Swingle movie revives Civil War history

When Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle was researching historical material for his 2002 novel "The Gold of Cape Girardeau," he discovered so much information about Cape Girardeau during the Civil War that he thought it would be a shame for it to go to waste.

So was born "The Civil War of Cape Girardeau," a documentary about the Civil War's impact on Southeast Missouri that will air at 12 p.m. Sunday on WDKA, Channel 49, or cable Channel 17.

"I think the story of the Civil War in our part of the country is not told often," Swingle said.

So, in late 2002, Swingle approached Dr. Jim Dufek, professor of mass communication at Southeast Missouri State University, about the possibility of the university's mass communications department producing a documentary based on his research.

"Honestly, I was really impressed with all the research he had done for his book," Dufek said.

Dufek decided to include the project in his advanced video production class. This senior-level class gives students the opportunity to work on video projects from script to screen for clients like Southeast Missouri Hospital and New Vision Counseling.

Most of the projects are completed in four months. Dufek estimated the Swingle documentary would take about nine months to complete, though it ended up taking a year and a half.

The students who were assigned to work on the documentary, Brian Heisserer, Stefanie Dallavis and Brandon Mitchell, continued to work on the documentary even after they graduated and had received credit for the project.

"They put their whole heart and soul into it," Dufek said.

To get images for the documentary, Heisserer, Dallavis and Mitchell searched books for photos and engravings and spent three days at a Civil War reenactment in Southern Illinois.

"We really needed to get that footage," Dufek said.

This footage provides visual imagery for the moments in the documentary when letters from Civil War soldiers are read aloud.

The documentary also features commentary from Swingle, Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University, and Dr. Louis Gerteis, chair of the department of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

After countless hours of editing, the documentary came to be 52 minutes long. In those 52 minutes, a brief history of Cape Girardeau leading up to the Civil War is told before the documentary delves into the city's role in the war, as well as what was happening in other parts of Missouri at the time.

"I hope we did a nice job of making it visually interesting to watch as well as informative," Dufek said.

Swingle, for one, was happy with the end result.

"I've seen the final product and I'm just delighted with the way it turned out," he said.

Now Dufek hopes to interest Cape Girardeau Public Library and the University's Kent Library in adding a copy of "The Civil War of Cape Girardeau" to their collections.

kalfisi@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182