Captive of the Historical Society

I saw an advertisement in the local paper today for a lecture. It read “Cruising the County. Francis Pike will take you through a slide tour of some of Boone County’s historical sites. Tuesday – Boone County Historical society.” This sounded like it might be fun — I know nothing of Central Missouri, and this has to be less boring than watching TV or hanging out in the Holiday Inne bar.

I drive to the Historical Society. I’m surprised to discover a very large and quite beautiful building. The one attribute I wouldn’t ascribe to the building, though, is “historic.” It’s a tasteful but contemporary structure with high beams and lots of class. I later learn that it was built ten years ago. I think of the small-town museums in New England and begin to wonder how a small town like this can afford such a building. It did have a musty smell, testimony to either a leaky roof or cellar and a limited capital budget, and it seemed to be staffed solely by the youngish woman who greeted me at the door. She was kind enough to turn on the lights of the museum and let me prowl the exhibits. It wasn’t quite New York’s Museum of Natural History, but there were some remarkable antiques, all tastefully displayed with descriptive information scattered around. The exhibits included some scary old medical equipment and a complete reconstructed dentist office with one of the very first dental x-ray machines.

One of the most fascinating pieces in the museum was the piano of “Blind Boone,” a blind black, pianist who, despite handicaps and prejudice became a well-known and wealthy performer of classical music in and around Missouri. It was a spectacular piano, inlaid with rare woods, and intricately carved. I never found out if Blind Boone was named after the county, after Daniel Boone, or after someone else. I did learn that Daniel Boone never lived here in Boone County. The county was named in his honor nonetheless.

“Are you here for the airshow?” asked the young woman. She seemed surprised to find out that I was not only not here for the airshow but didn’t know about it. Apparently Columbia is home to the nations largest airshow, and it was taking place on the coming weekend.

The staff member and I stood out in stark contrast with the six other slide-show attendees, all of whom had to be at least in their 80s (I later learned that Francis Pike was well into his 90s). There were cookies, bags of popcorn, and punch but I declined. I had just tried to polish off a copious fajita platter at a local Mexican restaurant. It was a super restaurant (who would have thought to find great Mexican food in Missouri!), but my attempt was unsuccessful and I feared that if I so much as nibbled or sipped anything my shirt buttons would pop.

As the lights dimmed and the slide show began, I began to get what my daughter refers to as “an uh-oh feeling in my tummy.” One of the things that I like about travelling is searching for the local and the authentic, but I began to think I might have gone too far in my quest. This must how it feels to a traveller to the Middle East who is served a platter of rice crowned by a camel’s eye.

My fears were well grounded. These people knew the history and geography of Boone County better than I knew my sock drawer. Mr. Pike would say something like “Who here has seen the Gravel Pike toll bridge?” and the other six would raise their hand and murmur approvingly. The young woman would advance to the slide, which showed what looked to me like any one of thousands of old steel bridges. If there was something special about the bridge, they all knew about it and weren’t going to repeat it for the only stranger in the room. Mr. Pike would then mention an extremely obscure fact about the site to surprise or titillate the jaded group. “…Mrs. Nifong would always be notified when her husband passed the gate so she could put the biscuits in the oven…” This went on in a similar vein, as Pike talked of places like Boone’s Lick Road, the Huntsdale Tobacco Barn and the Easley Insulation Tunnel. The octogenarian crowd would murmur knowingly and occasionally raise their hand to fill in some details about a particular bridge or abandoned railroad right-of way. I felt a little bit like the rookie in the joke about the prison where all the inmates had memorized a joke book and needed only to refer to the jokes by number (punch line: “well, some people just don’t know how to tell a joke.”)

After the slide show I chatted briefly with some of the elders, admiring the new building and expressing surprise at having a brand-new building for a historical society. The gentleman talking to me expressed regret at all the now-destroyed historic structures that might have housed the society: “I guess we’re slash and burn pioneer types out here” he said. I was handed some photocopies of Mr. Pike’s newspaper column and urged to take some popcorn home. “Otherwise I’ll have to feed it to the goat.” I walked slowly to my car, closed the door, and let out a sigh of relief at having escaped an uncomfortable situation.

Back at the Holiday Inne I ordered some local bourbon and read the reprints of Mr. Pike’s column, entitled “Whatever Happened To…” (tip from a professional educator — the more senses you can involve, the better you can remember). The articles were exactly the kind of thing I was looking for when I decided to attend the lecture, and I was fascinated by the stories. The Insulation Tunnel, by the way, was a mine for an unusual kind of rock that could be spun into fiber for insulation. This went on for years until somebody went and invented fiberglass. The Mrs. Nifong of the bridge and biscuit tale was the husband of Doctor Frank Nifong, a successful surgeon and teacher at the University. He later became a prominent philanthropist, and the Historical Society building is located near his former home, off Nifong Road. On weekends the society conducts tours of his house.

I was wondering why a city as big as Columbia would have developed in such a landlocked location. Kansas City is over 100 miles to the east, St. Louis over 100 miles to the west. The Missouri River (on which both cities are situated) makes a big bend about a hundred miles south. The young woman from the Boone County Historical society told me that Columbia was founded and settled by savvy business types who serviced the main wagon train road between St. Louis and Kansas city — an overland route must have cut trip upriver significantly. That wagon line, descended from an old Indian trail, would eventually evolve into Interstate 70, along which I drove to catch my plane in St. Louis.

It’s still a major road for commerce. I was amazed at the number and size of tractor-trailer trucks that hugged the right-hand lane as I cruise-controlled it to the Airport. Some of these were big double and triple rigs — rubber-wheeled trains, really. The countryside was gently rolling — not Kansas flat, but not Vermont mountainous. It was very densely wooded, and the sky was much bigger and bluer than Vermont’s. The big sky was filled with cute little puffy clouds rather than the towering cumulus I’m used to seeing in New England. It would have been a lovely drive had billboards not hideously wounded the landscape.