Ken Steinhoff, Author at Cape Girardeau History and Photos

December 1, 2011December 1, 2011

Tragedy at Neely’s Landing

Oct. 27, 1869, the steamboat The Stonewall, heavily laden with about 300 passengers, tons of cargo and 200 head of livestock was southbound on the Mississippi River near Neely’s Landing, bound for Cape Girardeau, Memphis and New Orleans. The river was low and the boat was running “slow wheel.”

A candle or lantern overturned or a passenger dropped a spark onto hay on the lower deck, which caught fire. Before the blaze was discovered, it had gained considerable headway.

Burning boat ran aground

An Oct. 27, 1936, Missourian reprised the incident on its 67th anniversary, drawing upon the memories of R.W. Harris, who was eight years old when the boat burned not far from his home at Neely’s Landing. When the crew couldn’t extinguish the fire, the captain headed the boat to the shore but struck a sandbar. The boat gradually turned in the current, causing the north wind to carry the fire through her.

Passengers caught like rats

“Panic stricken passengers were caught like rats on the blazing boat, between which and the Missouri shore was 150 feet or more of swift, icy cold water.” The flames were visible 1-1/2 miles away.

Some held onto horses

Four oarsmen went out on a skiff to rescue passengers. They were Lowrie Hope, Martin O’Brian, Frank West and Derry Hays,”the latter being a Negro.” They managed to rescue some passengers. Others were seen to walk into the flames; others jumped into the river, some forcing horses from the lower decks to swim while they clung to the animal’s tails.

209 to 300 drowned or burned

Depending on which account you read, somewhere between 209 and 300 persons perished from fire or drowning, making it one of the nation’s worst inland waterway disasters. Sixty or 70 victims were buried in a mass grave on the Cotter farm.

Scorched paper money found in safe

When the hull had cooled, what was left of the freight was salvaged and sold. Mr. Harris recalled that his father bought a firkin of butter from Wisconsin. One of the horses, scarred from burns, was long owned by Franklin Oliver, who called him Stonewall. When the boat’s safe was opened, only paper money, scorched to a crisp, was found, much to the public’s disappointment.

Bones still found 67 years later

Since the catastrophe, the paper said, the location has been called Stonewall bar. At low water, broken queensware, coal, nails, bits of iron and even bones are still reminders of the disaster.

Two accounts of the Stonewall’s burning

Large quarry north of Neely’s Landing

Neely’s Landing Quarry is located north of what remains of the town.

November 30, 2011

Fireplaces and Basement Stairs

I like working in the basement here in Cape. I miss my nice office chair and my film scanner and all the negatives just a swivel away, don’t get me wrong, but the basement is very conducive to my style of writing. It’s a procrastinator’s paradise.

First off, there’s the fireplace. Mother has a gas furnace, but she also has a basement fireplace that helps heat the basement and the rest of the house. The chimney for it runs up the wall between the kitchen and the living room, so when you get the fireplace good and warm, the wall becomes one big radiator. It feels so good to lean up against it and suck heat into your body after you’ve been out in the cold.

The best part is that you have to futz with it.

When I’m working back home, I’ll sometimes go for hours except for necessary breaks and naps. With a fireplace, you have to get up about every 20 minutes to give it a poke. The wood’s pretty dry, so you have to add a piece about every 30 minutes.

If you ignore it and let it burn down to coals, then you have to add some kindling and coax it into life with a few puffs. When the wood stack gets low in the house, you have to wheel the garden cart outside to reload it. That means you have to reapply the tarps that keep it dry. You calculate for a minute if you have to bring in a sandbag full of kindling we made when we cut up an old picket fence down in Dutchtown.

Then, there’s the decision about whether or not to let the fire to burn out so you can carry the ashes outside. That leads to another assessment: are the coals dead enough that you can pour them out in the backyard or is there a danger they might flare up and catch the leaves on fire?

Now that newspapers have gotten miniscule, you have to husband the few scraps of paper you can glean from junk mail and cardboard boxes and decide if you want to go for broke and build it all at one time or do you get a little kindling started and then add the bigger wood. Are you going to use the dry wood from last year or should you ration it out as firestarter for later in the winter?

See how much time you can fritter away tending a fireplace?

The only time I considered smoking

I worked with a reporter who was a pipe smoker. He could control the ebb and flow of an interview by how he worked his pipe. If he wanted time to think of the next question, or if he wanted to let silence build hoping that the subject would feel awkward and fill the silence, he’d reach for his pipe.

First, he’d go through the ritual of cleaning it out. Then the fumble in all his pockets for the tobacco. He had to find the right tool to tamp it down in the bowl. That was another search. Eventually he’d need a match. More inventory-taking. Sometimes when I KNEW he had a match, I’d watch him ask the subject for one just to get a flow going.

The only other guy I saw milk a tobacco product as effectively was Hal Holbrook playing Mark Twain smoking a cigar. Those guys had it down to an art.

I did a personality assessment and decided I couldn’t be a pipe smoker. I was like the old cheapskate who said, “When I’m smoking my own tobacco, all I can think of is the cost. If I’m smoking another man’s tobacco, the bowl is packed so tight it won’t draw.”

Basement stairs for cardio

If I want a drink or a snack in Florida, it’s about 20 feet straight into the kitchen. Way too convenient.

Here in Cape, I have to walk across the length of the basement – that’s 11 steps (15 if I divert to check the fireplace) – then it’s up two stairs, hit the landing, turn, then 10 stairs up. People pay good money to go to the gym for that kind of workout on a Stairmaster.

November 28, 2011

Holy Cow! Ice Falls from Sky

Mother and I had to journey over to Kentucky Lake this morning to meet a plumber who was going to winterize her trailer.

For you Sunbelt Readers (I’m talking to YOU, Jan), that’s where you drain all of the water out of the pipes, then blow antifreeze in them until pink stuff spews out the faucets. You drain the toilet bowls and put antifreeze in them, too. If you don’t, and if you don’t have heat turned on, the freezing water in the pipes will expand and cause them to burst. The purpose of pipes is to keep liquid inside them. Pipes that have burst fail in that purpose, as we found out when I turned the water on this spring. It is an unpleasant and expensive thing to fix.

You can click on the photo to make it larger. I actually like it. For the record I did NOT put those leaves there. Sometimes I think there’s a Higher Power who looks at a Florida photographer with sleet bouncing off his follically-challenged head and says, “You know, I’m gonna cut him some slack:’ Leaf, it’s time for you to go anyway, land where it’ll do him some good.'”

Foggy, rainy, cold

When we left Cape around 8:30 a.m. it was foggy, misting rain and about 38 degrees. On the way to the lake, it alternated between misting and pouring. Creeks were running out of their banks, so Illinois and Kentucky must have gotten a lot more rain than we did. By the time we got to the trailer, the temperature had dropped to 35 and the rain looked like it might have something mixed in it. I started raking and blowing leaves to get them off the deck and away from the trailer. I spent two weeks in Seattle and didn’t get a drop of water on my new Marmot Precip Rain Jacket, but it paid for itself today. I stayed dry and reasonably warm and the built-in hood kept water from running down my neck.

The only problem with blowing wet leaves off the north side of the deck when the winds are gusting to 36 mph FROM the north is that the wind hits the side of the desk causing an updraft. That carries your blown leaves up in the air. Then the north wind blowing horizontally flings the leaves right back at you. It was a lot more fun for somebody to watch than it was for me to do it.

What’s that blue stuff on the radar?

While we were waiting for the plumber to do his magic, I called up the radar and saw that we were surrounded by blue. We don’t get any blue on our radar in Florida, so I had to look at the legend. It said it was snowing on us. I didn’t see how it could snow in a rain storm, so I didn’t get excited.

Then I switched over to Facebook and saw that KFVS had asked people to submit their photos of ice, snow and slush. There were a gazillion comments from people reporting snow, freezing rain, slush and ice pellets. This sounded Not Good. We saddled up the pony and headed back home, still not expecting much more than rain.

About 40 miles from Cape, I started seeing suspiciously large raindrops that floated. The closer we got to Missouri, the more ice pellets and snowflakes we saw. When we pulled into the driveway at about 4 p.m., the snow was falling like crazy. We unloaded the car, and I walked over to my van, which had been sitting since yesterday. It reinforced those signs you see that say, “Bridges Freeze First:” the hood and windshield were coated with the slush you see above.

So, in the space of less than eight hours, we saw just about every form of Missouri weather short of sunshine, hail and a tornado.

Winters past

I’ve done several winter-weather related posts.

November 27, 2011January 16, 2024

How to Shoot a Barn

Well, that title is a bit presumptuous, but studies have shown that using the words “How to…” in the headline causes the story to rate higher with search engines.

When Friend Shari and I were on our way back from shooting Tower Rock Quarry and taking the scenic route where I discovered High Hill Church, she said to keep my eye out for old barns; there was one in particular she’d like to shoot again. She recalled doing it years ago and wanted to have another crack at it.

STOP!!!

We were tooling along down 177 near Egypt Mills when she hollered, “STOP!” She was always good at that. I locked down thinking she saw an 18-wheeler getting ready to hit us head-on and heard everything loose in the car slide forward.

She had spotted her barn. I threw it in reverse and cut over on CR 634 (I think) and pulled off on the side of the road with the hazard flashers on.

What are you looking for?

Being a former shrink, she’s always curious about the thought processes that go into making a photo. After dismissing her (and most other folks who ask that question), I’ve started to think about it. I told her that I would try to explain how I looked at the overall scene and then drilled into a detail here and there. As we walked around, I explained that sometimes everything would fall into place. Other times, I’d shoot a frame and decide that something didn’t work. Sometimes a slight change in angle would fix the problem; other times, there would be some extraneous object that would intrude that I couldn’t work around, and I’d move on.

I’m a sucker for contrast

I love dark photos where the light hits something and causes it to pop out. Sometimes, like in this shot, the light is striking it directly. More often, I look for a strong back or sidelight to make it translucent.

Signs that it wasn’t a good shoot

Leica made some great photo enlargers. One of the neat things about them was that their negative carriers were cut just a little larger than a 35mm frame. That let pure white light project down on the photo paper if you printed full frame. It was a point of pride to have your print have that black border around it because it showed that you “cropped in the camera.” In other words, you visualized the final product when you pushed the button.

When I looked at these pictures, I found myself reaching for the Crop tool to hack out pieces that didn’t work for me. I might have thought the composition worked, but I hadn’t successfully ‘cropped in the camera.” When we did that in the real darkroom, we’d call it “pulling it out of our rear orifice (or something close to that).”

Here’s an example. This is the full frame photo of the splotch of red paint with an orange leaf in front of it and some tendrils of vine and their shadows on the gray, weathered wood.

I couldn’t find the center of interest. Is it the leaf? Is it the vines? Is my eye supposed to follow the vines up and down, left and right? What’s important?

Cropping helps, but it’s not the answer

In this print, I’ve taken the same picture, but I’ve cropped up from the bottom and down from the top so you don’t see any of the gray wood there. Your eye tends to go toward the lighter area of a print, so this keeps you in the frame better. It also brings your eye to the leaf. I would have cropped a little more off the left, but I like the shadow of the vine over there. If you look closely, you can see the vine, then the shadow. The shadows of the vines on the right become more prominent and more interesting. Still, if the first photo was a D-, playing with it barely raised the grade to a C+.

Photo gallery of barn pictures

It’s not one of my best barn sessions. I shot this particular barn when I was riding my bike in this area about eight or nine years ago. I didn’t capture Essence de Barn then, and I’ve missed it this time, too. Maybe this barn and I just don’t click. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.