this sawdust burner. A peek at Google Earth shows what might be a few foundations scattered around, but I won’t check those out until a trip when it’s been cold enough to kill all the vegetation, cause the ground to get hard and to send the ticks, chiggers and snakes into hiding.