***
The prairie? Today you see less of it. Most land has converted to cultivation. But the area remains rural, and remote. As Erifnus and I caromed between farms, fields and forest, locals kept talking about the mountains in southwest Cass County. Mountains? In the middle of the prairie? Amaroochie, they said. Turns out to be the Amarugia Highlands, sticking out like warts on the smooth landscape. Their altitude doesn’t rival the Rockies or even the Ozarks, but from a flat start, Erifnus got a workout on her gears. And she got a view at the top. The conservation area turns out to be a popular recreation spot. Who knew? This close to Kansas.
All this galloping flipped my switch to gourmet. I set my compass to take me from Amaroochie to Archie, home of a high school team called the Whirlwinds and the second most unique water tower in Missouri. Water towers generally are the first peek at a town’s personality, visible from miles away. These small-town skyscrapers assume an infinite number of shapes, with only two requirements: hold water and become a billboard for the town’s number one obsession. The Archie water tower is diamond-shaped, and the town’s name cascades down the stalk. Under the shadow of the tower, I passed BJ’s Rise ’N Shine Restaurant. The parking lot was packed. I glanced at my watch. It was 3 p.m. Curiosity propelled my car to the last available parking space, and I entered this roadside diner to find good food, like Piranha chili, and a counter covered with homemade pies. Ordering desserts here is a bittersweet process of elimination. The Pizookies® are fresh-baked cookies smothered in ice cream. The beignets are baked, not fried—the best beignets this side of Café du Monde.
I love small-town restaurants and their reasonable prices. Down the road in Adrian, Winfield’s Restaurant served up a special of stuffed peppers, mashed potatoes and gravy with green beans and cherry cobbler for less than six bucks. I ate again. Then I found shelter for the night and regrouped for the next day.
***
A statue stands on the courthouse grounds in Butler. That’s not unusual, since statues seem to prefer such places. But this bronze likeness of a solitary soldier honors a turning point in the Civil War, a turning point that goes largely unnoticed. The Battle of Island Mound wasn’t much more than a skirmish, although at least seven men were killed. This was the first Civil War battle involving African American soldiers. On the old Toothman Farm, where the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry had built Fort Africa, federal troops repelled a larger Confederate force. The battle gets overlooked by just about everybody, save the most astute Civil War historians. But now the state plans a historic site. It’s about time.
Under the neon sign at Sam’s Hi-Way Hamburger, a line of kids waited at the service window to buy ice cream. My stomach wanted to stop for ice cream too, but my internal clock kept my foot to the gas pedal, since a stop would put me in line behind the better part of two little league teams.
On my way out of town, I stopped to see Linnie Crouch, a Butler legend. Well, I didn’t see him. He’s six feet under in Oak Hill Cemetery. I hope he lived an interesting life. Good, bad, I don’t know. He died in 1898. But his fame extends beyond the grave, almost six inches. His plot sprouts the world’s smallest tombstone, certified by Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It’s less than six inches square. He may or may not have been a Bushwhacker. But I’ll bet he knew a few.
Driving down the highway, I did a double-take. Ahead, a garbage truck slowed to pick up a load. The sign on its side proclaimed, “Bitter White Trash.” I looked again, closer this time, to read, “Better Rate Trash.” Hey, my road is long, and the key to keeping my interest involves random sights, random thoughts and the ability to sort through trash.
Many Missourians are sensitive about the persistent belief that the state is overrun by white trash. It’s a lasting scar that came from the shapers of popular opinion back during the years leading up to the Civil War. For political purposes during those prewar years, the abolitionist media portrayed Missourians as Pukes. The word was capitalized to formalize this subhuman culture, interested only in drinking whiskey, fighting and owning slaves. Missourians were almost universally described as illiterate and obnoxious, with vacant pig-like eyes and tobacco-stained teeth. Truth is, there were Pukes among Missouri’s Civil War population. But like any other subclass of heathens, they were outnumbered by law-abiding citizens. They just shouted louder, shot more often, and burned and looted and raped their way into American lore. And with the help of the Union press, the whole state was branded with an image that persists today. Pukes. Bushwhackers. Hillbillies. Bitter white trash.
I didn’t intend to pick up the scent of Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers and cavalries in blue and gray. But that’s the allure of taking a random route and pinballing through frontier territory. I learned that while things have changed, much remains the same. Many western Missourians still hold to Southern sympathies. Documents in Missouri’s “Bushwhacker Capital” of Nevada proclaim that “19 out of 20 Vernon Countians were Confederate sympathizers. Not counting Bushwhackers, the county sent more men per capita to the Confederate army than any other in Missouri.” That could explain why Union General Thomas Ewing issued his controversial Order #11 in 1863. To flush out the Bushwhackers, Ewing burned four counties to the ground. Ewing’s torching of Missouri’s Kansas border wasn’t the first act of eminent domain, but it’s among the most heinous. His reign of terror punished the innocent as well as the guilty. There is still deep resentment among farm families in western Missouri who suffered in Ewing’s effort to eradicate the Bushwhackers.
For a closer look at Bushwhackers, I pointed the mother ship toward Nevada, pronounced with a hard “a” (nuh VAY duh). Minutes later, I crossed the radar of another hard “a,” just doing his job, and he handed me a warning ticket for speeding. Fitting, then, that my first stop downtown was the drafty old jail. It’s a museum now, and I suspect local parents relish taking their miscreant teens to view the “cell room of medieval malevolence.” They actually kept prisoners here until 1960. Its stone walls shout century-old hieroglyphics, haunting testament to time spent in Hell. Accentuating the spooky aura of the jail, somewhere outside its thick walls, the mother of all sledgehammers repeated its dramatic thud at half-minute intervals. I searched for the sound, conjuring images of anvils dropping into claw-foot bathtubs.
The dull pounding persisted, every 30 seconds, reverberating through downtown. I followed my ears around the business district, past the courthouse, a work of art under a red tile roof. I followed the sound, passing murals that leapt from brick walls like giant tattoos, telling vivid stories of the Katy Railroad and the Civil War.
I remembered what a waiter on the Delta Queen had told me: “When you enter Nevada, listen. You’ll hear the sounds of old W.F. Norman.”
And suddenly, there it was. Right in the middle of town. The W.F. Norman Sheet Metal Manufacturing Company sends its stamped tin ceiling art everywhere in America, to places as far-ranging as the wedding-cake ceilings of the Delta Queen to the ornate mouldings atop Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel, where President Grant and Sam Clemens smoked and drank.
I was fascinated. Right here is a uniquely American art form that flourishes only in this one red brick factory. This town owns the tin ceiling market, thanks to the perseverance of a company well into its second century of turning ordinary sheet metal into architectural ornaments.
The W.F. Norman Company stamps tin into original designs, based on customers’ wishes. Even today, the company produces exact duplicates of mouldings and marquees, crestings and caryatids, to restore America’s stately mansions.
At the edge of this tin ceiling factory, I stood outside an open window, not a jon boat’s length from the ancient stamping apparatus. An iron-bottomed hunk of oak timbers, heavier than a Chevy Tahoe, raised slowly toward the ceiling, straining its giant hemp halter, and dropped like a guillotine on the unsuspecting sheet of tin. The tin was impressed. So was I.
The huge press offered a time-capsule trip to the Industrial Revolution, and with some adjustment I suspect this contraption could hammer a Humvee into gargoyles.