Demand for timber spurred rail growth

Railroads were a driving force in the development and settlement of Southeast Missouri, especially the swampy areas south of Cape Girardeau.

As demand for timber grew, the need for rail service through the area became important to people like Louis Houck, who saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a growing industry.

"That's the huge demand early on, to get the timber out of here," said Dr. Joel Rhodes, a history professor at Southeast Missouri State University who's currently working on a history of Louis Houck. "The volume of lumber coming out of the Bootheel was staggering."

In fact, Rhodes said, one of Houck's clients was one of the largest cross-tie makers in the world at the time.

Three separate railroad systems operated here in the early days -- the St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern, the Cotton Belt and the Houck lines.

Many of the towns that sprang up along the Houck lines were named for Houck's colleagues -- Brownwood, Zalma, Wappapello and Sturdivant were some of them.

But the railroads also supplied needed goods to the towns along their routes, jobs to the people there, a sense of identity and even a thriving passenger service.

And the trains needed many stops along the way to provide them service -- water for boilers and fuel. Those "tank towns" dotted the area.

Then as highways and automobiles started to take prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, the railroads became less important for transporting goods and people. Within decades many of the lines that ran through Southeast Missouri would be out of service, and the bustling activity of train towns would turn into the sleepy atmosphere of a bedroom community.

Today the only remnants of some of the smaller train towns are markings on old maps.