I grew up here. If you didn’t catch my name, I’m Tom Beaver. My family lived on Road D — William and Grace Beaver, two boys, four girls and a dog. We kids all went to school at Marthasville Elementary and Washington High School. My family shopped in Marthasville and we kid had our first friends, boyfriends and girlfriends in Marthasville. We learned to read in Marthasville, and the first place we drove to when we got our driver’s license was Marthasville — mainly Fuch’s Drugstore for an ice cream sundae, in my case.
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A speech delivered Xxx 99, 2017 at the Marthasville Centennial
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For me, the Golden Age of Marthasville was the 1960s, when I was a boy. The stores and storeowners of that time, the teachers, mechanics, carpenters, farmers, town fathers, community volunteers and everything else of that time were peak Marthasville to me. If you grew up here when I did, you’re thinking of names and faces right now, the same ones I’m thinking of, and you probably can’t imagine a more interesting cast of grownups and kids to have been born into. For others, the best Marthasville might be some other decade, maybe the one when you were a child. Or maybe you’re a new arrival and the best Marhasville is the one we have right now, the one you moved here to be a part of. Something I’ve realized is that Marthasville, like any other place that’s lasted a good long time, has had more than one Golden Age. And that brings me to my theme. This little town of ours is more than one town and one generation of people. It’s bigger than it looks. It’s a whole series of towns and a long seqence of different casts going all the way back to 1817, and even before. Marthasville is one of the longest running shows in Missouri. This little area between the bluffs and the river, between Washington and Holstein, has been the stage on which a very large cast of very impressive people have played out a surprising number and variety of interesting stories. You don’t have to go to all the way to Broadway for a great show.
Now, I didn’t know that as a young man. At the age of 30, I felt that Missouri had lost its flavor. I wanted an ocean of new experiences, not a pond full of old ones. And I got it. I lived in New York for 30 years, the same number of years I lived in Missouri before I left. And I loved it. I had a life there I could never have had here. But, eventually, I felt I’d had enough. New York had started to lose it’s flavor, too and I started wanting a life I couldn’t have there.
So I’ve returned, at least for awhile. I’ll probably stay here until I’m 90, then go back to New York again for another 30 years, then back here, and so on. That’s a pattern that seems to work for me.
So last December I returned, and to the surprise of my friends in New York, I’m as happy here as I ever was there. It surprises me a little, too. But there are two particular things I acquired between going away and coming back.
One is a renewed appreciation for all the things I liked about Missouri, Warren County, and Marthasville, when I was here the first time. Up until about the age of ten, this little spot on the map was so full of interesting things and people, from creeks to rivers, from Cornelius Berg to Daniel Boone, from crawdads and tractors to fossils and arrowheads, from the woods to the Fall Festival,that I thought it was almost perfect. I was seeing it with the eyesight of a child, which is very good eyesight.
The second thing I acquired is a deeper appreciaton for local history, though I don’t think that phrase expresses it very well. What I really mean to say is that I developed a stronger ability to see the past. I think as we get older, our physical vision gets worse, but this other kind of eyesight gets better. Maybe it’s because once we’ve climbed up half a century of time, centuries don’t seem like mountains anymore, but just hills. However it comes about, I find that I’ve come back to a Marthasville that looks different to me. I used to see it in terms of how many people it has and how far East and West does it goes. But now I see Marthasville in terms of how many people it’s HAD, and how far BACK it goes.
I’ve been talking with others in town, old friends and new ones, about local history, and I see that this is an appreciation many of you have. A few weeks back there was a storytelling event at the city cemetery. It was a wonderful and eye-opening experience. First, the native storytelling talent here is impressive. Second, the people who have shared this town with us, recently and not recently, have lived the kind of lives writers put into books. We heard tales of war heroes, of women who were outspoken and confident at times when society didn’t like that in a woman, of a mother who contributed four sons to one of the nation’s wars, of two young girls swept to their death by high water, of a time when there were biscuit families and there were cornbread families, and if you lived in that period, you knew what that meant and why.
We all know some of the stories that went into making Marthasville. Some of you know many more of them than me. But have you heard this one — Marthasville once had giants?
Imagine this. It’s a mild, September morning, exactly like the September mornings we’ve all experienced here in Marthasville, because it is here in Marthasville — but before Marthasville was a town. Right out there, between where we’re standing and the creek, a man calls out, “Are you heading to the landing, Jean? Have you heard?”
The other man comes kicking through the high grass and stumbling over a loose rock. There’s no street here yet, no lawns, no buildings. This is just a wild meadow with a creek running through it — that creek right there. The two men come together, each of them carrying a long rifle and wearing a poweder horn slung across their chest.
“Heard what,” asks the second man. The conversation is in French, but I’m translating it for you.
“They’re back,” says the first.
“Who? You don’t mean—”
“The expedition!”
“The expedition? After two and a half years? How many of them are left? Are the captains both alive?”
“They’re all alive but one! Captain Lewis and Captain Clark are telling of their adventures now! Come on, Jean, hurry!”
And the two frenchmen go trotting off that way, towards Green Gables and a little to the east. They’ll be there in 15 minutes.
And you know which giants I’m referring to. But maybe you never thought of them that way. They were indeed giants of their time, giants of their country, back from the vast, dangerous American west with knowledge that will advance the nation. President Jefferson waits impatiently a thousand miles away. He’ll hear the reports of Lewis and Clark eventually, but the seven families of La Charette will hear them today. Our fellow townspeople will be the first Americans to hear stories from one of the all-time great expeditions of discovery. Just two miles that way.
Those giants of the Earth stopped here twice, once on their way going, again on their way back. It’s come down to us in history that they were recieved each time with warm hospitality by those early townspeople of ours. They weren’t the only such travelers to stop here, and be welcomed here, and listened to. We just paid a visit to September of 1806. But let’s go back a little farther, to July of that year. Another team of explorers has stopped at La Charette, this one on the outbound leg of its journey. There are military men in the expedition, and doctors, and weapons, and 51 Osage Indians. These Indians have been to Washington to plead their case before the nation’s leaders, and now they are being escorted home to Osage country by this expedition, which will then continue into the American West on a mission of exploration. Four months from now, after a long trek across the Great Plains, the leader of this mission will spot an imposing mountain on the eastern wall of the Rockies and attempt to climb it. He will fail at that, but the peak will be named for him: Pike’s Peak. Our visitor today is Zebulon Pike, another giant of his time.
This spot on the Missouri River was, for 50 years or more more, the last outpost of white civilization west of the Mississippi. La Charette, the older sister of Marthasville, was established as a home base for fur trappers and a trading post for commerce with the Native Americans. It was itself a daring and important venture, but it was also a kind of last goodbye for fur trappers heading into the dangerous west, and their first welcome home some months or years later. It might sometimes seem like we’re just a spot on the map, but we were one of the first spots on this half of the map. And we’ve been here continuously ever since.
One of our best-known early townspeople was Daniel Boone, a giant amont giants. If we could stand right here and aim our imaginations all around the flat area of this valley, fast forwarding from 1799 up to 1820, we would surely we see Daniel Boone passing through here not just once, but often. His daughter Jemima and her husband, Flanders Calloway, lived just a mile from here, halfway between us and La Charette. Daniel’s sons lived around here, too, and all of them were hunters, always on the go. Sometimes they’d go hunting and fur trapping up the Missouri River towards Kansas, though it wasn’t Kansas yet. Sometimes they’d be hunting and trapping on the Bourbeuse River, over by what would become Union. But they would surely have been hunted and walked this local land, too. You might see Daniel and his wife Rebecca walking through here together. Something they liked to do as a couple was to make maple sugar. It was a project the Boone family enjoyed each year, first in North Carolina, then in Kentucky, and finally right here around Marthasville. One March about four years before Marthasville becomes an official town, Daniel and Rebecca were sugaring somewhere in this vicinity. Rebecca fell ill, probably because it had been such a cold, wet month, and we taken from the sugar camp to her daughter’s house, the Flanders Calloway house over here, and that’s where she died. And by all accounts it was a sad, sad time for everyone one around. Rebecca Boone was a woman the community depended on and could hardly imagine doing without. I believe we’ve had individual women of that kind in the Marthasville of our own times.
Daniel lived another six years after that. He moved from his own home near Femme Osage to live here at the Flanders Calloway house. He was in his 80s now, and he wanted be close to Rebecca’s grave to to his daughter Jemima. By then Marthasville was a town. We can walk down the street today and meet men and women in their 80s, who have many stories they could tell, and sometimes do. And they’re a local treasure. The first people of Marthasville had treasures like that, too, but one of those treasures men was a giant of American history. It would be something if we could walk over to Front Street today, and sit on the steps of the old grocery store, and listen to that particular old man. We can’t, but our fellow townspeople did.
Another of our giants was John Colter, the adventurer and explorer known as The First Mountain Man. Colter was part of the Lewis and Clark expdedition. Later, he went west again and discovered Yellowstone. Between adventures, he lived in and around La Charette off and on for 40 years. If we sat here looking back in time, we’d probably see him walk past, too. The same eyes that saw Yellowstone before any of the new Americans knew such a thing existed now looking out across this valley of ours every day, seeing the same bluffs and hills and creeks we see. We’ve been a witness and a host to many of the people who opened up the second half of America.
But anyone we might see walking across this field in those days was a giant. The life they lived was a hard one. Their houses were small and uncomfortable. If they had a window, it was just a hole with an animal hide over it. We would call their houses sheds, and not very good sheds. The rolling hills, the bluffs, the views across the river bottom, that all must have been just as beautiful then as it is now. But it wasn’t an easy landscape to live in. In 1815, two years before Marathasville was founded, a Mrs. Ramsey was milking her cows on the morning of May 20 — about one month ago, if you don’t include the years. Six Indians attacked. Mrs. Ramsey and four of her children were killed. A neighbor boy who was herding some horses in the woods saw signs of the attack and ran for help. The allarm was sounded — trumpets — imagine hearing trumpets across the valley there, and knowing what sound meant. Colonel Boone, one of Daniel’s sons, charged out of Fort Calloway to help the wounded. Because the Flanders Calloway house, which I’ve mentioned before, was a fort at that time.
It wasn’t a safe place then. It’s almost always quiet and peaceful here now, and has been for the longest time, but we can see with our imagination that it wasn’t always so.
Those dangerous frontier times did pass. Most of what I’ve talked about happened in the years right before and after Marthasville was founded. We were the frontier for a very long time, but gradually we stopped being the edge of civilization, and different kinds of stories and different people came along.
We can’t look at all the Marthasvilles of our past today, but let’s look at a few more of them. In 1819, when Marthasville was two years old, we saw our first steamboat. In went past us heading west in May, then went past the other way a few weeks later, returning to St. Louis. A few weeks after that, the people of La Charette and Marthasville would have seen something even grander. Another scientific expedition comes by heading west, this one a caravan of four steamboats and nine keelboats, transporting over a thousand military troops up to the Yellowtone River to discourage the British from meddling in the American fur trapping trade. One of these steamboats has the figure of a dragon extending out front, with exhaust pipes emitting steam from its nostrils. That would have been a sight people around here talked about for quite awhile, I believe.
For ten years after that, steamboat traffic was few and far between along here, but then it picked up and would have been a frequent source of interest and romance. Mark Twain wrote about steamboats on the Mississippi as the bringers of excitement and culture to his small river town. I believe boys would have been the same in Marthasville as they were in Hannibal in this regard, listening for every steamboat whistle and imagining themselves growing up to be pilots.
Mark Twain is another of the giants who came around our bend in the river. In 1861, just 26 years old and still Samuel Clemens, he passed by on his way to the west, an experience he writes about in the book, “ROughin It.”
There are interesting stories and interesections with history all the way through. A lot of these things I’ve only learned recently, since coming back to Missouri with fresh eyes and a fresh desire to see quantity and variety here, the kind of stuff I went to New York at the age of 30 to see. What I’m realizing is that Marthasville is small on a map, but large in history. I went to New York to meet people of other nationalities and languages, but I’m meeting people like that here, too. Not in the present Marthasville, but in all the other ones. When I was a boy, many of the older people here still spoke German. Before we were a town of Germans, we were a town of French, and a bit futher back, the voices shouting across the river as they traveled west in search of furs would have been Spanish voices. And during those frontier times, and for thousands of years before that, the voices would have been Indian.
There are surprises all the way up to the present. I find the more recent ones as interesting as the ones from our fronteir days.
Did you know that in the 1930s we had an ice house, located halfway up town hill? The owners would cut ice in winter from Charette creek, or ponds, or even from the river, and pack it away in straw and sawdust, so the town could have cold drinks in summer?
In the 1930s, before the school was built uptown, classes were held in the building many of us knew later as Driemeyer’s garage.
In the 30s or 40s we had a cheese factory. We had a movie house called “Morhaus Theatre,” which also served as a dance hall. On weekend nights, the streets would have had cars parked along the sides, with men and women in evening clothes walking to where the dancing was, and live music ringing through the town.
We had two or more hotels, one of them called the Merrimake Hotel, a grand three-story building.
And so on, and so on, right up until the 60s, the 70s, the 2000s. And it includes the events of June 17, 2017, when the people of Marthasville gathered beside the river once again to welcome the stories and lives the world had brought their way. But today and this weekend it wasn’t the Missouri River we stood at. It was the river of local history. If our imaginations will welcome them, all the townspeople and visitors of the past 200 years are ready to come ashore and mingle with us and report their stories.
These are just a few of the glimpses I’ve seen of the previous Marthasvilles. Many of you could stand up here and give ones just as interesting and more interesting. I wish you could. The more our older people tell their stories and the more our younger people ask for those stories, the bigger and fuller our town becomes. Then a quiet street or field isn’t empty. It’s a stage where previous lives are being acted out, making our own lives fuller, making our little spot on the map a place so full of interesting things it’s almost perfect.
Thank you for listening. Enjoy the Bicentennial, share your stories, and I’ll see you all here again in 200 years.