- The humanist philosophy of Lester Mondale (3/12/24)1
- Cape Osteopathic Hospital opens its doors (3/5/24)
- 8 killed and a million dollars damage done in 1924 tornado (2/27/24)1
- Jackson's militant priest, county recorder at odds over marriage licenses (2/20/24)
- Streaking fad comes to Cape (2/13/24)2
- Recalling the start of MEW (2/6/24)
- A few more items from the 1923 end-of-the-year edition (1/30/24)1
1960 map illustrated early history of park area
This photograph of a river overlook in Trail of Tears Park was taken by G.D. Fronabarger in 1961. (Southeast Missourian archive)
Three years after the state of Missouri accepted the land in northeast Cape Girardeau County for the development of park that commemorates the Trail of Tears, The Southeast Missourian published a hand-drawn, full-page map of the park. The names of the various sites in the park that bore historic significance were labeled, and an accompanying article traced the history of some of those names.
Because the map is so large, I cannot reproduce it here in a readable form. But it can be found at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=Oc-rVwKPngoC&dat=19601008&printse...
Following is a reprint of the article, published Oct. 8, 1960. The initials at the end of the story identify the writer as Judith Ann Crow.
NAMES OF EARLY DAYS ABOUND IN NEW PARK AREA
Colorful Designations For Trail of Tears Points Are Recalled.
Blind Tiger, Devil's Tea Table, Hanging Dog Island, Hobo Hollow, Bee Bluff -- these are some of the colorful, fanciful names given through the past century-and-a-half plus to places in what is now Trail of Tears State Park. The reflect the folklore of the area, just as the names Sublett Spring and Hollow, Jim Reynolds Hollow, Vancil Landing, and Golliher Hollow tell of its early settlers.
Two Girardeans, Clarence N. Fultz, 1801 Bend Road, and Henry J. Perry, 516 Johnson St., worked together to prepare the accompanying map of the park. It was Mr. Perry who reached into his memory of some 70 years of living in the park area and provided the place names and the lore about them as Mr. Fultz put them on the map.
The Blind Tiger near Sublett Spring up Sublett Hollow -- no doubt they pronounced it "holler" -- Was a point of rendezvous between moonshiner and customer.
How He Got Liquor.
As Mr. Perry tells it, when a man wanted some corn likker, he took his sack of corn to a big black oak stump up from Sublett Spring on one of the park's razor-back ridges. With the corn was a jug.
The customer fired his gun twice in rapid succession, then departed for an hour or so. When he came back, the corn was gone, the jug was full. No one dared stay near enough to sneak a look at this rapid switch, for the moonshiner carried an accurate gun, and had little patience.
This wasn't in prohibition days, either. Mr. Perry first heard the story of the Blind Tiger in 1895, when he was 7 years old. He recalls a 4-inch iron pipe jutting out from under an old road. It carried water from Sublett Spring and reputedly cooled coils of the still.
Later -- about 1902, when the railroad was built through this section -- George Jackson had a Saloon at Sublett Hollow, near where the Blind Tiger used to be.
Early Landowners.
Some of the early landowners in this area, as Mr. Perry recalls, were the Subletts, Giboney Houck, Arthur Perry, C.M. "Matt" Golliher, and John Kesterson. The Vancils owned the biggest track, which they sold to the Manskers. Later, this land, which lies north of Golliher's, was bought by George William Miller, the father of Dr. O.J. Miller who now lives on Bend Road in Cape.
Up in the northwest corner of what is now the Park, Henry Schenimann and Sterrell Bray owned a good piece of land. Ed Rankin and John Rodenberry had places in Moccasin Hollow, and August Froemsdorf's land was where the riding stables will be. August Litzelfelner owned land on Indian Creek at the north end of the Park, including Hobo Hollow.
Shawnee Indians once made the rough wooded hills their hunting ground, and had many camps there, usually near the numerous springs. (Their headquarters were at Shawneetown.) They have been gone from the area for well over a century6, but such Indian relics as are to be found there are more likely to be Shawnee than Cherokee, even though the park gets its name from the tragic trek of the Cherokee exiles in 1838-39.
Most of the Cherokees were brought over by ferry from Willard's Landing on the Illinois shore. The Winter was better, and supplies short. Some 500 exiles died coming through the riverside portions of Illinois and Missouri. Among the dead was the Princess Otahki, whose grave lies in Indian Grave Hollow. The Jack Sheppard House, which stood near the south entrance to the park and near the site of the Old Iona School, was the only settler's home standing in the park area at the time the Cherokees came through, Mr. Perry says.
Shoes or Snakes?
Moccasin Springs gushes out from a flat rock shelf which extends into the water about 50 yards downstream from the site of the old Golliher house, where century-old boxwoods still add their grandeur to the picturesqueness of the landscape.
These springs go their name, it is said, from several moccasin tracks on the solid rock shelf. (Another story says the name comes from the petrified moccasin snakes to be seen in the rocks.)
In the old days, Mr. Perry recalls, a man named Mabrey had a shantyboat beached on these rocks during low water, where he sold "hop tea." (Note to the innocent: "Hop tea" is beer, sold under that name because Mr. Mabrey didn't care to bother with buying a license to sell liquor.) Mr. Mabrey was shot in a fight with a young man in 1902.
Devil's Tea Table was a rocky extrusion of a high bluff overlooking the river, flat and smooth on top as any table but obviously inaccessible to anybody but the Devil himself -- hence the name. (It belongs to the "family" of "Devil-places" along the river which include the Devil's Bake Oven and Devil's Backbone near Wittenberg and Grand Tower.) The table was blasted off about 1902, when the railroad went through, but the name has clung to the bluff.
Boats and Bars.
Rocks and rapids made the Mississippi tricky for early steamboat navigators, and Stonewall Rock Bar, just below the mouth of Indian Creek on the Missouri side, tells the story of a typical disaster. The Steamer Stonewall burned on Oct. 26, 1869, Mr. Fultz relates. Unable to get over the rocks to shore, she sank, and around her hull the sandbar which bears her name was formed. It was at this point, too, that La Mascot sank the same year.
Another bar was formed on the Illinois side downstream from the mouth of Indian Creek when the Steamer North Star sank. The bar is now called Hull Island. Mr. Perry's father often told of seeing the wreckage of the Pawpaw, sunk near Vancil's Landing about 1865, when he came home from the Civil War.
Bee Bluff, says Mr. Perry, was so named because colonies of bees used to build their homes along its stepp sides; the double danger of the home-defending bees and the slippery climb itself presumably made the honey all the sweeter to the adventurous youths who went after it.
Encompassing some 500 acres, the old Spanish Grant survey line runs from the river back about three-quarters of a mile, and about a mile-and-a-quarter up and down the river; it lies in the southern part of the park. Neither Mr. Fultz nor Mr. Perry knows to whom this particular section of land was originally granted, or at what time during the Spanish Regime (1762-1800) the survey was made.
Hanging Dog Bluff, above Neelys Landing on the Missouri side of the river, got its name from a prominent point of rock which just out from the side of the bluff and looks much like a dog's head. The channel of the river crosses from this bluff to an island on the Illinois side -- so the island came to be called "Hanging Dog Island."
Whereas now nearly all parts of the Park are fairly accessible by roadway -- or will be when the development is complete -- in the early days the only road through the area to the river was Vancil Trail, which followed Vancil Hollow to Vancil Landing.
There must have been some Civil War skirmishing near what is now the main entrance to the Park, for in 1938, Mr. Perry's brother, Jess, felled an oak tree there, and found that it had grown around a cannon ball much like those found in Cape Girardeau after the battle here.
Pine Hill, Rocky Knoll, Lone Pine Hill, Cobble Hollow, and Dug Hill are other place names redolent of the area's past and its physical characteristics. Dug Hill, for example, began as a sort of knoll, an old roadway went alongside it, and gradually dug deeper and deeper into its side. Kids used to dig caves into the soft dirt. Dug Hill is just east of the location of the Park's Lake C.
Neither Mr. Fultz nor Mr. Perry, however, (being gentlemen in the best sense) would venture more than a discrete smile when asked for what gone-but-not-quite-forgotten female Big Flora Creek was named.
JAC
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