Cape Girardeau's first public school met resistance

Thirty-three years before the Naeter brothers struck ink in Cape Girardeau, the city's first public school started not so much with a bang but with the click of a gun cocking.

On the Saturday before Lorimier School was scheduled to open in September 1872, an armed man stood guard outside the newly constructed building intending to block entrance to it on the first day of classes.

It wasn't the first show of resistance to the new school. Newspaper accounts hold that many people did not welcome the move away from standard parochial schools to a free, public education system, especially businessmen opposed to the additional taxes needed to operate such a school.

The issue was put to a vote in 1867. Election signs were posted and torn down by opponents within minutes. It passed, though proponents celebrating the victory at the Common Pleas Courthouse were forced to scatter as "two hostile groups of men" approached from different directions.

For five years, public school classes were held in the basement of a local church. Then, in 1872, voters approved a $15,000 bond issue to build the city's first public school building on Independence Street. The building, named after city founder Louis Lorimier, was set to open in September of that year, but once again opposition surfaced.

A 1935 account of the incident in the Daily Republican states that "some persons" discovered the armed guard in front of the building on the Saturday before school was to start.

They alerted proponents of the school, who "also armed, slipped unnoticed into the building through a window and overpowered the school enemy." Class began as planned two days later.

The original Lorimier School was razed in 1935 and a new school built on the same site. Longtime Cape Girardeau educator May Greene, who taught in the district from 1879 to 1932, turned the first shovel of soil to officially begin construction of that building. In 1978, that school became Cape Girardeau's current city hall. By the time the Naeters arrived in Cape Girardeau in 1904, the city's education system -- public, parochial and higher -- had already undergone significant changes and advances.

Parochial schools by far have the deepest roots in the history of that system, operating as many as 30 years before the public school system was founded. St. Vincent's Young Ladies Academy and St. Vincent's College, both established in 1838, were among the first parochial schools in Cape Girardeau.

Trinity Lutheran School opened in November 1854 in a house and later moved to a church building on William Street. St. Mary's Grade School formed in 1882.

By that time, Cape Girardeau's Third District Normal School, which would later become Southeast Missouri State University, was in its ninth year with a curriculum that included six departments: professional, mathematics, English language and literature, natural sciences and physics, geography and history and art.

The Normal School formed in 1873 in Cape Girardeau, the third of its kind in the state. During the Naeters' first year in Cape Girardeau, the school was in the process of rebuilding after a fire on April 7, 1902, destroyed the original building.

On Nov. 26, 1905, a new building dubbed Academic Hall opened to the public for the first time. The Naeters were there, and an account of the event in the next day's edition of the Daily Republican captured the amazement of the 5,000 people who attended.

"Those who had never had an opportunity of looking inside before had no idea that such a magnificent building was right here in their midst, and the words magnificent and wonderful fell from the lips of the admiring throngs." -- Nov. 27, 1905.

It wasn't until 15 years later that the Normal School was renamed State Teachers College. The name again changed in 1945, this time to Southeast Missouri State College and then finally to Southeast Missouri State University in 1972.

Today, the university offers much more than an education for future teachers. Students can major in everything from accounting to zoology in five colleges.

In the last 100 years, Cape Girardeau County's parochial system has grown to 10 schools that serve more than 2,200 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. Several of the schools, including Immaculate Conception School and Saxony Lutheran High School, are in the midst of or have recently completed major expansion projects.

The city's public school system has also recently undergone construction projects, all without the tension of gun-toting opponents interceding.

In the past decade, the Cape Girardeau School District has built a new elementary, career center and high school. The district now serves over 4,000 students and includes five elementary schools, a middle school, junior high school and a new high school facility that opened in 2002.

There's little there to compare with the education system of 100 years ago. Today's students' education is accomplished not on textbooks and chalkboards but on wireless laptop computers.

But the past is still alive, or at least well preserved, in many of the schools, especially those named after the city's most-noted educators -- Alma Schrader, Barbara Blanchard and Charles Clippard.