MEMORIES OF PAST: CAPE WOMAN REFLECTS ON CHANGES OF PAST CENTURY

At 93, Anna Jenkins hasn't seen everything that has happened in the 20th century in Cape Girardeau, but as a lifelong resident she has seen most of it.

When Jenkins was born in 1903, it had only been 97 years since Cape Girardeau's founder Don Louis Lorimier laid out the small trading post as a town. Two years later the town celebrated its first centennial.

Jenkins lived five miles west of the city where today it is within the city limits.

Like many families in rural Cape Girardeau, her family farmed, and she did the chores, which including milking the cows and working in the garden with her mother. Her family grew wheat, corn, peas and clover.

"I was always big enough to do chores but when I wanted to do something they said I was too little," Jenkins said with a chuckle.

"We walked through woods and over fences," she said. "We got there the best way we could, there were no school buses."

And the schools were different back then as all grades were taught by one teacher. She remembers there were about 40 students each year.

But the number of students began to grow, right along with Cape Girardeau's population.

In 1900, Cape Girardeau had 4,815 people. In the next decade, it grew by an astonishing 3,660, almost doubling in size. By 1920, there were 10,252 people here.

In the 1920s, the city showed the largest percentage growth of any city in the state when its population grew to more than 16,000.

In 1921, Jenkins left home to help her aunt raise her aunt's two small children.

"Back in the '20s, we used to wear hats," she said. "You never saw a woman wear slacks or smoke like they do today."

A few years later, Jenkins went to work at the Florsheim Shoe Factory on Main Street, earning $7 a week putting new shoes in boxes.

She rode the streetcar to work and home. The streetcar and the Main Street Florsheim has disappeared.

But the Florsheim wasn't the only business in town in the 1920s -- far from it. New businesses came in. The Normal School had just changed to a Teachers College and enrollment began to climb.

"We really grew there for a while," Jenkins said.

In 1928, Jenkins went to work for her uncle at a grocery store at Bloomfield and Benton where she worked for more than 10 years before it burned down.

Her uncle moved his store to 608 Good Hope, which was then a nicer part of town, she said.

"It was a town within itself," she said. There were two dry goods stores, a hardware store, restaurant, a seed store, two barbershops and five grocery stores, she said.

She worked other jobs since then, enjoying them all: "I've liked every job I ever had; I loved to work," she said.

Life wasn't always good, but Jenkins always tried to laugh. "It was either that or cry," she said. "We just did what we had to get by."