University Demolition Is Just Part Of Its Nature

The historic handball court located on the Southeast Missouri State University River Campus is no more. It has been dismantled brick by brick and some of those will be incorporated into a residence hall that will occupy the site in a year or so.

Please don't assume this musing is disparaging of the University for appearing to be massively hypocritical for offering a renowned Historic Preservation degree on the one hand while apparently carrying a sledgehammer in the other.

No, I am not going to chastise the University for how it deals with the various properties it has absorbed into its Jabba the Hut bulk over the years. However, I do applaud fellow blogger on this website -- James Baughn -- for his efforts to make this travesty of architectural eradication known to the general public. Good effort, James!

But get over it.

I know that sounds harsh, but everyone knows that a zebra can't change its stripes, you don't step on Superman's cape, and you will never, EVER change the University's affinity for tearing down old structures. It's part of their nature, and I have proof that pre-dates the founding of the institution -- which I will share in a minute.

Actually, before James and various media outlets publicized the fact the University was preparing to tear down yet another historic structure to make way for their definition of progress, I never realized that the massive brick wall at the River Campus was a handball court.

I always assumed it was where executions took place back in the dark, early days of Cape Girardeau when thieves and cutthroats prowled the streets at night while God Fearing Folk huddled in their houses praying they would live to see another dawn (Insert your own joke about current day South Cape).

You can't tell me, you didn't think the same thing. The "handball court" looked like someplace you would blindfold a bandito, stick a cigarette in his mouth, then at the count of ten, Blam! A handball court just sounds too pedestrian.

Perhaps, I'm right. Perhaps, after the executioner's wall had done it's duty, and the city was purged of nefarious lowlifes, the town fathers decided that they wanted to scrub the memory of death and bloodshed associated with the structure from the city's collective memory. That kind of thing is not good for business or for attracting pioneers to a growing frontier town.

And what better way to purge the local memory than create a story that this massive brick wall was an innocuous handball court, and those pocks and divots were created by overzealous monks playing some killer rounds. After a generation or two, the memory of its true origins faded and the handball story became fact. Sounds perfectly logical to me.

And now bricks from this structure, bloodied by untold executions conducted in the city's wild and wooly days are to be incorporated into a residence hall. Has the making for a good horror story, doesn't it?

But I digress. The purpose of this blog was to defend the University and what some people perceive as a lust to tear down anything that doesn't fit into its leaders' vision. While some may think this is a new development, progress as defined by the University has been this way for decades and a recent eBay acquisition contained the proverbial smoking gun, verifying this theory.

In 1906, the Board of Regents commissioned a very fancy invitation to the dedication of the Missouri State Normal School Buildings. That is what Southeast was called back then. I stumbled across one of these invitations while trolling through eBay and since the price was low, I bought it.

The invitation -- whose cover I have scanned in below -- shows many of the campus buildings as they were in the first decade of the 20th century. But as I was thumbing through the document, a loose photo fell out.

It obviously did not belong and is quite old, with a handwritten date of 1871 scribbled on the front. That's two years BEFORE the official founding of the University and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the University has always had a fondness for demolishing structures it didn't commission.

Plus it helps explain why the settlers of Southern Illinois were so obsessed with Egypt.