LETTERS: DRAINAGE DISTRICT IS PART OF HISTORY OFTEN OVERLOOKED IN THIS AREA

To the editor:

The Little River Drainage District article in Thursday's paper is about the second largest land reclamation project in the world, second only to Holland's reclaiming is land from the sea.

Neglected in the story was that residents of Cape Girardeau played a major part in its creation. Maj. James Francis Brooks, a Civil War veteran and my grandfather, was responsible for designing and construction of miles of the ditch that flows into the Mississippi river.

He engineered the layout and supervised the crew working on the ditch. My father, Chris Stiver, after erecting the local cement plant, was an engineer on the job who bedded down six nights a week in school buildings and other free places, then worked all light-to-dusk days, with the crew often carrying their heavy instruments on their shoulders in a mile or two walk to that day's work site. They had no lunch, and instead of water, Major Brooks gave them a lemon to suck on when thirsty. Funds were tight, and often pay was long delayed.

But as everyone knew then and now, there would be no thriving Southeast Missouri unless the ditch was strategically located and built to see that the land around it was swamp-free.

Every time I cross the drainage ditch, I think of my hard-working forebears who helped make Southeast Missouri what it is today, although it was all done before my birth 80 years ago. All the wonderful men who labored so hard to build this ditch are never recognized for what they did for all of us Southeast Missourians, under such devastating conditions, to make Southeast Missouri one of the best farmlands in our entire country.

Charles E. Stiver,

Cape Girardeau