From the 1940 tax book

At the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, one of the many collections we keep is tax records -- monstrous books, oversized and heavy, that list personal property or real-estate taxes paid by Cape Girardeau County property owners in a given year, going back to the mid-1800s. Many of the tax books are a post-and-board structure, meaning metal posts bind the pages between two covers, or boards. Creative naming, right?

Each spring semester, students from Southeast Missouri State University make their way to our facility to research a given property's history, and that involves digging into the tax books, searching by property description (not street address, as they're not listed that way, and anyway, street addresses have changed throughout history), looking for a telltale jump in valuation that indicates a house was built on a lot, or an improvement of some sort was made. That means researching between several books in a single session, a physically intensive process that's made a little easier if the books are indexed. Most of the tax books have a handy index in front that gives the page number for the towns and neighborhoods, with the less-populated areas closer to the front of the book and Jackson and Cape Girardeau more toward the back, generally speaking, and that makes it a simpler process, but archives assistant Tiffany Fleming and I have been indexing the indexless tax books lately, and in the 1940 book, we found a few treasures.

I have found loose sheets or bits of paper in bound volumes before, and generally speaking, I will remove them to a more appropriate housing, especially if the paper is acidic and could damage the volume's pages. That's why I removed these pieces from the book, and made a note of which pages they were removed from. I will place them inside a protective covering inside the front cover so they won't cause damage or be damaged themselves. I thought they were interesting, and since they have holes punched out of them, obviously they were included when the book was bound, so they are part of the book's history.

First up is a blank application for a license from the State of Missouri Conservation Commission. I thought it was interesting that non-residents could purchase a fishing permit but not a hunting-only permit -- in today's dollars, that $10 hunting/fishing permit for a non-resident would be about $30. I also thought the line about whether the applicant could write his own name was interesting -- literacy is widely assumed now, 90 years later.

On the back of one of these blank applications is some long division, which I thought was interesting, and on the back of the other was a string of numbers that I think are probably related to a particular landowner's parcels.

Then there's Ray Dake. He was a representative operating out of Poplar Bluff for an office equipment company in Springfield, Missouri, if his stationery is to be believed, and scribbled across the back of that same stationery is more of this ephemeral information that probably wasn't meant to be included in the permanent record, but there it was, regardless. At the bottom of the sheet are decent words to live by: "There is one thing worse than a quitter; it's the fellow who is afraid to begin."

These scraps of acidic paper provide an intriguing window into the day-to-day operations of a county government office from nearly 100 years ago, and here they are at the Archive Center.