HOUCK, COBB HELPED USHER REGION INTO 20TH CENTURY

During the first two decades of the 1900s, Cape Girardeau and environs were undergoing monumental changes. In 1904, a motorized auto called "Red Devil" began running between Cape Girardeau and Jackson, heralding the demise of the stagecoach. The Little River Drainage District was established in 1912, leading to the reclamation of the vast swamplands southwest of the city. And in 1919, the Normal School became a Teachers College.

Louis Houck, the region's foremost entrepreneur at the end of the 19th century, and former slave John Cobb couldn't have come from more diverse backgrounds, but both had a major impact on the region.

Houck saw how railroads could connect the dots between the swamplands of Southeast Missouri and how important the university would be to its future. Cobb became a symbol of the role education would play in shedding the legacies of slavery.

Houck was born in Mascoutah, Ill., in 1840. He worked in his father's print shop, earned a law degree and on moving to St. Louis was almost immediately appointed assistant U.S. attorney general.

He was making $125 a month and barely surviving. "My experience as a salaried officer created a great prejudice in my mind against working for a salary," he wrote in his "Reminiscences," serialized in 1969 in the Southeast Missourian.

Determining that he could have more impact in a smaller city, Houck stepped off a steamboat in Cape Girardeau in 1869 and set up his law practice. He married Mary Hunter Giboney, daughter of one of Cape Girardeau's pioneer families, on Christmas Day 1872.

Houck later became interested in building railroads -- 500 miles of them throughout Southeast Missouri. "I desire to construct railroads from Cape Girardeau that will branch fan shape across the swamps and through backwoods country in order to make valuable land and resources available, and give to persons living in the hinterlands easy access to the outside world," he wrote in his diary.

In his leisure time he wrote. The results completed more than a 20-year period in his three-volume "History of Missouri" and two-volume "Spanish Regime."

When the Missouri Legislature decided in 1872 to place a normal school in Southeast Missouri, Houck helped champion Cape Girardeau. When the competition came down to Cape Girardeau, Jackson, Ironton and Fredericktown, it was the offer by Houck and others to buy the construction bonds that prevailed.

Houck Field House and Houck Stadium at Southeast Missouri State University are tributes to his 39 years of service on the college's board of regents -- 36 as president -- and his generosity to the school. He, M.E. Leming and Leon Albert formed a company that built dormitories -- Leming Hall and Albert Hall -- that gave the school an advantage over the state's other normal schools.

Houck was known for his drive and ambition. In building his first railroad, a line from Delta to Cape Girardeau, he was given six months to bring an engine the 16 miles to Cape Girardeau. His laborers toiled in zero-degree weather to complete the line by Dec. 31, 1880, but ran out of rails 1,000 feet from Cape Girardeau.

None could be procured because the river was frozen, so Houck instructed his men to tear up the tracks behind the engine and use them to bring the line the rest of the way to Cape Girardeau. They did so, just in time to make the deadline.

Cobb did not chronicle his life as Houck did. He was born into slavery in Knox County in Tennessee. He was taught first by the son of the man who owned him. Later he attended school at a black Presbyterian college in Maryville, Tenn., where he was the servant of a professor.

An ox-drawn wagon brought him to Cape Girardeau County where he settled near Jackson, and for several years, he worked for farmers.

After passing a teachers examination, he taught at a black school in Jackson for three years before becoming an instructor in Cape Girardeau. He was a teacher and principal at the Lincoln School for 38 years.

The school at Ellis and Merriwether was renamed for Cobb in 1925, recognizing his 38 years of service. One of the speakers was Cobb's son, Robert, then secretary to the Missouri Negro Industrial Commission.

"I am reaping the benefits of my father's good life," he said. "I come in contact daily with men who knew him years ago and my road is made easier because they knew and trusted him."

In 1902, Houck sold his railroad to the Frisco Railroad. Two years later, the Naeter brothers began publishing the Daily Republican, the newspaper that became the Southeast Missourian. St. Francis Hospital and Central High School both opened in 1914.

In 1919, local standout Elam Vangilder began playing baseball for the St. Louis Browns. John Cobb died that same year.

In the spring of 1953, just before the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation, fire badly damaged the John S. Cobb School. The next school year, separate schools became part of Cape Girardeau history.