After the most miserable Winter and Spring imaginable here in Seattle, we headed off to St. Louis in May to catch up on grandkid-hugging, tiki-drinking, general good fun and some warm weather. We had a great time!
First: here’s the St. Louis family:
The St. Louis Zummies – ready for a swimming pool outing.
Craig and Annie, Laurie and me, heading out to an excellent dinner.
Clara – 11 years old
Clara in her new look. It will likely change in few weeks, but we kind of like it!
Henry – almost seven years old.
A Ramble to Cahokia Mounds
A thousand years ago, Cahokia – just east across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was home to around 20,000 people, with stockade walls, many buildings, and the mounds. These mounds were built for defensive and religious purposes, as well as burials of important people. There are over 100 mounds ranging from little bumps to Monks Mound: 900 feet long, 700 feet wide and 95 ft high, constructed from 22 million cubic feet of dirt, all dug up by hand and carried to the site in baskets (no excavators or dump trucks in the 12th century, when the most building activity occurred!).
This was an enjoyable ramble. The Interpretive Center was closed for renovation, and we’ll return when it re-opens, as we hear it has lots of interesting history and information. Some pictures of the biggest mound:
This is a big freaking mound! Those are the steps to reach the top.
Two smaller mounds in the distance.
Gardening
One thing Craig and Annie do not have is a lot of time to garden, so we helped out. They had done a lot of work to planted new flowering plants and shrubs which will look great in a year or two; now, though, weeds were taking over. So Laurie and I had at them and cleaned up a couple plant beds. The frustrating part was, as always, a week later the weeds were back so we did it again. Still, we were glad to be able to help.
Some new hostas, hydrangeas and flowering plants. Before Laurie and I attacked this bed, a fast-growing, highly-invasive plant was taking over.
This is Craig and Annie’s new butterfly garden. All the plants are Missouri natives and should grow well in the terrible clay soil that makes up their yard. They did a lot of work to get these and the front yard shrubs and flowers planted – it’ll be fun to watch them grow and flower.
A Ramble to Memphis, Missouri
Memphis, Missouri, 10 miles south of the Iowa border, is not anything like the big Memphis in Tennessee. Memphis, Missouri is maybe 1,800 people, no spectacular sights (actually, no sights at all); really, no reason for us to visit except…
…my great-grandparents lived there for many years and my grandfather (Jacob Wendell Zumsteg) was born there. We figured that was reason enough to visit Memphis, Missouri, so we detoured on a drive to Kansas City to do a little ancestor-tracking in Memphis.
We went first to the cemetery to see if we could find some Zumsteg graves we knew are there. We figured it would be a small cemetery and we’d have no problem. Not so; it was big, being the main cemetery for the county and surrounding areas. We had a section number for the Zumsteg graves, but the sections weren’t marked, so we just tramped around. We found one Zumsteg tombstone, with graves for some siblings of my grandfather but we could not find that of my great-grandparents. Since it was about 90° and midwest-humid, we gave it up and drove into town.
First visit there: the library. A very nice librarian pulled out a binder that had records of all the graves in the cemetery and a map of it! I took a picture so we could go back and find what we were looking for. Gotta love a small-town library!
As near as we could tell, there are only two restaurants in Memphis and one was nearby, so we went there for lunch. Here’s one page of the menu; check the prices.
I’ve said the day of the $10 cheeseburger is gone, but not in Memphis, MO. Check that out: $6.50 for a double cheeseburger. Highest price for a sandwich: $5.75. Laurie and I each had a sandwich (Reuben for her, turkey club for me), ice tea (no alcohol available) and we split a large order of fries. Total cost: $18.71. Not for each of us, total cost. And the sandwiches were just fine.
Back to the cemetery. With our map in hand, we quickly located the graves we were looking for:
My great-grandparents emigrated from the Aargau region of Switzerland – just a mile from the German border – in 1853. We think they went first to St. Louis, where others from that region who had emigrated earlier lived. In the 1870s they moved to Memphis. Why? We have no idea. We talked to a woman in the hardware store on the main square (okay, the only square) and she remembers hearing that the Zumsteg family ran the pharmacy in the early-1900s. I have found nothing to confirm that, but she said she had a small glass bottle, used to store a liquid medicine or lotion, that had “Zumsteg” engraved on it, so that could be. My grandfather was born here in Memphis in 1881.
A street on the main square. Lots of empty storefronts.
The Scotland County Courthouse. Memphis is the county seat, so this courthouse, with a rather odd dome(?) is in the center of town.
We visited the courthouse where a very nice young man spent about 45 minutes digging through old property records to see if we could learn where the Zumstegs lived. We are not 100% sure, but we think the house below is where a great-uncle and his family lived. It’s likely built on land owned by the family since the 1870s and replaces an earlier house. But that’s mostly speculation. That last Zumsteg in Memphis, my grandfather’s youngest brother, left the town in the 1940s, moving to California, where he died in 1958.
That’s Memphis, Missouri. Honestly, I can’t see a reason you’d visit it unless you too have ancestors there. But honestly, we loved visiting it and seeing where my great-grandparents lived and where my grandfather and his siblings were born.
Kansas City and Independence
After Memphis we drove to Independence, a good-sized city right next to Kansas City, on the western edge of Missouri. When we decided to go there, we had a purpose: to see the National Frontier Trails Museum. Both readers of this blog will remember that Laurie and I are “rut nuts:” enthusiasts of the Oregon and California trails used by emigrants in the 1840s-1860s to move from the East Coast to California, Oregon and Washington. In the early days of emigration, Independence was the jumping-off place for the three main trails – the two mentioned above and the Santa Fe Trail, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
If you’re in the area and interested in the trails, this museum is worth a visit. It has exhibits on the three trails as well as on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Some pix:
Laurie checking out a map at the National Frontier Trails Museum
A replica of a wagon that would have been used on the Oregon-California trail. Imagine loading this with enough food for four-five months and heading off into the unknown.
We have a connection to stars of trail research: Irene Paden and her husband Bill, who spent many summers tracing the route of the California Trail. She wrote two excellent and well-known books about their travels and research on the California Trail. We’re interested in her because the Padens were best friends with my Arfsten grandparents for many years in Alameda, CA. My grandmother lived with Irene for several years when I was in high-school and when visiting my grandmother I was able to spend time in the basement of Irene’s house, which was chock-full of relics and artifacts they’d picked up on the trail over the years.
I learned that their collection had been donated to the Oregon-California Trails Association, which had then donated it to the National Frontier Trails Museum. I thought maybe some of that collection would be on display, but found just one small thing.
A knife from the Irene Paden collection.
The museum has just hired a collections manager and we’re hopeful that more of Irene’s collection will be on display in the future.
We also stopped in at the Oregon-California Trails Association office, which is next door to the museum. There we had an enjoyable conversation with a woman who has worked for OCTA for 30 years about OCTA and how much we enjoy being members. I asked about Irene Paden and she was able to show us all the information they had on her donation of the collection – inventories and descriptions of the items donated, clippings of news stories about it, pictures of the family. (The collection was actually donated by Irene’s son several years after her death.) Definitely a fun and rewarding stop on our trip.
Kansas City
Kansas City is a pretty cool place; we hope to explore it further on future trips. Our first stop was at a sculpture park associated with the Atkins-Nelson Art Museum. We were drawn here because the park has one of two Andy Goldsworthy walls (the other is in Storm King, New York. We visited that in 2019). This wall is not as long as Storm King’s, but we loved it.
We can’t say why we love the Andy Goldsworthy walls, but we do. Maybe that’s art: you don’t have to analyze why you like something. No matter what, these walls really touch us.
World War I Museum
Who’d’ve thunk there is a World War I museum in Kansas City, but there is: a spectacular one. It was overwhelming, really. I have no good pictures of it to show you. Laurie lasted about two hours, while I could have spent a full day here.
One last thing to do in Kansas City/Independence
Ribs, brisket, chicken, beans, cole-slaw, white cheddar mac-and-cheese, potato salad and white toast. It was great!
Big News
While we were in St. Louis, Craig was interviewed for a campaign position by a candidate for the Missouri Senate. He got the job, which was exciting for all of us, and a little nervous-making for Craig. He’ll be responsible for “field operations,” which means getting canvassers, phone callers and postcard writers, training and scheduling them, and increasing the candidate’s presence in the district. Although Missouri is a fairly conservative state (think Josh Hawley. No wait, don’t think Josh Hawley; it’ll fry your brain), the district his candidate is running in is definitely of the blue persuasion, so Craig says she has an excellent chance of winning. Craig was involved in campaigns in New York, and this is his first real paid job in the field. Pretty cool, we think.
Dream Daughter-in-law
We have always said that Annie is the best daughter-in-law ever. One morning, Laurie was having a late sleep when came a knock on the door. She opened it and there stood Annie and Henry, with a freshly-made latte for Laurie. Is that the sweetest thing ever?
That’s the wrap-up on our latest St. Louis sojourn. We were in Missouri for a little over two weeks, and we had a great time. We’re already looking forward to our Christmas trip to St. Louis.
P.S. Uncle Wiggily
Do any of you remember the Uncle Wiggily Longears books and stories? I remember having them read to me as a child and I read them to our kids. We brought an old Uncle Wiggily book of stories to read to Henry, expecting that he would find them too boring and slow. Wrong! He really enjoyed them and every night asked us to read a story.
Now for a bit of Uncle Wiggily trivia.The author, Howard Garis, worked for a newspaper and in 1910 wrote the first Uncle Wiggily story for the paper. He then wrote an Uncle Wiggily story every day, six days a week, for fifty-two years! (That is somewhere around 16,000 Uncle Wiggily stories!)
It was really fun to have Henry enjoy the Uncle Wiggily stories. And if the rabbit gentleman and Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy don’t fall into a vat of molasses and cause the postman to drop his mailbag, scattering postcards all over town, I’ll post something about our next trip – whenever and wherever that is.