April 13th was the Learning in Retirement trip to visit a few small local towns. Our original plan was to visit Meta Missouri and visit the Diamond Dog Food factory to see how dog food was made. Unfortunately, I guess, the Federal government changed their regulations and now prohibits tours at pet food factories....supposedly as a guard against e-coli and salmonella infection. (But I'm not sure who was at risk - us or the dog food.) This type of restriction supposedly already exists for human food.
We drove through Meta and looked at the outside of the factory. Diamond Dog Food seems to be devouring Meta and is the largest thing in the town. Meta was once a railroad town and there are many very old Victorian homes that are slowly crumbling away through neglect. The Rock Island RR went through Meta but the line has been shut down for maybe 20 years.
The weather was beautiful and the Redbud and Dogwood trees were in full bloom. We had around 50 people on the bus and a few were familiar but most of them I didn't know. The bus driver had a few jokes and some snappy stories and the group was in good spirits and seemed agreeable. I'm not a good bus rider and with this age group (I was one of the youngest) I expected others to be a little grumpy but everyone was fine. We had local tour guides for both St. Elizabeth and in Tuscumbia
Our first stop was the town of St. Elizabeth and we had an appointment with a bunch of school kids at St. Elizabeth R-IV school. This is a K-12 school with a total of 253 students. There are 14 seniors. They have had only one student drop out in about 20 years and I'm sure everyone knows who that was. We parked the bus and were met by a giant Hornet - their mascot - who welcomed us to the school and we were ushered into the gym and given juice and cookies. We were sung to by about 100 kids from grades K-3 who have already memorized the school's Alma Mater. The school band is all junior high kids because the senior high kids don't have time for band. We were hosted by the FBLA chapter - Future Business Leaders of America - which is about half of the senior high kids. There are a few competitions that they participate in on the district, state and national level. Some of the winners showed off what they had done and it was impressive.
We toured the community center that was built by WW-II veterans when they came home from the war. This was a pretty impressive accomplishment that relied on mostly volunteer workers or contributed materials. The place includes a small bowling alley and a little bar, a large kitchen and a large group or meeting room. The community quilting bee was going on and the ladies were working on two large quilts. These are auctioned off or sold as raffle prizes at the annual town picnic.
Across the street is the Saint Lawrence Catholic Church...the main church in town. This is a very Catholic community and you would think it would be called St. Lawrence but no one is sure why it became St. Elizabeth except that there was a town of St. Elizabeth on the Osage River that was abandoned and they moved the post office to the newer town that was then called Charlestown...but now is St. Elizabeth. The brick church dates to around 1907 and replaced an older frame building. Our tour guide gave us a great deal of history of the church. It went through a modernization process in the 1970s when the Bishop decided that all of the ornate decorations and statues needed to be removed and the interior had to be painted a plain olive-green color. Surprisingly the people went along with the plan and the modernization took place but the alters and statues were just placed in storage...for a while. Eventually a new Monsignor arrived and the church was restored pretty much without getting the Bishop's approval and with no significant cost. The church does have an abundance of statues...I think I counted fourteen not including the stations of the cross. The damage done by the Bishop's modernization effort was pretty much overcome but there are still hard feelings and a few places where the restoration couldn't repair the damage. Only local people would know that because the place looks very nice. St. Lawrence (San Lorenzo) is the patron saint of Bernalillo in NM where I went to watch them do the Matachines dances last August during the local fiesta. I don't think they do that in St. Elizabeth. But -- they do tell the same story of his martyrdom. He was roasted on an iron grill and before he died he told the Roman Emperor to "...flip me over, I'm done on this side".
Yes. That's our bus parked in front of the store....we took that bus places where a bus has never been before and got some very odd looks.
We had lunch at Kitty's Place....the local cafe presided over by a boisterous Miss Kitty who seemed overjoyed to have a restaurant full of hungry people. I had to order my food several weeks ago as part of the advance planning. I had fried chicken, fresh green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, a roll and a piece of coconut cream pie with lemonade. I ordered chicken and green beans but the other stuff came with it. It was very good but I was stuffed. The best fried chicken I've had for a while. Since this was sort of the standard lunch, everyone was stuffed and we still had to go to Tuscumbia.
We waddled back to the bus with our local guide running along side telling us all the stuff she forgot to tell us -- mostly about the veteran's memorial they have in town listing every local soldier who ever served in any war.
It is a ten mile drive to Tuscumbia but several people were starting to nod off. The road is very twisty and hilly so most of us were awake hoping the bus would make it OK. We crossed the "Bridge to Nowhere" across the Osage...the very first stimulus package project in Missouri that got people in St. Louis upset. It's a good bridge and traffic can now safely cross the river.
We picked up our local guide and he proceeded to take us and our huge buss on a driving tour of Tuscumbia, the county seat of Miller County. I have never actually been in Tuscumbia but have been by the town but always turn off to cross the bridge. This is a river town close by the Osage River and the town and does not have a huge and dominating Catholic church, which makes it unusual in this area. Our bus tour was a start and stop sort of thing...he would have the driver move the bus 100 feet and then stop while he told a story....then we would move another 100 feet. Tuscumbia was a thriving place up until the mid 1940s but a flood in 1943 washed away much of the lower town. It was also a steamboat landing and they could send stuff up the Osage or down to St. Louis. The Anchor Milling Company was the major business. After the flood and the demise of steamboating and the construction of Bagnall Dam Tuscumbia lost most of it's focus until they started making cedar hillbilly novelties....mostly little hand made cedar outhouses that were popular at tourist traps in the Ozarks. That industry employed 80 people at one time.
After making a thorough trip through the streets of Tuscumbia we made it too the Miller County museum located in the last remaining Anchor Milling building. This is a pretty impressive museum for a small town and they seem to be the repository for everybody's stuff. They have it categorized and grouped in exhibits that cover early pioneers and the Civil War and local medical history. Lee Mace of Ozark Opry fame was from here so they have some of his stuff. They have an emphasis on steamboating which is a little surprising for people because they don't think the Osage River had steamboats. The boats weren't huge but they seemed to be pretty busy. There was a season each year when they could make runs way up the river toward Warsaw and Clinton.
The museum has the very barber chair that our tour guide sat in when he got his first haircut -- probably 70 years ago. They have a busy genealogy library and a genealogist on duty once a week.
Outside they have two log cabins that were relocated to the museum. One was built around 1863 and was 1 1/2 stories with a sturdy stone fireplace. The other log cabin is a small slave cabin that was home to a woman who apparently had several kids and is included in some family trees.
It was almost 4 PM so we climbed back on the bus and headed for home. It was maybe a 30 minute ride but about a third of the passengers were asleep by the time we got home.
