Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Terry Hopkins‘ dad’s box of General Sign Company signs coughed up this billboard of Rusty, Rueseler’s Chevrolet’s mascot along with the “Rueseler’s are as Wild as the West Rest!” slogan.
A neon version of Rusty graced the top of the dealership on South Kingshighway. Here’s a link to more photos and the story.
It has a bunch of comments from folks who remember buying muscle cars there, and a note from someone who knows what happened to the big sign.
Jesse James sent me a set of photos he shot while he was in Cape over the Christmas holidays. He happened to be at the end of Bellevue, which was the site of Civil War Fort A.
The old apartment building at 155 Bellevue has been razed and the land cleared for some kind of project. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)
I usually lament the passing of buildings, but this apartment wasn’t much even when I used to visit a reporter friend there in the mid-1960s. Here’s what it looked like in 2011.
I did a Missourian search to see if there had been any stories about what was going on, but nothing popped up. Most of the briefs associated with that address were miscellaneous moperies that showed up in the police briefs.
It looks like Jesse’s photo shows the tree behind the apartment has been saved.
Here’s an overview of the neighborhood taken in 2011. The apartment is the white building to the left and below the Fort A label.
Arlene Southern’s apartment was the unofficial hangout for The Missourian’s younger staffers. Jerry Obermark, left, covered cops. Denny O’Neil was one of the most talented writers I ever worked with. He and Jerry went with me to cover the Buck Nelson Flying Saucer Convention in the Missouri Ozarks.
I chased former managing editor Don Gordon down in North Carolina a couple of summers ago. He still talked about how preppy-looking Mary Beth Vawter talked her way into an interview with Barry Goldwater’s wife when Barry was campaigning in Cairo in 1964.
Tall-hair Arlene was the improbable choice for religion editor. She might have been the one who made the mistake of slugging the church briefs “god junk.” Her readers weren’t happy when the composing room forgot to take the slug out before the story ran in the paper.
You notice the table is set for four. I must have been relegated to the kids’ table.
Of course, grousing about our jobs, pay, hours and assignments took up a lot of our time. I remember when the gripe stick was passed to me one night.
I said, “Yeah, they ought to hire some high school kid to do the scut work to free us up to do really important stories.” When I looked up, everybody was grinning. That’s when I realized that was exactly what The Missourian had done: I was that high school kid.
There was a rumor that some illegal herbs might have been burned in that apartment, but the group protected my innocence and never did anything like that in my presence. They probably should have loosened up a bit so I wasn’t so surprised when I got to Ohio University. The first time I went to a party, I thought, “Wow, these college students must be really poor: they’re having to share a cigarette.”
The very thing that made it a great vantage point for controlling the river during the Civil War makes it a great location to live today. I’d love to sit on a deck or balcony and watch the river go by.
Here’s the view of the property looking north from the parking lot of what used to be the former First National bank at the corner of Broadway and Main.
Thanks to Jesse for the news tip and the photos.
The Neely’s Landing posts generated quite a few comments about cemeteries in the area. When Dick McClard and I were roaming around, he took me to the Cotter Cemetery on private property off CR 525.
We knocked on the door of a nearby house, but nobody came to the door. Dick said he had met the folks on earlier visits, so he felt comfortable walking over to the fenced, well-kept cemetery.
Edward Cotter’s stone says he was born in Cork, Ireland,on Christmas Day, 1812, and died March 3, 1875, at the age of “62 Yr’s 2 Mo’s 6 D’s.”
The Find A Grave website says the place is also called Hays / Hayes and Bray Cemetery. You can see a list of 12 of the internments here.
Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.
I’ve noticed an unusual traffic bump on the stories I’ve done about Neely’s Landing and the horrific steamboat The Stonewall disaster that occurred in 1869. That prompted me to post an update that is more speculation than fact.
Here’s a little refresher. You can go to my original post for more detail.
I spent quite a bit of time driving around Neely’s Landing searching for the grave site, but there’s not much left of what was once a thriving town. Mississippi River floods erased many buildings, much like they washed away Smelterville and Wittenberg. The Proctor & Gamble plant gobbled up even more of it.
I thought a cemetery high on a hill overlooking the landing might be a possibility, but I quickly dismissed it.
Here’s why I didn’t think it qualified.
Amateur historian Dick McClard and I started trading ideas. He has forgotten more about that area than I ever knew because of his research into the McClard family and its many offshoots.
He thought that the old Cotter Farm and grave site might be on Proctor and Gamble’s property in the general vicinity of the X. It was on the Neely’s Landing side of Indian Creek; the ground was fairly flat and the soil was soft.
Dick was a former P&G employee, so he knew the right ears to blow into to get us an escorted visit to our target area.
The security guard who was our ride and guide was on a tight schedule, so we didn’t get much time to nose around. I had time to shoot a nearly 360-degree panorama of the general area that didn’t show anything particularly interesting. The left side of the photo is looking north, then it swings to the right until we are looking approximately north-northwest.
You’ll have to click on the photo to make it large enough to make out anything.
Dick thinks that any markers that might have existed were moved or covered over when the railroad cut through the area to carry visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Decades of Mississippi River and Indian Creek floods probably scoured the area, plus it has been farmed.
We’re going to give it another shot, but timing is critical. It’ll help if we get there before the brush, snakes and bugs start showing up after wintertime. The best we can hope for would be some discarded stones or markers that have been pushed off to the edges of the property, but I doubt there was much around to set the graves off from the surrounding farmland.
Here’s one of the best accounts I’ve run across about the disaster and the history of the area.