Missouri - Day 8 - into the Boot Heel and along the Mississippi River

Trail of Tears State Park, Jackson

Thursday, 8 April 2021

There was a bad storm early in the morning, beginning about 4:30 AM or so.  I was lucky that I'd already taken the dogs out on their first walk, and we got back just before the downpour and the lightning.  Then the power started cutting in and out, so I unplugged everything except the microwave and refrigerator, which are wired in.

The trouble started when the power kept cutting in and out, even long after the storm passed on, and I finally started thinking there was some glitch in the campground's power system.  What finally got to me was the noise: both the frig and the microwave make little beeping sounds when their power is turned on and off, and after a while I felt like I was sitting in a pinball machine.  I unplugged the RV and turned on the generator for a while.  But that's such an ugly sound I decided to leave earlier than usual, walked the dogs again and left - at 7:10 AM.

today's route

On the road

The first 15 miles were on Missouri Hwy W, a country road with narrow lanes and no shoulder.  But it went through very pretty woods, thick with trees that had thin trunks, small fields, and small groups of houses or scattered farmhouses.

During the entire day today I saw 4 Trump signs.  I was surprised to see a sign at a busy crossroads near Poplar Bluff that said, "Return Dignity To America - Vote Biden."

Poplar Bluff didn't have a highway sign, but I deduced it from the roads I was traveling on.  It had 17,023 residents in 2010, so you can see it's a principal town in this area.  It says it's the "Gateway to the Ozarks," but it looked to me like the Gateway to the Boot Heel.  You can see on the map above where the nickname "Boot Heel" came from.

Going south on MO 53, which I picked up at Poplar Bluff, the land suddenly got very flat.  The Boot Heel is only 37 miles wide and is defined by the Mississippi River on the east, and I'm guessing those facts explain why it's so seriously flat.  I haven't seen land this flat since I was near the Gulf of Mexico in south Texas.  I could see for miles in any direction.

I saw plowed fields and huge cornfields with last year's stalks still sticking up.  Lots of Red-winged Blackbirds.  I saw that some of the fields I passed were flooded and wondered if that was just left over from the recent storms or do they grow rice here.

One answer is that they've grown rice in the Bootheel (I've seen it as 1 word and 2 words) for the last 30 years, and it's grown as far north as Cape Girardeau.  The majority of the crop goes to the Anheuser Busch Brewery in St. Louis (and who'd have thought of that?).

But there has been at least some flooding, because I saw a mature tree than that had water 2' or 3' up its trunk, and lakes and rivers and streams looked like they were flooded.

In the town of Qulin (not a misspelling), pop. 458, I saw a church sign that said, "God Loves His Peeps."

I couldn't help but notice that several of the farms I passed had many pieces of large, very expensive farm equipment stored.  Other farms had no farm equipment visible at all.  I wondered if they've banded together to buy the equipment, or if maybe some owners rent it to others?

Missouri doesn't always identify which river I'm driving over, I'm sorry to say.  In southeastern Missouri, though, when they tell me I'm entering a county, they tell me the county's population - information that's often omitted from the city limits signs.  Odd.

I passed more of that green grassy crop.  Later in the day I got a photo of one of those fields, and I'll stick it in here.

Just grass, right?  But it's planted in rows and farmers are using irrigation equipment on these fields.  I just don't know what it is.

The mascot for the local teams in Campbell (pop. 1,992) is the camel.

I started seeing a lot of flags that combined the left half of the US flag with the right half of the Confederate battle flag.  I couldn't find a "free to use" photo online, but I did find the website for a flag shop that said this flag was a best seller for those "wanting to embrace their roots!"

I've noticed that General Baptist churches are the most common in this area.

I started seeing in some fields that black plastic had been laid over the crops the length of each row.  To encourage growth?  Protect from spring frost?  I saw another field completely covered with straw.

I came to Kennett, pop. 10,932, a principle town in the Bootheel and the "Hometown of Sheryl Crow."  I'm a fan of hers and this seems like an interesting place for her to have grown up.  From Kennett, I was about 30 miles from Missouri's lowest point of 230', in the far southwestern corner of the Bootheel.

I passed occasional billboards for suicide prevention.  Apparently the state of Missouri has undertaken a huge project for suicide prevention aimed originally at at-risk youth ages 10-19, but also at veterans and drug users.  They've even got an education program for gun sellers, to help them recognize a potential purchaser that might be suicidal.

Missouri has a town named Braggadocio.

You might be able to tell from the map above that the Bootheel abuts Arkansas on the west and south, and Tennessee on the east.  Beginning north of the Bootheel near New Madrid, it meets Kentucky, and then a little farther on it hits Illinois.  That's a lot of influences coming in.

I saw a billboard proclaiming, "Unborn Children for Trump/Pence in 2020."  I couldn't believe it but it was real.  It had a couple of cute pictures of toddlers, hardly unborn children but much much more photogenic.  I also saw a lot of anti-abortion billboards that weren't related to a political candidate.

Aside from religious issues, the billboards I saw in this area were mostly for agricultural interests: seeds and equipment.

I passed the entrance for the Delta Research Center, part of the University of Missouri's School of Agriculture.  They've developed new varieties of soybeans and done research into cotton and rice cultivation.

I saw a sign telling me I was back on the Great River Road, which I haven't seen in a year - since I was in Arkansas.

I passed something that reminded me about the 1927 Flood of the Mississippi River - still considered the most destructive river flood in US history, and was described by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as "the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country."  I can't find anything that tells me its effect in Missouri, but I did see that below Memphis the river reached a width of 80 miles, and Memphis isn't far from MO.

New Madrid

The name of this town is pronounced MAD-rid, not like the city in Spain, though that's where the name came from.  Various signs told me it was founded in 1783, incorporated in 1803, and is on the original route of El Camino Real.  In 2019 it had 3,116 residents - though the town seemed a little bigger than that to me.  Here's a historical marker I found about the town's origins.

This marker sits on a boardwalk beside the Mississippi River.

The New Madrid Historical Museum says it has numerous exhibits about what they call The Great Quakes in 1811 and 1812.  For once, a local museum like this isn't exaggerating its claims.  I didn't visit the museum - mainly because I hadn't known about it and didn't plan my route to have the time - but there's a lot of information online.

As far as they know now, there were a series of severe earthquakes in this area, beginning in December 1811 in northeastern Arkansas, and extending to February 1812 in New Madrid.  Each of the 3 principle quakes was followed by severe aftershocks.  But to determine just how severe these incidents were, scientists have had to resort to detective work because there were no seismographs on the continent then.  Based on the affected area, they were the largest in magnitude east of the Rockies.

Their best guess is that the 1st and 3rd quakes were about 7.5 magnitude, and the 2nd was about 7.3.  By comparison, the 1964 Alaska earthquake was 9.2, though the affected area was only about half the size, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was estimated at 7.9 but the affected area was only about one-tenth the size.  So yeah.  A big deal.

That 3rd quake actually occurred along the Reelfoot fault line in Missouri and Tennessee, and I remember staying at Reelfoot Lake State Park when I was in Tennessee and learning about this earthquake and the extreme subsidence it caused.  There's more specific information in my post then - that was in November 2019.

And there's more information at this USGS website:   https://www.usgs.gov/new-madrid-earthquakes and at the Wikipedia page:  https://en.wikipedia.org/New-Madrid-earthquakes.

The reason I was in New Madrid in the first place was to see the county courthouse.

New Madrid County Courthouse
in New Madrid

Here's parts of a plaque in front of the courthouse that explain what we see.

I enjoy reading about old feuds and political maneuverings.

In my photo above of the courthouse, you can see a historical marker, which turned out to be about Harry Truman's connection with the county.

As I recall, Pres. Truman always expressed affection and loyalty for his home state of Missouri.

I spent a little time driving around town, trying to find someplace to stop - both to take the photos of the courthouse and to have lunch and take a walk.  I double-parked for the first but was unsuccessful on the 2nd one.  But I did run across the local Masonic Lodge.

New Madrid Lodge

This is on the right front
of the building (at left).

I couldn't find anything online that told me exactly how the lodge was destroyed, though local historians say it was burned.  But they seem to think it happened during the 5-week Battle of Island Number 10, just offshore of New Madrid in the Mississippi River.  In 1862, the South controlled New Madrid and the island, though these were almost the last of the Missouri territories they held.

If you take a close look at the map at the top of this page, you can see the river does some serious meandering right here at New Madrid - it's called a "tight double turn" where a Union ship sailing down the river would first approach the island head on, then be forced to slow to make the turn - a sitting duck, in other words.  The island was critical to Southern control of the Mississippi, but their overland supply line was completely vulnerable.

The Union army closed off access to New Madrid, the South moved all its troops and supplies to the island, and then they both started shelling each other.  Meanwhile a lot of other Northern troops were doing a lot of other things and the Southerners were eventually trapped and surrendered.  The North had gained some major access to the river, which made a difference in the outcome of the war.  Here's the Wikipedia page with a lot more detail.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Battle-of-Island-Number-Ten  

Back on the road

It was lunchtime and we all wanted a break, and I was stumped about finding a place to do that.  I decided to keep going toward our next destination and hope to find somewhere along the way.

Then Google played another one of its little practical jokes by telling me to drive along the Levee Road for .7 mile and then turn on Missouri Hwy Ww.  I was so skeptical of those instructions I stopped at the post office to ask.  It took all 3 workers to decide that those directions would probably get me where I wanted to go.  I wish they'd also told me there was a more sensible route, which there was.

The Levee Road turned out to be a nasty gravel washboard - extremely uncomfortable for all of us.  I could have gotten to that Missouri highway if I'd just kept going straight past the courthouse, but no-o-o.  Instead I needed to go past the courthouse and then around several blocks so I could get on this washboard.  

And that highway wasn't even named Ww.  It was WW.  A small thing, you say, but when you've just been washboarded and are trying to find a strange road and there weren't even any highway signs for vehicles from my direction telling me the name of this road - the signs were for other directions, meaning nobody ever expected somebody to come along the Levee Road without knowing exactly what they were doing - anyway, the correct name of the road can make a difference to my self-confidence as a driver.

Route WW ran along the Mississippi River, I think - at least, there was a whole lot of water on both sides of the road, which was disconcerting.  And lest you think I'm exaggerating:

I think this is the Mississippi River - or a piece of it.

And all that water on the left side didn't come through some normal process; at least some of it came from flooding:

This was a road, with a stop sign.  It's now so completely underwater,
I couldn't even tell where the other end was.  Note the "Water Over Road" sign.

Thank goodness there was no other traffic because Highway WW was a very narrow road.  At one point we surprised a Great Blue Heron that had been fishing in the water, and it flew up and kept ahead of us following the road for quite a way.

The road followed a levee for a while, which was fenced off and had cows grazing on it.

I saw hawks, including a Harrier, and a meadowlark.

I saw a sign pointing me to a car ferry, apparently crossing the river.  And I saw huge flat cropfields.

And we finally got to our next destination without having found a place to stop before - so we were all very ready for the break.

Towosahgy State Historical Site

According to a state handout, this place is pronounced tah-wah-saw-ge, and it's an Osage word meaning "old town."  The Indians who lived here between 1000 and 1400 AD were part of the Mississippian culture, the mound builders I've run across before in my travels.  And although this area was unprotected - and looted - for many years, there are still a few mounds here and other evidence of the earlier occupants.

2 of the mounds they've found

and a third

This informational plaque takes the place of a
state staff person, I guess.

This hut is a replica, they
say.  It has no doors or
windows - all 4 sides look
like the one you see here.

All that was here was what you see, plus a vault toilet and a parking lot.  But this place is definitely out of the way, and I imagine they don't get many visitors here.

My odometer read 76,000.0 in the parking lot.  That's a lot of miles I've been driving, though sometimes it feels like a lot more.

I had to turn off the main road, which I didn't have all that high an opinion of until I saw what I was turning on to: County Road 502.  There wasn't a sign telling me the name of the road, but there was a brown sign saying the historic site was this-a-way, so I took the road on faith.  But I had to drive more than a mile and a half on faith, which was really pushing it.

County Road 502

Not only is that a gravel road, but it's recently been given a new layer of gravel so I had to be very careful to travel where others had gone before me.  Otherwise, it was like driving in snow when you hit a deep patch no one's been on and you can't get traction, only substitute gravel for snow.  I learned this the hard way, because I was afraid at first to drive in the tracks of others - it was so muddy I was afraid I'd get stuck in it.  But it turned out I was more likely to get stuck in the deep gravel than in the mud, so I switched tactics.

Back on the road

Google's directions for getting out of there included continuing down County Rd 502 for another 1.4 miles, then turning on County Rd. 507 for an additional mile, before I'd find Missouri Hwy. FF, which would run into Hwy. AA.  (I'm telling you, the people who stick to interstates have no idea what they're missing.)

I couldn't get an internet signal to see if there was an alternative, and I didn't want to go back the way I'd come because I didn't know how to get from there to anywhere I wanted to be, so I followed Google.

Except I came to a fork in the road that Google hadn't mentioned, and I hadn't come as far as it said I should, so I took the road that looked most traveled.  Which then forked again, still with no road signs saying where I was.  I'd taken the left fork earlier so I took the left fork again.  And ended up in somebody's yard.  Fortunately, it was a working family with big barns and equipment and 3 nice guys who were enjoying a lunch break.  They not only tried to give me directions to where I wanted to go but also offered to guide me there.  But I figured I could find it okay on my own.

So I turned around and went back to the 2nd fork - the one closest to these guys - and took the other route.  Which dead-ended in a crop field.  Maybe you can tell that these county roads aren't much wider than 1 lane, so I had to back-and-forth-and-back so many times I wished I'd counted when I got up to what I thought was #8.  I was terrified, you see, of getting stuck in the pile of dirt along the side of the road - or in the ditch just beyond it.  

But I finally got turned around, passed the road to the house, and went back to that 1st fork and went down it and, sure enough, found what I hoped was Route 507.  Except there wasn't a sign on it anywhere.  I had to take that, too, on faith.  But just like those guys had said, it did in fact run into Hwy. FF, which was labeled (huzzah!) and there, at the end of it, I saw a sign for Route 507.  I never did see one for Route 502.

Somewhere in this vicinity is a place called Big Oak Tree State Park, and I'd originally intended to stop there.  But after careful reading of their website, I discovered that the oak tree in question died some years back.  The area has been designated a National Natural Landmark because it's 80 acres of a "rare, untouched wet-mesic bottomland hardwood forest in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain portion of the Gulf Coast Plain."  I'm sure it's wonderful, and with more time I'd want to visit, but I chose the mounds.  And they may not have been exactly thrilling, but I certainly got an in-depth view of the agricultural areas of Missouri.

In the town of East Prairie, pop. 3,176, I passed Stanley Muffler Company, "Home of Aluminized Tractor Mufflers."  I'm guessing all that's important to some consumers, though I can understand it only because it's in English.

Not long after that I hit I-55 and for once was glad to be on an actual highway.  At the town of Sikeston, pop. 16,318, I-57 took off northeast toward Illinois, and so did a long line of semis, I was interested to note.  I-57 crosses the Mississippi at a narrow point, then heads almost due north to avoid also having to cross the Ohio River, which flows into the Mississippi just south of there at Cairo, Ill.  I remember going there 2 years ago when I was spending my month in Illinois and being surprised that there was so very little there - the town was impoverished to the point of disintegration and there was almost nothing to mark the importance of those 2 mighty rivers meeting there.

Continuing north on I-55, I came to Cape Girardeau (2010 pop. 75,899), back on the Great River Road.  By then I was really tired and was lucky to find a parking space in a city lot right by the river.  No view of the river, but a sterling view of the levee, which had been covered with an impressive art installation.  The dogs and I took a close look.

includes some state symbols

For a long way on either side of that panel, there were drawings of distinguished native Missourians, of which these are just a sample.

Calamity Jane, the James brothers, Ginger Rogers,
Jean Harlow, John Huston, Betty Grable,
Vincent Price, Redd Foxx

Dred Scott, Stan Musial, Yogi Berra, George Brett, 
Dan Faurot, Mannie Jackson 

Seth J. McKee, Omar N. Bradley,
John J. Pershing

August Busch, James Cash Penney

Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin, T.S. Eliot

And all along the way in front of these portrayals were brief biographies.

I'm not sure how Dred Scott ended up on
this panel of "Sports Dazzlers."

Though Thomas Hart Benton doesn't fit
with these broadcasters, either.

And Bingham (an artist) and Twain (a writer) don't
fit with these military men.

And finally, this one about Missouri:

Near all this was a display about local history, including the brief visit by Meriwether Lewis to folks living here early in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

And half a block away was a magnificent church.

Old St. Vincent's Catholic Church,
built 1853.

The day had been sunny a few hours earlier, but you can see the clouds were moving in by this time.

From there I drove another 20 minutes or so up the river to Trail of Tears State Park.  Google had once again given imprecise directions, and I was tired anyway, so I got irritated when I got to the park and found a Trail of Tears Visitor Center, but nothing that said it was the park office or if not, where one was.  The parking lot for the visitor center was crowded, which I figured translated into a crowded center, which I wanted to avoid, so I drove on to the campground.  

No campground office there either but instead a sign telling me to use a QR code or text, neither of which I can do.  I couldn't pick up an internet signal or a phone signal, and the camp host wasn't answering his door (though his dog did).  So not being able to check in officially, and not wanting to drive a couple of miles back to the visitor center, I just parked in my campsite and waited.  By the time I went to bed, no park ranger had driven by and the camp host had still not come home.  I finally taped a note to his door, saying who I was and what my reservation confirmation number was and that I was going to bed early and leaving early in the morning.  Weird.

This was a very small campground, with only 19 spaces (including #11 for the camp host) in a small loop.  Not much room for the dogs and me to walk.  Immediately beside us ran a railroad track, and trains ran about every hour or two.

You can see, I hope, that I wasn't exaggerating - the train tracks really do run very close to where I was trying to sleep.  And the trains ran all night.  And blew their horns each and every time they came to the crossing.  That's my RV you can see on the left.

On the other hand, that's the mighty Mississippi River you can see on the other side of the train tracks.

The state park is a certified site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.  I wish circumstances had been a little different so I could have stopped at the visitor center - but I still haven't gotten a vaccination and I'm not going to mingle with a crowd of people without a pretty good reason.