Forward, Into The Past
Sure, we should all eat dessert first, for life is short and uncertain. Even in our time as humans, we get many chances to delay some gratification for later enjoyment. It’s called discipline, or maybe virtue. It’s not universal, but I can think of two life forms that make us look like lifelong party animals. Meet the mayapples and cicadas.
I recently noticed an old newspaper item that seemed loaded with irony. It ran in 1917, four months before an outbreak of Spanish flu killed over 600,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide. Not knowing the disaster that lay ahead, The St. Louis Star-Times chose to recall a memory from 1867:
Longtime reader Tom Grady posed a provocative question after reading my recent essay on old time baseball in Lafayette Park. He asked what kind of lawn mowers were used back in the 1860s. The actual games in question were in 1861.
The first patent for a modern bicycle design was first issued in 1866. That design would seem simple compared to one for a lawn mower, but not so. It turns out that the harvesting of crops was more of a practical necessity than say, riding the KATY trail. So the mower got invented first.
Continue reading “1904: History Of The Lawn Mower”Just to the north of the Lafayette Park Hotel stood a small single story building at the corner of Mississippi and Park Avenues. Its address was 1400 Mississippi Avenue. The earliest reference I see was from 1888. A popular corner place, It became a polling station for the 23rd ward, 123rd precinct of St. Louis:
I’ve recently written about the old Lafayette Park Hotel. It dated back to about 1875, and rather mysteriously disappeared from view with the great tornado of 1896. Architectural historian Michael Boyd got me started when he asked if I could find anything related to its demolition. I searched high and low. Nope.
Here’s the first mention I could find of the building on Mississippi Avenue, just south of Park Avenue. It’s from August 29, 1875, a time when building activity was really taking off east of Lafayette Park:
Back in 1995, first-wave restorationist and Lafayette Square MVP Ruth Kamphoefner composed a tidy summary of observations and cautionary tales from her 25 years in the neighborhood. It not only paid tribute to some outstanding doers, but feels nearly as appropriate today as it did then. I’m in awe of Ruth, and what she accomplished in her decades here. What I write is surely inadequate. She can better convey some of it for me. In her own words…
Early in the 1970s, so many people came to house tours that we had lines half a block long in front of houses. So many properties sold that we envisioned the complete restoration of Lafayette Square within a year or two.
“Pretty soon we won’t need to have any more house tours!” I gloated to Jerry Ferrell, LSRC president at the time.
Dreamer.
Adapted from a story by the St Louis Post Dispatch of December 25, 1885
LAFAYETTE PARK GHOST.
IT STRIKES TERROR TO THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Seen by George Wilson and a Couple of Inquisitive Young Men – It Is Fully Identified as Supernatural – A Newspaper Investigator Solves the Mystery and Relieves the Pressing Fears
Nature is wonderful stuff. I delight in watching the shifting strength of various woodland plants as they compete through the summer. I got to studying the mayapples of late spring, when the forest floor is covered with them. Each plant labors to create a single drooping fruit. Roots, shoots, fruits and all are mostly gone by July.
There isn’t much that first blossoms around here in September, but two exceptions are the goldenrod and white snakeroot. Both of these have the run of the place right into October, lining the edge of woods and walking paths. Their tiny flowers serve the vital function of providing late season nourishment to bees, butterflies and moths. The only other reason to deliberately plant it might be that its bitter taste deters deer and rabbits.
Continue reading “1840: A Case of Milk Sickness”In 1874, an innovative farmer from DeKalb, Illinois received the original patent for barbed wire. Joseph Glidden established the Barb Wire Fence Company with Isaac Ellwood, also of DeKalb. It’s doubtful that either man foresaw this invention becoming one of what the BBC recently listed as “the 50 things that made the modern economy.”
All the iron on Earth originated in large stars that existed before our Sun even formed. Iron is the final product of a star’s radioactive decay, which fuses hydrogen atoms to form ever heavier elements. When the hydrogen fuel is exhausted and sufficient mass accumulates in the core of the star, it no longer supports its own gravity, and explodes; or so I’m told. In that supernova explosion, huge chunks of iron can be thrown many light years into space. Such a chunk came to land in eastern Missouri’s St. Francois County and became Iron Mountain.
Continue reading “1893: Iron Men Of Lafayette Square – Christopher And Simpson”
