COMMERCE DESCRIBED BY WRITER AS `HAUNTING'

After driving more than 5,000 miles up and down both sides of the Mississippi River over a six-month period, travel writer Tom Weil concludes that "All rivers run through time as well as place."

Two of the places that stick in his mind are nearby: Commerce, which he calls "one of the most haunting towns on the entire river," and the promontory known as Cape Rock.

"The reason why it's so haunting is there are no developments around there," he says. "You get the flavor of how the town developed before there was any civilization, how the past must have been when Ensign Girardot established his trading post."

During the fall of 1990 and spring of 1991, Weil followed the river from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its mouth -- Pilottown, La. -- to research his new book, "The Mississippi River: Nature, Culture and Travel Sites Along the Mighty Mississip."

In doing so, he stopped to record the historic, cultural, scientific and scenic significance of every city and settlement along the great river. And of all of them, Commerce distinguished itself as the town that time forgot.

Currently traveling aboard the Delta Queen riverboat as a lecturer on the river's history and lore, Weil said, "Commerce truly has the flavor of a frontier town lost in place and lost in time because there's very little there.

"The riverfront is completely undeveloped. You have the feeling you've stepped back a hundred years or more."

Back in the mists of prehistory, some scientists think, Commerce may have been a much livelier place.

"Some geologists believe that at this point, in ancient times, the Mississippi's mouth entered the Gulf over a 300-foot waterfall," he writes. "Now the waters flow calmly past the unpeopled shore."

Weil's book notes that Commerce provided the only west bank rock landing on the river south of Cape Girardeau a century and a half ago, before the Little River Drainage District reclaimed the marshes.

He writes, "This advantage, however, hardly resulted in any lasting prosperity for Commerce, whose name mocks its present day inactivity."

But Commerce once was the county seat, Weil points out, and had a population triple its current 200 residents. It was home to 12 stores, four hotels, two stave factories, a pottery, a steam gristmill, a newspaper and two churches.

Now, "Of all the settlements along the great river, Commerce, more than any other, somehow possesses the feeling of an isolated frontier town, lost and lonely and forgotten in the vast reaches of the Mississippi Valley," he writes.

Weil's 500-page tome, published by Hippocrene Books, is intended as a "practical guide" for those who travel along the river. Its information was gleaned during Weil's sojourns along the Great River Road that stretches alongside the Mississippi.

A St. Louis native who for 13 years wrote a travel column for the Post-Dispatch, he says almost every bed-and-breakfast along the road is listed in the book.

Weil calls Cape Girardeau "a pleasantly laid-back, hilly river town" in the book. "It's an extremely attractive river city, mainly due to the hills..." he expounded by phone from Vicksburg, Miss., during a tour. "I was impressed by the hills and the vantage points."

The book details the well-known story of Frenchman Jean Baptiste Girardot's establishment of a trading post around 1720, and the arrival 70 years later of the city's founder, Spanish agent Louis Lorimier.

Weil tells of Lorimier wearing his hair Indian-style, "in braids so long he used them to whip his horse..."

The book describes many of the expected Cape Girardeau landmarks in addition to the Coca-Cola "3 cents plain" sign on the Port Cape Girardeau restaurant and muralist Jake Wells' depiction of the city's past on a wall at Kent Library.

"Going back not only to the French but also to the Spanish era, Cape has many layers of history... up to the summer of 1993 and the Great Flood," Weil said.

Told that Commerce was hit hard by last summer's flooding, he observed, "Maybe it's even more haunting now."