Out of the past: May 15

1993

The annual May worship service is conducted at 172-year-old Apple Creek Presbyterian Church near Pocahontas in the morning, with the Rev. Bill Bernauer, a supply pastor at Lutesville (Missouri) Presbyterian Church, preaching the sermon; this historic church no longer serves a congregation, but is maintained and kept active through the Apple Creek Memorial Association.

The Boyd Group of Las Vegas has pledged it will make a $37.5 million capital investment in Cape Girardeau, if voters approve riverboat gambling in the city next week; the company revealed its proposal for a riverfront development and floating casino at a news conference Friday.

1968

Workers tear down a wooden wall and move a walkway about five feet inward on Broadway in front of the new U.S. Courthouse and Federal Office Building, which representative architect Thomas E. Phillips says is about 75 percent complete; workers placed the walkway and wall in front of the site in March 1967, when construction began.

The Eugene Luhr Co. of Columbia, Illinois, has been awarded the contract to build the small-boat harbor at Trail of Tears State Park; the harbor, being financed jointly by the state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will be built at Moccasin Springs.

1943

Cape Girardeau County Court is considering constructing a temporary building at the County Home for the care of emergency cases of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases; there are a number of tuberculosis cases in the county, and the court has been unable to get places for them at the state's tubercular sanatorium at Mount Vernon, Missouri, or the Jasper County Hospital at Webb City, Missouri.

Ivy McLain, 72, for 42 consecutive years a justice of the peace at Neelys Landing, dies of a heart ailment at a local hospital; McLain was born Aug. 14, 1870, at Oriole; he is survived by his wife, the former Lillie Statler, and two sons, three daughters, four brothers and a half sister.

1918

Judge Benjamin F. Davis, one of Cape Girardeau's most distinguished residents, drowned last evening in the great diversion channel a few miles south of Cape Girardeau, and his body isn't found until this morning; Davis, with his law partner, Benson C. Hardesty, had spent the day viewing the effects of the flood and were returning to their starting point in a flat-bottom boat, when it overturned.

Superintendent C.H. Claiborn of the Frisco Railroad says train service to the south of Cape Girardeau will positively be resumed tomorrow morning, unless something out of the ordinary occurs and stops his workers, who are replacing the bridge at Ranney's Switch, which was washed out by the floods Sunday.

-- Sharon K. Sanders