Writer awarded for Ste. Gen house tour book

Cape Girardeau resident Mark Evans was surprised when he received a letter from the Missouri Alliance for Historical Preservation about a month ago.

"I thought I was getting a notice that I didn't pay my Missouri Preservation dues," Evans said.

He soon learned that he was not in trouble at all, but was the recipient of the alliance's 2004 Osmund Overby Award for his Ste. Genevieve house tour book, "The Commandant's Last Ride."

Evans will receive his award during a ceremony at the state Capitol rotunda today.

The group's executive director, Barbara Fitzgerald, said Evan's book is the second to receive the Osmund Overby Award since its inception last year. Overby was a founding member and former president of the group and is now an honorary member.

"I think it very well documents Ste. Genevieve," Fitzgerald said.

Evans developed more of an interest in the historic Ste. Genevieve, which has the only surviving French colonial village in the United States, when he discovered an ancestor who was one of the town's founders.

Evans lived in Ste. Genevieve for about three years before coming to Cape Girardeau and in 1999 he published a coffee-table book about the town. But he had different goals with "The Commandant's Last Ride."

"This one was done with the idea of people walking or driving around town and using this as a guidebook," he said.

The book starts out with and intermittently continues with Evan's fictionalized account of the recollections of 89-year-old Jean Baptiste Valle, the town's last commandant, the French version of a governor, as he takes a buggy ride around town in 1849.

"It just hit me that of all the Ste. Genevieve historical figures, no one would have experienced as much history as he did," Evans said about choosing to use Valle as an anchor to his book.

"The Commandant's Last Ride" is available in Cape Girardeau at Barnes & Noble, Dockside Consignment and Annie Laurie Antique Mall.

kalfisi@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182