RED HOUSE COULD BE AN EXCITING PROJECT

About all that's left to remind Cape Girardeau residents of the city's founder are a street and a cemetery named Lorimier. Property owners have another connection as well: Their abstracts of property ownership probably begin with some mention of the legal battles over claims to what once was a vast land grant to Louis Lorimier.

Other than that, the history of Louis Lorimier is pretty sparse, except for a few bits and pieces that may be more fantasy than fact.

Consider the fact that the man's first name wasn't Donald. Or even Don. It was Louis. Even though he was French, his claim to land in the Louisiana territory was granted by Spain, and since he was given some authority over the inhabitants of the area, he either was given or claimed the Spanish title of "don," which almost any Spaniard who owned property in the late 1700s might have had.

Interest in Lorimier is being renewed because of the imminent celebration of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition that traced the westward route of the Missouri River in hopes of finding a shipping route to the Pacific Ocean. As the two explorers discovered, there were plains, mountains and deserts in the way. But they made it and returned to tell their eye-popping tales.

Lorimier figures into this story, because Merriwether Lewis was a guest of the Lorimier family while making his way to St. Louis with William Clark -- who spent the night camping on the river because he and Lorimier weren't exactly friends.

The focus of a local committee looking for ways to tie Cape Girardeau to the Lewis-Clark bicentennial is Lorimier's house, long gone since an 1850 tornado tore through the area. The house is usually referred to as the Red House. There is no sure way of knowing whether the house was really painted red or might have been called that because of a play on the word Alhambra, Arabic for "red house" and the seat of Moorish kings in Granada, Spain.

In 1992, an effort was made to raise money to rebuild Lorimier's Red House as part of the city's bicentennial celebration, but planners ran out of time.

In addition, some thought is being given to an archeological dig on the presumed site of the Red House, which would be somewhere on the front lawn of Old St. Vincent's Catholic Church near the river.

The scope of the Lewis-Clark bicentennial committee's thinking is, in a way, overwhelming. But what a wonderful way to expose residents and visitors to a vital piece of Cape Girardeau's history for years to come.

This is a project worth the time and effort of any history buffs and promoters of tourism.