New heritage center planned for Jackson

A corner of uptown Jackson once home to a formal wear shop is destined for a new use.

The Cape Girardeau County Historical Society plans to transform the building at 102 S. High St., which until August had housed The Andrew Jackson since 1973, into a heritage center by next spring.

The center, which is planned to host traveling exhibitions, exhibit regional history, offer educational workshops and promote historic sites in the region, is expected to open before April 1, said Carla Jordan, a preservationist who has been hired to oversee the center's development and recruit volunteers.

Jordan said she hopes the new center will act as a hub between already existing museums and historical sites in the region, plus draw visitors to uptown Jackson.

"It's just another step toward connecting the dots," Jordan said, "both with history and geography."

Roy Boren, president of the historical society, said the center also will provide the society with a place to land that it has never had.

The center will serve as a headquarters for the society, which is funding the project with an endowment.

"We have 50 members, we meet occasionally and we have been working on this project several years," Boren said. "We've had a lot of detours, so to speak, but we are at a point where we have leased the building, and we hope that with [Jordan's] expertise, and she does have that, that we will be able to get this going."

Jordan also directs the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg, Missouri, and plans to split time working at both centers.

W. Shelby and Mildred Brown, a Jackson couple, endowed money to the society that is going toward the center. Boren said Shelby Brown, who died in 1998, was a businessman involved in steam engines, sawmills, farming and timber, and was instrumental in starting a railroad in Jackson, while Mildred Brown, who died in 2003, taught school in the Marble Hill, Missouri, area and later became a longtime librarian at the Jackson City Library.

"Both were interested in preservation of information about the good ol' days, the past," Boren said, "and her desire in later years was to have a museum in Jackson."

Jordan is recruiting volunteers for the center and is putting together a historic display plan, in which she plans to involve the uptown businesses when possible, she said, by working with them to help fill the building's large display windows.

"We are planning displays, but there will also be traveling exhibits and workshops," Jordan said. "And I really think having help from others along those streets will be an awesome opportunity for history and business to play together."

The large brick building that will hold the center is known to locals as the "mural building," because of a large painting on the Main Street side featuring the city's namesake, Andrew Jackson, and historical activities. The formalwear store is now on North Kingshighway in Cape Girardeau, where it reopened Aug. 1. The building's owners have a renovation underway, part of which, Jordan said, will restore the facade to how it looked in the 1940s.

A floral theme, "Spring into History," is already set for the heritage center's opening.

eragan@semissourian.com

388-3632

Pertinent address:

102 S. High St., Jackson, MO