Perry County Archives

June 8, 2021

Iconic Post Cards

Several years ago, I searched through my archives for what I thought were iconic images that I could turn into post cards. Most of them were taken in Southeast Missouri, but some Illinois and Ohio images managed to sneak in (even one from Washington, D.C.).

Every card has a description on the back. In the interest of full disclosure, a couple of them ended up with the WRONG description, but that’ll only make them more valuable to collectors, like the 1918 “Inverted Jenny” postage stamp that was printed with an airplane upside down.

The post cards are available at

Pastimes Antiques, 45 Main Street, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63701; Phone 573-332-8882. They are two dollars each or three for $5 in person. They are able to take credit card phone orders and mail as many as will fit in an envelope for an additional $5 for shipping and handling.

If anyone is interested in larger prints of any of the photos, send me an email and we can work out the details.

Smelterville: ‘A Community of Love’

My Smelterville book is available from three local places.

Annie Laurie’s Antique Store, 536 Broadway Street, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63701; Phone 573-339-1301, $20 in person.

Pastimes Antiques, 45 Main Street, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63701; Phone 573-332-8882. $20 in person. They are able to take credit card phone orders and mail them for $30, which includes shipping and handling.

Cape Girardeau County History Center, 102 S. High Street, Jackson, Mo., 63755; Phone 573-979-5170. $20 in person; $30 to cover shipping and handling if mailed. Unfortunately, they are unable to take credit card orders.

Gallery of post cards

I can’t guarantee that all of them are still available, but scroll through the gallery to see what you might like. Clicking on an image will make it larger, then you can use the arrow keys to navigate.

For the record, all of the images are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without express written permission. You are encouraged to share a link to this post, but not individual photos.

August 21, 2016

St. Joseph Catholic Church

Shortly after Road Warriorette Shari and I photographed Luther’s Chapel Cemetery in Perry County’s Union Township, we turned into Apple Creek to explore St. Joseph Catholic Church Cemetery.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

Town originally called Schnurbusch

Apple Creek was originally named after a prominent family in the area, and there is a stone expressing appreciation to W. Joseph Schnurbusch for donating the land for the church.

German Catholic immigrants built the first St. Joseph church in 1828; the log structure was used for 12 years, then was replaced by the “Rock Church.” The present brick building was constructed between 1881-1884.

It’s a peaceful place

The grounds are full of crosses and the usual statuary.

The rules are pretty clear

The Joint Parish Council is pretty clear about what it will and won’t allow in the cemetery.

If you don’t follow the rules, you might be hauled into the Parish Office, where knuckle-rapping might be on the list of punishments meted out. (A convent was added to the church in 1917.)

I was framing a group of crosses

I was trying to frame a photo of the crosses in the background when my eye was drawn to something beside me off to the right.

What’s with the red rope?

A stone marking the final resting place of what I think was a long-dead priest held a wrapping of red rope. When I looked closer, it wasn’t just wrapped around the stone, part of it was going up into the tree.

This didn’t exactly break any rules, but it sure seemed odd.

A decoy?

The rope was looped around a tree branch, and hanging from the end of it, swinging in the breeze, was something that looked like a duck or goose decoy. There was no good way to get a shot of it short of climbing the tree, and y’all don’t pay me enough to exert that much energy.

The stone was old, and the rope had faded enough that it had been there a relatively long time. I’d love to know the story behind this.

We missed the most interesting part

When I got back to talking with my Jackson and Altenburg museum friends, they said we had missed the most beautiful and unusual part of the church grounds. They were right. I’ll publish photos from that area soon.

May 2, 2015March 4, 2021

Rendville Public School

You’re probably wondering how a town with only 36 people left in it can generate so many posts. Well, this is the last one until I visit the place again, but I think it’s one of the most interesting. Curator Jessica told me to turn right one road too early to get to Rendville proper, but we didn’t much care. Jessica is a lot like Mother: always looking for the road not taken.

Part-way up a tall hill, a huge, falling-down building came into view. We’d never have seen it in a few more weeks when the leaves are all out. There was a pickup truck with its window rolled down parked in a little turnoff leading to the building. I figured that must mean somebody was around. There were no no-trespassing signs around, so we hoofed up the path, noting fresh footprints in the soft ground.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

Marvin filled us in

Nobody answered my hail, so I went to the front of the building while Jessica prowled around back. Before long, I saw Jessica and Marvin, who said he grew up near the building, which turned out to be a school. “When it closed, it was left just like they were going to have classes the next day. There was even a bell, but someone made off with it.”

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Rendville had a sizable black population: “That’s how Rendville came about,” Marvin recalled the local lore. “They ran all the colored out of Corning.”

Interestingly enough, though, both races attended the school, which dated back to the 1880s.

Convict bricks

Marvin pointed out that some of the walls were made of “Convict Bricks.” They were stamped “Convict Made; 1926; Ohio State Brick Plant; Convict Made.” They were a “hard brick,” unlike most of the older parts of the building that were “soft brick.”

Jessica, who is a bit of a brick expert, said she had never seen any like this before.

Like something from Gone With the Wind

I had the feeling I was in a movie set for General Sherman’s Atlanta urban renewal project (minus the fires).

Long hoof up the hill

Miz Jessica, a triathlete, is one of those people who runs even when nobody chases her. She volunteered to walk down this sidewalk that connected the school to the town, shooting photos along the way. I volunteered to pick her up at the bottom of the hill in my van.

Note the arched window

I asked Jessica to dig up some information about the school. The Little Cities of Black Diamonds archive has a photo of what the Rendville Public School looked like. The Corning High School had a building that looked so much like this one, I thought maybe someone had mislabeled the photos.

She squinted closer than I did and determined the window shapes and the bell tower were different.

Look for the blackboards

The easiest way to determine if an old building was a school or not is to look for the blackboards.

Disembodied voice

I was down in the boiler room when a disembodied voice said, “Hey, Ken.”

I peered around to see where the sound was coming from and said, “Holy Bleep!” when I saw Jessica and Marvin peering down from above. When I followed them, I found it was less scary than I thought. There was a good poured cement set of stairs between two convict brick walls that was perfectly solid.

Earlier Rendville stories

The story about a a mystery in the Rendville Cemetery has drawn some interesting comments from folks who knew the whole story (you might have to press Ctrl-F5 to see new comments).
A reader solved the mystery of a cryptic message scrawled on the side of a building on the main drag. You’ll have to read his comment to find out what “HOWE – West Virginia monkey with a white cap on. What’s he going to do when Halloween comes” meant. Makes perfect sense when you know the town and its players.
I’m not sure if the one-room school with the two-hole outhouse was in Rendville proper, but it’s close.

If you are interested in old coal towns (many which have disappeared), stories about labor and railroads, swing over to the Little Cities of Black Diamonds website for some interesting reading and pictures.

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015

Seelitz Cemetery

Seelitz, in eastern Perry County, was a short-lived town near Altenburg. It was one of the seven colonies established in 1839 in the Saxon Migration.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

Not a good location

Gerard Fiehler from the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum walked me back to where a memorial stone contains the names of some of the earlier settlers. You’ll notice that many of the dates are from the first two years of the settlement.

Seelitz, I was told, was located in a low area that it made it disease-prone. The other problem was that the the early inhabitants were mostly students and professional men poorly prepared for carving out farms and houses from wilderness.

Rev. Stephens exiled

The Rev. Martin Stephan was the leader of the movement. He and his followers, with a communal treasury of $88,000 (you can see the chest it was kept in at the museum), landed in Wittenberg with the goal of farming about 4,500 acres of land that resembled what they had left in Saxony, Germany.

Rev. Stephan, however, was accused of “voluptuous living and dictatorial conduct” and put in a boat for exile to Illinois. It is rumored that he had been tapping the till and some of the wives.

That was the start of the Missouri Synod

Despite all the difficulties, the Saxon immigration was the start of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, which was established in 1847.

The beautiful and still active Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg was built in 1867.