Faces of Southeast Missouri: Trish Erzfeld

Trish Erzfeld is the Perry County Heritage Tourism director and chair of the Missouri Eclipse Task Force. In this role, she is helping communities in the 2024 Solar Eclipse path of totality across the nation prepare for the event.

Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

Trish Erzfeld has served as the Perry County Heritage Tourism director for the past seven years, when the City of Perryville and Perry County created a Tourism Division to promote the area. Planning the 2017 eclipse event for Perry County was one of her first projects in the role; for the event, she served on the St. Louis Eclipse Task Force and learned about the science behind eclipses, how to plan an event around an eclipse and how to serve the visitors who came to town.

This time around, she is the chair of the Missouri Eclipse Task Force that meets once a month to learn from a speaker who teaches about a different aspect of the eclipse and serves as support for eclipse community planning. The task force has also planned the Southeast Missouri Eclipse Expo taking place at the Show Me Center July 22.

“I love the interaction with different communities,” Erzfeld says of what she enjoys about being the chair of the statewide task force. “I love helping other communities promote what’s unique and special about themself. That’s my job here in Perry County, and so it’s fun to collaborate and to grow all of our towns and communities together as one.”

Erzfeld grew up in Menfro, Mo., in Perry County, the fifth generation of her family to live there. She says she loves promoting Perry County as the regional tourism director because of her family’s deep roots in the area.

“I’ve always had a love for history, and once you get outside of your own family history, you look at your community, you look at your county, you look at your region, and you just identify so many things that are special and unique that are a part of you from growing up here,” Erzfeld says. “I think that’s where a lot of my passion comes from.”

Any part of earth can experience a total solar eclipse every 350 to 425 years, Erzfeld says; it is rare that this region is in the path of totality of two eclipses within seven years of each other. This will be the last eclipse people in this region will get to experience in this lifetime without leaving the state of Missouri.

Erzfeld says because of the group of approximately 50 professionals who came together in 2017 to lend their expertise to the event, Perry County has become a model for other communities situated throughout the 2024 path of totality. She has spoken at American Astronomical Society workshops in Rochester, N.Y., and Alburquerque, N.M., and worked with committees in Uvalde, Texas; Genesee, N.Y.; and Fulton, Maine, to help these communities plan for being in the path of totality in 2024.

“It’s fun and it’s awe-inspiring to think that a county of 19,000 now is being the road map for [larger] communities,” Erzfeld says.

In Southeast Missouri, the path of totality will run from Ste. Genevieve south on April 8, 2024. And yes, Erzfeld says, eclipse glasses from 2017 are OK to use for viewing the 2024 eclipse — as long as they are not scratched and don’t have any holes in them.