Cape traveled bumpy road to transportation progress

A century ago, ferries provided the only transportation across the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau. and steamboats regularly traversed the waterway. Land travel was bumpy at best.

Back then, there were no airplanes, concrete streets or river bridges.

Louis Lorimier, who established the town in 1806, operated the first ferry here.

The town "is here because there is a wide, flat riverfront with a gentle incline," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University.

That made it easier for oxen and horses to pull supplies to and from the river, he said.

Horses, wagons, boats

By the turn of the century, most area residents still traveled by horse and wagon. Steamboats carried passengers up and down the river. For many years the city was represented by steamboats bearing the name Cape Girardeau.

The Eagle Packet Co. of St. Louis had three boats named for the city. The last, christened at Cape Girardeau in 1924, traveled up and down the river until 1932. By 1937, most of the steamboats were out of business. Goods were being shipped by rail and truck.

In the early 1900s, railroads were expanding. The Frisco Railroad began providing regular passenger service connecting Cape Girardeau to St. Louis and Memphis in June 1904.

The railroad was extended to Cape Girardeau at that time to provide easier transportation to and from the World's Fair in St. Louis, Nickell said.

"It really did extend the community," Nickell said. Until then, the fastest travel to St. Louis -- 22 hours -- was by steamboat. Trains made it a three- or four-hour trip.

The heyday of passenger train travel was in the 1920s. More than 60 years of Frisco passenger train service at Cape Girardeau ended Sept. 17, 1965.

By then, cars and trucks had become the popular mode of transportation. But early in the century it was a bumpy, dusty ride.

"The roads were full of ruts," said Nickell. "They were all gravel and mud."

Even as late as 1929, you couldn't leave Cape Girardeau without traveling on gravel roads, he said. "Every time you passed a car, there was a cloud of dust."

In the early 1900s, few automobiles could be found in the town of 4,800 people. When President William Howard Taft visited Cape Girardeau by boat in 1909, cars had to be brought in from Perryville, Mo., for the parade, Nickell said.

Only two years later -- on Oct. 17, 1911 -- the Southeast Missourian described the transportation scene in Cape Girardeau.

"A three-yoke ox team on the levee is waiting to be driven on the ferry Gladys. Close by is the steamer Cape unloading three automobiles, one an electric car. A passenger train, a freight train and a work train are on the Frisco tracks.

"Mule and horse teams are in sight and a trolley car, less than a block away, unloads and gathers passengers. Every mode of transportation is to be seen except a flying machine," the newspaper reported.

The city had a trolley system from 1893 to 1934. It started out as a mule trolley. At one time, the trolley car barn on Good Hope Street stabled 28 mules. Later, the trolley system was powered by electricity.

Now the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau is planning to set up a trolley bus system. The vehicle would resemble an old-fashioned trolley and haul tourists around the city.

At one time, Cape Girardeau also had its own bus system. Bus service began in 1941. Cape Transit Co. shut down the buses on May 31, 1969, citing a lack of passengers.

In order to accommodate the increase in vehicles, concrete streets began being built after the Panama Canal was completed in 1914, Nickell said.

In 1916, Congress passed the highway act. "That was the greatest stimulus to concrete highway construction in American history," Nickell said. For every $9 a state spent on road construction, the federal government provided $1.

In the early 1920s, the concrete paving of U.S. 61 between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau began.

Highway 61 was a very important road to St. Louis, Nickell said.

"It was sometimes called the civil rights highway in America. "Blacks from the South came up the highway. It was the main Midwestern, north-and-south highway."

Meanwhile, the muddy Mississippi River remained a great divide breached only by boat through most of the 1920s. That was before the city's first river bridge opened in September 1928. It took 20 months to build the 4,744-foot-long span at a cost of $1.6 million.

Initially, there was little traffic on the toll bridge because the span connected to only dirt roads on the Illinois side. But the bridge soon drew Illinois residents to Cape Girardeau to work and shop, adding to the decline of Cairo, Ill., as a shopping destination.

During World War II, guards were posted on the bridge because of concerns about sabotage.

In 1957, the toll charges ended and the city celebrated the "freeing" of the bridge with a parade and a queen contest.

The two-lane span was replaced by the new, four-lane Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge on Dec. 13, 2003. Thousands attended the dedication in windy, subfreezing weather. Spectators walked onto the bridge, snapping photos of the occasion.

One of the biggest transportation changes in Southeast Missouri was the construction of Interstate 55, which made the city accessible to countless car-dependent Americans.

"The goal of the interstate highway system was to connect all towns that had 50,000 people or more. Cape Girardeau was fortunate it was between St. Louis and Memphis," Nickell said.

It wasn't until August 1972 that the last stretch of I-55 between Cape Girardeau and St. Louis was completed. Then-governor Warren Hearnes cut the ribbon at the dedication near Perryville, Mo. The ceremony drew more than 1,500 people.

"It's meant a great deal to us," said former Cape Girardeau city manager J. Ronald Fischer. "It just kind of put Cape Girardeau on the map."

The Cape Girardeau Regional Airport opened near Scott City in 1947, having previously served as a World War II Army flight training school known as Harris Field. "They had about 30 airplanes in the air at the same time," said local pilot John T. Seesing. "They just landed on a grass field."

Seesing remembers Cape Girardeau before there was an airport and when aviation was a novelty. In 1939, a Piper Cub with floats used the Mississippi River as a landing strip. "It was the first airplane I saw that close," he recalled.

Various commuter lines have served Cape Girardeau dating back to the 1950s when Ozark Airlines started making flights to and from the city.

Seesing said the airport remains a vital part of the area's transportation system. For some it's the "front door" to the city, he said.

Nickell said Cape Girardeau continues to benefit today from boats, planes and automobiles.

"We are very much a transportation crossroads."

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123