CAIRO HISTORY: CUSTOM HOUSE OFFERS GLIMPSE OF CIVIL WAR

A centerpiece of the museum is this Grant exhibit, which features the desk used by Gen. U.S. Grant during his command at Cairo in the first six months of the Civil War.

CAIRO, Ill. -- Ben Bacon spent a lot of time around one of the centerpiece exhibits at the Cairo Custom House Museum recently. The object of Bacon's attention was a model of the Civil War Gunboat Cairo.

"I'm really looking forward to Vicksburg," said Bacon. "I understand they have the actual gunboat on display there."

Bacon, of Greenwich, Conn., was one of 25 people on a 10-day, Smithsonian Museum of American History Civil War Tour, which started in Paducah, Ky., last week.

Following the stop at the Custom House Friday afternoon, the Smithsonian group boarded a bus en route to Columbus Belmont Battlefield State Park at Columbus, Ky.

The Smithsonian group will visit Shilo Battlegrounds this week and several areas in Mississippi, including three days at Vicksburg, before winding up the tour in New Orleans.

Columbus Belmont Park, said A. Wilson Greene, who is serving as Smithsonian tour guide, is a fortified point on the Mississippi River known as the Confederacy's "Gibraltar of the West."

The Cairo gunboat, which was built at nearby Mound City, was put into service in 1862, but had a short-lived life as it went down in the Yazoo River on Dec. 12, 1862, during a Civil War battle.

"This is the first time I've seen a model of the USS Cairo," said Bacon, an author who recently completed a Civil War book titled "Abraham Lincoln's Men and Machines."

The book, said Bacon, goes a little deeper than just the history of the Civil War. "I take the history a step further and discuss men and machines in the war."

The new book, to be published by Presidio, a book company in San Francisco, will be on the market by June.

Louise Ogg, a member of the Custom House Commission, which was appointed by the city in the mid-1980s to provide for restoration of the old three-level Custom House in Cairo, said the museum was fortunate to have the Gunboat Cairo model. It was constructed by Harold Christensen of Fulton, Texas, and measures about 8-by-3 feet.

Christensen offered the model to the Vicksburg, Miss., museum, said Ogg, but Vicksburg already had reconstructed the original Cairo, which was raised in 1962, 100 years after it sank in the nearby Yazoo River. "Christensen, originally from Murphysboro, knew about Cairo and its Custom House project, so he asked if we would be interested. We were, and he donated it to the museum." said Ogg.

Bacon, Smithsonian representative Dennis Smoot of Washington, D.C., Greene of Petersburg, Va., and 22 others from all parts of the nation who are members of the Smithsonian Association viewed a number of Civil War items at the Custom House.

In one display case near the USS Cairo exhibit is a number of items that were on board the Cairo when it was raised. These include a coffee pot, knife, fork, spoon and mess plate.

Of great interest to the group was another centerpiece: the Grant exhibit, which features the desk used by Gen. U.S. Grant during command at Cairo in the first six months of the Civil War.

The latest acquisition by the museum, said Russell Ogg, another member of the Custom House Commission, is a Civil War Quartermaster Corp. stenciling kit.

"These kits, comprised of chisels of all sizes and a hammer, were used to stencil names on items -- trunks and anything metal -- used by the Quartermaster Corp." said Ogg.

"We're receiving new items consistently" said Mrs. Ogg, a former librarian at the Cairo Public Library and local historian.

On display at the Custom House is a number of old photographs from Matthew Brady, a noted photographer during the Civil War era; an old post office display from Pomona; old bottles - champaign and soda - from the old Steam Bottling Works; a turn-of-the-century telephone booth, sports and many other historic displays.

"That's what it was, a custom house," said Ogg. "The city had been declared an official `Port of Delivery' by the 33rd Congress in 1854, and a surveyor of customs was appointed to inspect and collect fees after goods had passed the point of entry here. Five years later it was determined that the city needed a Custom House."

It wasn't until after the Civil War that funds could be appropriated for the building, but it became a reality when the doors opened on the evening of June 16, 1872.

The building, which has housed customs offices, a post office, police station, federal court and other government agencies through the years, closed in 1975, when the Cairo Police Department moved into its own building just across the street.