Bill Eddleman
Host, Tales from Days Gone ByBill Eddleman was born in Cape Girardeau, and is an 8th-generation Cape Countian. His first Missouri ancestor came to the state in 1802. He attended SEMO for two years before transferring to the University of Missouri to study Fisheries and Wildlife Biology. He stayed at Mizzou to earn a master of science in Fisheries and Wildlife, and continued studies in Wildlife Ecology at Oklahoma State University.
Bill’s professional interests were in ornithology (the study of birds) and wildlife management. Upon earning his Ph.D., he worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation, did postdoctoral research at the University of Wyoming, and then joined the Natural Resource Sciences faculty at the University of Rhode Island in 1988. He moved back to Cape Girardeau to take a similar position in the Department of Biology at SEMO in 1995. He continued in the Biology Department and several administrative positions until retiring in 2016.
Bill has always had an interest in local history and genealogy. His familiarity with Southeast Missouri history was the primary reason he became Associate Director for the State Historical Society at its Cape Girardeau Research Center in 2017. At the center, he promotes donations to their manuscript collections, provides history-themed programs for groups in their 15-county coverage area, and assists patrons with research. His own historical research interests include mainly 19th-century Southeast Missouri history, especially the Civil War era and early settlement period.
In his spare time, he serves as president of both the Missouri Birding Society and the Missouri State Genealogical Association. He and his wife Hope also reenact Civil War era history, and are active members of the Friends of Fort D in Cape.
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The War of 1812 in Missouri bore little resemblance to the war most of us hear about in history classes. Most Missourians who served were frontier militiamen such as a young man from near Caledonia—George D. Strother. -
Residents of parts of southeastern Missouri were shocked to hear of the actions of a criminal gang during the late spring and early summer of 1881. Four men who had met socially, Jesse Myers, Robert Rhodes, James Hamilton, and Frank Brown were the primary members.
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East of Oak Ridge in Cape Girardeau County is an old cemetery beside a county road. The inscription on the sign marking the cemetery is “Wilson Cemetery.” However, Wilson Cemetery illustrates how present-day names for locations and features can hide or blur history. The place has gone by three different names over the last 202 years.
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The U. S. government created a pension system in 1862, not only for soldiers disabled in the Civil War but also for widows and children of those dying in the line of duty. Also included were mothers who documented their soldier sons as their sole support. The resulting files are a treasure trove of Civil War stories, including that of one young Bollinger County soldier, Albert T. Limbaugh.
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American settlers in Missouri 200 years ago would have been familiar with a ghostly “booming” sound heard in later winter and early spring on prairies. The source of this sound was displaying male greater prairie chickens.
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Halloween is coming up within a week. I am going to veer a little bit from the documentable stories I usually tell and relate a tale that borders on legend. Sometimes things may have a perfectly logical explanation but appear supernatural. Such was the case with an experience a man from Daisy in Cape Girardeau County had in the mid-1800s.
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On Saturday, October 15, 2022, an unveiling ceremony will reveal markers placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and Sons of the American Revolution at the grave of James Caldwell at Parkview Cemetery in Farmington. Caldwell was not only a veteran, but an under-appreciated pioneer and legislator in Kentucky and Missouri, and a local leader in Ste. Genevieve and St. Francois counties.
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On January 17, 1926, newspaper readers throughout Missouri were surprised to read the following: “Benjamin Hodge today celebrated his 109th birthday. Records at his home near here show that he was born in New York Jan. 16, 1817.”
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One of the initiatives of the Federal Writers’ Project portion of the Works Progress Administration in 1936 to 1939 was the Slave Narrative Project. This effort sent mostly white writers to interview over 2300 surviving African Americans formerly enslaved. Despite potential issues with the information, the narratives provide a glimpse into the experiences of formerly enslaved people during and after emancipation. One example is Robert Bryant of Herculaneum, Missouri.
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Missourians were shocked to learn of a brutal murder in Dunklin County on August 6, 1851. The victim was Nathaniel Cook Jr., shot from ambush in a cypress swamp about four miles south of Kennett.
