St. Louis attractions | Travel Thru History

Missouri: Cahokia Mounds

Exploring an Ancient Civilization Just Outside St. Louis

by Kelley Baster

Few things are appealing about a 10-hour drive in the middle of February. The gray and brown landscape along a flat, straight highway isn’t exactly scenic. Fortunately for me, this particular drive was broken up by a stop to a major historical site that I may never have visited if it weren’t for this trip. I had casually mentioned the trip from Ohio to Kansas that I was planning, and an acquaintance told me to stop by Cahokia Mounds on the way. While researching this option, I was surprised to discover that this site was once home to the most extensive and advanced pre-Columbian settlement in the modern United States. Yet, somehow, I have no recollection of ever studying it or even hearing about it.

As soon as I went in the interpretive center at Cahokia, I was welcomed by a friendly volunteer who let me know the next film about the settlement would be beginning soon. I made my way to a large theater and learned a lot from the brief documentary about life at Cahokia. I then began to explore the exhibits, which rivaled those of some of the bigger museums I’ve visited. They talked about daily life in the past, the surrounding environment, and the excavation that unveiled much of what is now known about Cahokia.

As early as 700 A.D., people began small settlements at the site that later became Cahokia Mounds. By the settlement’s peak in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, Cahokia is estimated to have contained 10,000-20,000 inhabitants. For some perspective, that’s double the current size of Aspen, CO, and just a little bit smaller than Key West, FL. Those thousands of residents were spread out over an area that stretched for over six square miles. The size of the settlement is even more impressive when compared to other cities at that time. The settlement at Cahokia surpassed the size of London in that time frame, and no other settlement in North America surpassed Cahokia it until Christopher Columbus and his companions arrived on the continent.

In addition to its size, Cahokia is noteworthy because of its level of progress for the time. Of course, even maintaining order in a settlement of its size shows a certain level of advancement. An extensive display even lets you walk through a life-size model that portrays a typical day at Cahokia. Walking through the scenes that depict people working, cooking, and playing truly helps visitors envision life at the time. Other indications of the settlement’s progress are present as well. One noteworthy instance is a calendar system created by a series of wooden posts, now known as Woodhenge. Similar to the way in which a sundial can indicate the time, the posts of Woodhenge indicate the time of year. A recreation of this setup can be seen today at the site.

After thoroughly exploring the museum, I made my way to the main historic attraction at Cahokia: Monk’s mound. At 92 feet tall, this earthwork seems to be as prominent in the park as it was in the Cahokia community nearly 1,000 years ago. While Monk’s Mound is impressive from the surrounding ground, I was certainly glad I took the stairs to the top to see the skyline of St. Louis and the surrounding park below. Numerous smaller mounds fill the rest of the park and are linked by trails that meander through the grounds. If I had visited in a warmer month, I certainly would have spent more time exploring these trails and mounds.

The historical significance of the Cahokia Mounds is so great that it has even earned the revered designation of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, making it one of only 23 such sites in the United States. It’s listed alongside much more popular destinations, like Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty. The mounds, recreation of Woodhenge, and interpretive center all help visitors understand why Cahokia certainly deserves that designation.

If You Go:

Cahokia Mounds is located near St. Louis, MO, and is not far south of I-70.

Cahokia Mounds’ website provides museum hours, a trail map, and other information that will be helpful in planning your visit. No admission fee is required, but suggested donations are listed, ranging from $2 for children to $7 for adults.

More information about the historical significance of Cahokia Mounds can also be found on UNESCO’s website.

About the author:
Kelley has had an interest in travel, writing, and photography for most of her life, she has only recently begun to combine these interests into travel writing. She created her website, www.aboutthedestination.com earlier this year. Kelley prefers destinations that offer great hiking opportunities and natural scenery; however, she enjoys exploring cities once in a while too.

All photos by Kelley Baster
View of Monk’s Mound from ground level
View from top of Monk’s Mound. Interpretive Center can be seen in upper left corner
Stairs ascending Monk’s Mound
View from top of Monk’s Mound facing St. Louis skyline

Watching for Ghosts in the Haunted Lemp Mansion

St. Louis, Missouri

by Roy A. Barnes

“Oh no, do I have to sleep all the way up there tonight?”

This is what I thought when I found out that not only was I going to sleep in one of the most haunted houses in this nation, St. Louis’ Lemp Mansion. I would be temporarily residing in the third floor attic, cut off from the other guests.

As I walked up the two floors via the long flights of stairs through the lightly musty hallways ready to face my fate for the evening I was full of trepidation.

It would turn out to be one of the most horrifying nights of my existence, some of it brought upon myself. I didn’t need to feel the presence of someone watching me, or see objects moving by themselves, or hear the ghostly footsteps, that have been reported so many times by others, because my own mind was filled with a wild imagination for the scariest possible outcomes!

The Lemp Mansion’s History

John Adam Lemp was one of America’s first beer magnates. He began in St. Louis as a grocer, but his beer sales would become the prime focus by 1840. He’s purported to have produced the first lager beer in St. Louis, forming the Western Brewery. John’s son William took over, and by 1870, the Lemps had the largest brewery in St. Louis and were one of the first breweries to have a national patronage because William implemented refrigerated railway cars to ship beer outside of the St. Louis area. In 1892, this operation would be known as the William J. Lemp Brewing Company.

The thirty-three room mansion that is the focus of so much ghostly activity today was bought in 1876 by the Lemps. William’s daughter Hilda married Gustav Pabst of Milwaukee, creating a powerful beer alliance in 1897. But the good times for the Lemps were about to end, and tragedy would begin to assault the family.

In 1901, William’s son Frederick died mysteriously. In 1904, heartbroken William shot himself in the head. William “Billy” Lemp, Jr. became President and moved into the mansion when mother Julia died in 1906. More bad times were on their way: Prohibition would be the catalyst in shutting down the brewery in 1919. Then Billy’s sister, Elsa Lemp Wright, who was like a Paris Hilton of her day, committed suicide in 1920 due partly to terrible insomnia. She shot herself in the heart on the Lemp mansion property.

In 1922, the grand ten city block brewery of the Lemps near the mansion grounds was sold for just under $600,000 to a shoe company. It had once been valued at seven million dollars. As a result of this firehouse sale, Billy shot himself in the heart in the former brewery office, to the left of the main entrance of the house, which is now a dining room for those guests who partake of morning breakfasts. Brother Charles would take over the mansion and live there until 1949, working as a financier and political influencer of South St. Louis, when he, too, shot himself to death in the head, dying very lonely and bitter. He was the only Lemp to leave a suicide note, and it was succinct: “St. Louis Mo/May 9, 1949,/In case I am found dead blame it on no one but me/Ch. A. Lemp.”

Watching For Ghosts

I knew all this history before deciding to visit the Lemp mansion, fascinated that I would stay overnight in such a ‘haunted’ place. But when the day came for me to go there, I began to worry. What if I did see a ghost, and it scared me to death? Watching one of my favorite horror movies The Shining, a few days before my trip to St. Louis, only caused me to feel more anxious.

For a home with such a history, very little of the Lemp furnishings remain in the house save some clothes and boots of Billy Lemp’s ex-wife Lillian. This is because another Lemp child, Edwin, who actually lived to be 90, ordered a vast amount of the family heirlooms destroyed upon his death in 1970 to help rid the family curse. I wasn’t concerned with the heirlooms as much as I was at turning the corner and (potentially) seeing a ghost or ghosts right before my eyes.

I unpacked my luggage, then sat in my room called The Louis Suite. The rooms are named after various members of the Lemp family. (Louis didn’t kill himself but died of natural causes.) I stayed there awhile, getting a respite from the hot St. Louis summer afternoon and realized that I wasn’t feeling scared at all. I kept telling myself that this house doesn’t give off any strange vibrations.

I watched some television before going out for the evening arriving back just before 11 p.m. All was eerily quiet. There were no night employees or phones in the room, so I felt isolated, given that the attic only has three rooms. One of them was unoccupied, but the other room next to mine didn’t have any sounds coming out of it. In a state of heightened anxiety, I kept my door wide open and put my backpack against the door.

I worked on my computer, and kept turning my head to check the open door. I thought I was catching glimpses of apparitions, but if I did, they disappeared quickly. Then suddenly, I heard a loud clanging noise. It didn’t stop.

“Oh no, the ghosts are going to get me all alone up here,” I thought, and I ran out my room and down the hallway. all the way to the end. And there I saw that it was only a man scraping ice out of the ice machine.

Hearing Ghostly Voices

The man told me that he and his wife had stayed at the mansion some fifty times. He said that the attic had just been made usable for guests in the last year or so, and that séances had been held up here since this part of the house was the most haunted. He said he has heard gunshots, ballroom music, and ghostly voices during his stays at the mansion and his wife had actually seen a ghost.

He told me told that a “Monkey-faced” boy, the son of Billy Lemp, who spent his life confined to the attic (where I was bedding down for the night), still haunted the mansion. This boy had Downs Syndrome, and was basically neglected by the family. People have reported seeing his apparition peeking out of the attic’s tiny windows.

After talking to the man for around ten minutes, I decided to take some pictures of my room and the hallway to see if I could catch some images of orbs or apparitions. Some of my pictures did capture orbs. One photograph of the hallway mirror appears to have a light outline of a ghost, the size of a child’s body! Could that have been the unfortunate “Monkey-faced” boy?

A little after midnight, I decided that if the ghosts were going to get me, let them, because I needed to get some sleep. So I closed the door and went to bed. I tried to sleep, but with no avail. All I could think of was what would happen when I closed my eyes. I tossed and turned with the ceiling light and fan on above me, feeling a bit of a chill even under the covers. Later, I decided to turn the fan off, but when I stood on the bed, I saw blinking lights through the glass window above my door. I boldly went to my door, and opened it. Someone or something turned off the hall light, and in the shadows, a woman appeared.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I said to the apparent guest from the next room. She didn’t look like a ghost, as she stood next to the doorway of the room next to mine.

“That’s okay,” said the woman. I shut my door wondering if she were taking pictures of the hall as I saw flashes go off. I didn’t feel scared when I saw her, but a tad relieved that I wasn’t totally alone in the attic.

Sleepless In St. Louis

A little after 5 a.m., after more tossing and turning, I decided to get up and head to a nearby coffee house. When I opened the door, the hall light was on again. No one was present, and I scurried out of the deathly quiet mansion fearful at every turn, trying to make it to the back door, the only way accessible to guests after the staff leaves at night. Would the ghostly Doberman Pinscher that Charles Lemp shot before killing himself try to scare me out of my wits somewhere along the hallways or stairways as I made my escape to freedom? Fortunately, nothing happened.

I arrived at the coffee house ten minutes later.

“Do you have anything that is soothing?” I asked the waitress. “I stayed overnight at the Lemp Mansion, and my nerves are shot.”

“We have a Chamomile tea that’s good for that, I’ll make you one,” she said.

The tea helped calm my nerves, and with some quality time in the lively civilization of the coffeehouse, I felt much better.

Back at the mansion, during breakfast, I shared my overnight experience and pictures with some other guests. They found my night of trials very interesting.

I won’t forget my experience at the Lemp Mansion. Especially since I did a better job of scaring myself than the ghosts did!

Food Tour of the St Louis Delmar Loop

If You Go:

The Lemp Mansion Restaurant & Inn
3322 DeMenil Place, St. Louis, Missouri 63118
314-664-8024

About the author:
Roy A. Barnes is a past contributor to Travel Thru History and writes from southeastern Wyoming. His travel articles have also appeared at Transitions Abroad, Bootsnall.com, GoNOMAD.com, Live Life Travel, Cyber Oasis, and others.

All photos are by Roy A. Barnes.

Scott Joplin: King of Ragtime

St. Louis, Missouri

by Michael Schuman

What jazz was in the 1920s, rhythm and blues was in the 1950s, and hip-hop was in the 1980s, are what ragtime was at the turn of the 20th century: on the cutting edge, music played in not so savory places and an art form that respectable people said was going to be the end of western civilization as we know it. And nobody in the late 1890s and early 1900s wrote and played ragtime as well as a Texas-born itinerant musician named Scott Joplin.

The only home where Joplin ever lived that still stands is a humble yet handsome, brick, walk-up flat on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. It is open as a state historic site, serving both as a tribute to Joplin and perhaps the nation’s most significant monument to this truly American musical genre. The bottom floor is a mini-museum devoted to ragtime and the early recording industry; the top floor is a recreated turn of the century flat, furnished like Scott Joplin and his wife Belle might have done during their residency.

Joplin may today be remembered the King of Ragtime, but he was a child prodigy who grew up playing myriad instruments, composing music and rendering the classics. In time he left Beethoven and the rest behind and gravitated towards the improvisational, syncopated rhythms that had their roots in the minstrel tradition. That evolved into the piano-dominated music called ragtime, originally known as “ragged time” because of its supposed ragged sound.

In its early days, ragtime was not the music one heard at concert halls. It was played in the saloons, brothels and skid row restaurants of railroad towns and port cities in the Midwest. Yet like jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop, ragtime soon made the transition from music of the counterculture and black culture to music enjoyed by the white middle class.

By the time Joplin moved into this St. Louis home in the spring of 1900, he was starting to become nationally-known. Much of his success was due to his first highly regarded published work, “Maple Leaf Rag.” It was a mega-hit in the world of ragtime and became the first sheet music to sell over a million copies.

In the home’s museum section visitors can peruse the covers of period sheet music, and several are evocative of the day’s racial mood. The cover art for his 1902 composition, “The Entertainer,” is by today’s standards remarkably racist — a stereotypical strutting, top-hatted black minstrel-style performer. Another 1902 number is titled, “I Am Thinking of My Pickaninny Days.”

It was “The Entertainer” that turned a new generation onto this leader of ragtime royalty. Joplin was a footnote in musical history when in 1974 composer Marvin Hamlisch arranged much of Joplin’s music for the movie, The Sting. The movie went on to win seven Academy Awards, including best picture, and it spawned a single: Hamlisch’s rendition of “The Entertainer.” During a time when the music charts were topped by artists such as Elton John, John Lennon, and The Allman Brothers Band, this anachronistic ragtime number reached number 3 on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 list. After decades of obscurity the world had rediscovered Scott Joplin.

It is hard to appreciate ragtime without hearing it, and visitors are permitted to have a seat at a period player piano and pump the pedals. The QRS player piano rolls offer ragtime numbers such as the bouncy “Magnetic Rag” and “Swipesy: Cake Walk.”

The cakewalk was a hybrid, a combination of a dance consisting of alternating hopping and kicking steps, and an early version of the game musical chairs. The last couple standing won a prize, literally a cake, although prizes gradually became bigger over time. The cakewalk was incredibly popular around the turn of the century. Site administrator Cookie Jordan noted, “Because black Baptists did not allow dancing they did not refer to the cakewalk as a dance. They called it a march.”

Joplin’s prime years coincided with the infancy of the recording industry. Ancestors of today’s MP3s, ipods and compact discs were recorded cylinders, and several are displayed here. Recorded cylinders lasted on the market for a few decades, and were all but replaced by flat phonograph records by the late 1920s. The two most successful record manufacturers, Edison and Victrola, handcuffed the buying public much the same way computer software giants Microsoft and Apple are accused of doing today. Both Edison and Victrola manufactured record players as well as records, but one could not play an Edison record on a Victrola record player and vice versa. Victrola ultimately won the war.

You get an idea of the Joplins’ living quarters on the second floor. Says Jordan, “A lot of people have romantic notions of the Edwardian era, and they think how wonderful things were. I have to tell people they had outdoor plumbing. People had a hard life by our standards, and that’s the reality of what life was like for Scott Joplin.”

Gaslights, calcimine paint and late Victorian-style furniture offer a taste of Joplin’s day. There is a desk with pigeonholes topped with a gas lamp and sheet music; a period cabinet upright piano sits against a parlor wall. A bedroom fireplace kept the Joplins warm in winter, while they spent many muggy St. Louis summer nights outdoors on the adjacent sleeping porch.

Joplin tackled more ambitious projects beyond single ragtime tunes. He composed an opera, The Guest of Honor, to commemorate Booker T. Washington’s dinner at Teddy Roosevelt’s White House. It was performed throughout the Midwest and prairie states in 1903, although some music halls refused to accept the fact that a black man could write an opera and credited The Guest of Honor to “Scott Joplin’s Minstrel Company.” Unfortunately, the sheet music has been lost so The Guest of Honor can never again be performed.

A second Joplin opera, Treemonisha, tells the story of a post-Civil War black couple who adopt a baby girl who grows up to become a teacher and leader. No music publisher thought it would be a commercial success and Joplin was unable to sell it. He self-produced and performed it once in 1912, but Treemonisha was soon forgotten — that is, until 1972 when it was performed for a second time in Atlanta. It was then presented in Texas by the Houston Opera Company which was invited to perform it on Broadway in New York City. In 1976 Joplin was posthumously awarded a special Bicentennial Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American music.

Jordan would like visitors to leave Joplin‘s house with an appreciation for an innovative musician from a long time ago. She says, “Museum patrons should go away with a sense of what the turn of the 19th to the 20th century was like for Joplin. It was a new age, a new music was being developed, serving as a glimpse of the times to come. Museum-goers should also be able to realize the genius of Joplin and his other ragtime contemporaries, mostly African Americans forging new ground and planting seeds for new art forms to follow.”

One of those art forms that grew out of ragtime was jazz, hatched in the 1910s and coming into its own in the 1920s. And like jazz, ragtime is a wholly American music genre.

Watch a video of the Scott Joplin House Missouri State Historic Site

St Louis Food Tour: The Dish on the Central West End District

If You Go:

Scott Joplin House State Historic Site is open Monday-Saturday 10-4 and Sunday 12-4. Tours are offered on the hour. Admission: $2.50 adults and $1.50 ages 6-12. Note: The building next to Joplin’s house has been refurbished and opened as the new Rosebud Café, featuring ragtime performances. The first floor of the café interprets a turn of the 20th century bar and gambling club. (The original Rosebud Cafe where Joplin played was located at 22nd and Market streets, roughly five blocks away.) Note: The Scott Joplin House State Historic Site will hold its 17th annual Ragtime Rally with live performances on Memorial Day, May 25, 2009.

The 29th annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival will take place June 3-7 in Joplin’s former home town of Sedalia, Missouri, about 190 miles west of St. Louis. Events include a ragtime concert and fish fry as well as a symposium on Joplin’s legacy. Information: Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation, 321 South Ohio Avenue, Sedalia, MO 65301, (866) 218-6258, (660) 826-2271

Information: Scott Joplin House State Historic Site, 2658 Delmar Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63103; (314) 340-5790.
General information: St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission, 701 Convention Plaza, Suite 300, St. Louis, MO 63101, (314) 421-1023, (800) 916-0040

About the author:
Michael Schuman has been writing travel copy for over 30 years. His articles have appeared in the travel sections of over 175 newspapers and two dozen magazines. He is the author of seven travel books and 23 nonfiction books for the young adult market. His latest is Barack Obama: “We Are One People.”

All photos are by Michael Schuman.