PRESERVING HISTORY: UNIONTOWN BUILDINGS TELL FORGOTTEN TALES

The historic Frentzel house is now backed by Frentzel Haus, Inc., a non-profit corporation, which is restoring the structure. Jackson USA Signal/Mark Evans

UNIONTOWN -- Missouri's German heritage doesn't get much older than Uniontown and the surrounding Perry and northern Cape County bergs.

Like the ghosts of a lifestyle nearly forgotten, the sagging buildings in small towns like these along the once-buzzing US Highway 61, are fading quietly away. While they make spectacular objects for shutterbugs and cause many a first-time 61 driver to crane a head for a second look, the deteriorating buildings are on their last legs. Many have already been lost during the past 25 years, as the history of the old Missouri Route 25/El Camino Real continues to die out.

Jim Frentzel and Diana Thompson, in two separate ventures, are hoping to reverse that trend in Uniontown.

Frentzel and Quentin Klaus purchased the old Frentzel house in Uniontown in 1992 and formed the non-profit Frentzel Haus, Inc., to preserve and restore the historic family home.

Across the street, after being in business continuously for some 140 years, the old Frentzel Store had sat empty for about four years. Now it, too, has found a restorer. Diana and Ty Thompson of Cape Girardeau, bought the deteriorating structure last fall and after months of restoration work, have opened Country Charm Emporium.

The two buildings have been tied together in Frentzel/Hopfer family lore, as well as in Uniontown history. (See related story.) It seems somehow appropriate that both should receive help simultaneously.

"My husband had seen it several months before it went on sale," Thompson said. "We decided, it was such an interesting building that we wanted to fix it up and open up a shop again."

Both Thompsons hail from Cape. Diana teaches at Kelso C-7 School in New Hamburg, while Ty is an environmental specialist in St. Louis. Diana's grandfather ran Central Packing Company in Cape for many years. Frentzel has informed her that the store she now owns once carried her grandfather's meats.

Some question exists as to whether the 19th-century structure standing today is the same store Charles Augustus Frentzel constructed in 1855. A small, one-story connected building used to stand to the north of the current building. Several years ago the building literally collapsed and was dozed under.

"We're not certain if that was the original 1855 store and if this part was added later, or if the entire structure was built in 1855," Thompson said.

Frentzel apparently enlarged his home across the road during the 1870s and likely made some additions to the state at that time.

A Frentzel relative, on hand for the annual Frentzel Reunion Sept. 19, surprised Thompson and Frentzel by saying she has a photo of the store without the second floor apartment on it. She has promised to get a copy of the photo to Thompson.

Whatever the construction date of the existing building, Thompson found it full of surprises -- like the steps to the second floor that can be pulled up by rope and pulley to reveal steps into the basement. In the stone basement, meanwhile, a long-boarded-up set of rock steps leads into eerie darkness.

"We don't know if that could be some sort of wine cellar, or what," Thompson said. She said they plan to investigate the mysterious steps as soon as possible. The basement also shows clear evidence of the former chicken coop and coal bin that were once located there.

An ancient cistern sits behind the building, with what appears to e Amelia Hopfer's name carved on it. A down spout on the back of the building has a unique switch, meanwhile, for allowing dirt to run off the roof, following a rain. When the water would become clean enough, the switch could be thrown and it would be diverted into the cistern.

"The store itself has never had running water," Thompson said. "The Winters, who ran it from 1939 till 1967, had a water line run from the cistern, to the apartment upstairs. There was never any plumbing downstairs."

The original outhouse is still in the back -- with a new door, thanks to Ty. For now the Thompsons are making use of it.

Country Charm Emporium, open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, features antiques, collectibles, handmade gifts, florals, quilting patterns, decorative painted articles and more. Soup and dip mixes are also featured. Once indoor plumbing is added, Thompson hopes to include a coffee bar.

Frentzel Haus

Jim Frentzel, grandson of Alvin A. Frentzel, who ran the store from the 1890s until his eyesight failed in the 1930s, has led the fight to save the Frentzel family home across the road.

The original two story house was likely built in 1840 by family patriarch Johann Gotlieb Frentzel and expanded some 30 years later by his son, Charles Augustus Frentzel. The original part of the house features a unique and eye-popping stone cellar, with an arched stone ceiling.

"Quentin Klaus and myself were at a high school class reunion and we started talking about great grandma's house," Frentzel said. At that time it was owned by a Frentzel descendant who was in a nursing home. When the house later went on the market, Frentzel and Klaus went together to buy it.

"All of the family own as much of the house as we do, now, because it's a corporation," Frentzel said. "We're restoring this house to preserve the heritage of the Frentzel family and the community, as much as we can gather up."

The goal is for the stately structure to be a private family museum of sorts -- although Frentzel has no interest in trying to hunt down period furniture to fill the home.

"We could never accumulate it," he said. "We intend to put the history of the family and the community around the house, as much as we can get, so people can come back to the house where their family started, here in the United States.

"In America, very few people can walk up to a house and say 'That's were my family began in America.'"

Frentzel, who lives in Texas most of the year, hopes to write the story of the Frentzel family.

"What we want to do is kind of write the story of the Frentzel family in story form," he said, "not like a traditional genealogy book."

History bypassed

The opening of the final link of I-55 in 1972 signaled the death knell for Highway 61 communities -- at least as vital communities, able to support several business establishments.

Uniontown native Lillian Bingenheimer Bjorseth captured the images of a bygone age upon revisiting her home town during the mid-1970s and writing a feature story for the Perry County Historical Society. She reflected upon the lifestyle as she grew up there in the 1940s and 1950s and the already dying town it had become.

"It was different when Mom used to stop for flour and sugar after church while Dad and I would go to Mike's Place, he for a cool draft and me for ice cream and peanuts," she said. "When I got a little older, but long before the legal age, dad would buy me a cool draft after church, too. But then, everyone knows healthy, hardy German girls are weaned from milk to beer!"

The Uniontown of Bjorseth's youth included a truck stop, two general stores, the post office, two taverns, a machine shop and a dozen or so homes. The joys and even the mischief of country life seemed quite pure, compared to today.

"The apartment above Winter's (Frentzel's) Store is vacant now, but it still holds fond memories for me," she wrote. "When the Winters lived there, before they built a 'built home' with two indoor bathrooms, one of their daughters and I used to have such fun slipping down to the store for candy before making mud pies in the back yard."

She painted a striking image of dads waiting for their teens at Mike's, during church youth activities, after which the youths would put nickels in the juke box and play pool. Later they might slip out for a few beers behind an old gravel pile.

Even in the 1970s, the trend had begun. The insightful Bjorseth picked up on the changes immediately.

"It was when I looked around at the houses in the village that I sensed my home town also looked like a dying community," she wrote. "Sure, a few of them had been recently painted, but at least four of them must have been vacant for 10 years, judging by their present rundown condition."

Death seldom comes quickly for a community, however, and towns can sometimes be resuscitated. For one small town on one little-used highway, two concerned individuals seem to have intervened in time.