19th century integrated workplaces

From the 1880s-1920s, Cape Girardeau's Matteson Paint Mill supplied a locally-sourced product desired throughout the region -- that is, if white or "Spanish Brown" suited your purpose.

Today, paint projects start at the home improvement store. A boggling choice of brands, colors, with the shaker machine to mix it all up. It never occurred to me that in a previous era, a high quality paint, renowned regionally for beauty and durability, was made from natural resources dug from the ground in and around Cape Girardeau.

My first awareness of Cape Girardeau's historic paint mill came when reviewing the pension records of Tony McGee, a Civil War veteran of the 57th United States Colored Infantry. Tony was born enslaved in Alabama, but at the age of 18, voluntarily enlisted for Union Army service at Cairo, Illinois, his regiment stationed primarily in Arkansas. In post-war years, McGee worked as a roustabout on steamboats. When Cape Girardeau became his home, he first was a farm worker on the Houck farm, and then at the Matteson Paint Mill.

An active member of Second Missionary Baptist Church, McGee's association with fellow churchmen Edward and George Johnson -- Matteson Mill's crushing plant superintendent and fireman -- may have helped McGee secure a job at the mill. Mill owners, James A. Matteson and his son, Robert W., hired dependable laborers regardless of race.

Matteson's mine sites produced superior pigments. A rare clay ochre, extracted from deep underground pockets produced paint known as "Spanish Brown." "Flint" and calcium carbonate from deposits at the Houck stadium site, as well as a quarry north of Capaha Park, produced elements for a superior white paint. The mined minerals were pulverized and the resulting ground powered pigments were packaged in wood barrels to be shipped far and wide.

Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, 1893-1915, detail the factory operation at 400 N. Main St. -- a wood frame structure housed the mill room (crush and ground lime rock and clay ochre), storage and a receiving/shipping room. Matteson's other factory sites around town mixed pigments with oil, but their primary production was packing and shipping dry materials.

I have researched many of the Colored Troop veterans who lived in Cape Girardeau, and McGee is one of the few Black freedmen working in industrial-type employment, while most veterans were day laborers, farm hands or draymen. In later decades, local industries employing Black workers expanded. By 1917, several military draft registrants listed Matteson Paint Mill as their employer. Industries employing Black workers included cooperages (barrel making shops), quarries, the railroad, bakeries and construction companies.

Early industrial work was hazardous and unregulated. McGee's military pension file included his widow's claim, that McGee's death, at the age of 57, was caused by "dust from the rocks" at the paint mill. He died from consumption and bronchitis in 1907. Matteson died of liver cancer, also in 1907, and his son, heir mill-owner, Robert, died of tuberculosis in 1921.

The Mill operated more than 40 years, but the 1923 Sanborn map indicated the mill was "old and vacant."