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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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.” -
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.
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No other river best captures the diverse nature of Missouri than the St. Francis River. The river begins its 426-mile course in the St. Francis Mountains, flows rapidly in its rugged upper part, before taking the appearance of a typical Ozark river, then ends in the flat swampy country of southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas.
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The Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wished to document the flood devastation and chose to do so in a unique way. They hired the distinguished Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton to sketch the scenes of the floods and their effects on the residents of the area.
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The horrors of Foeste's war captivity can be summed up by his own words, spoken years later to a hired man on his farm. “They damn near killed me in that camp.”
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Father, later Bishop, John Joseph Hogan was born in Bruff, County Limerick, Ireland in 1829. He came to the U. S. in 1847, attended seminary in St. Louis, and became a Priest on April 10, 1852. By 1857, he established missions to Irish railroad workers and Catholic settlers in outstate Missouri in Chillicothe, Macon City, Brookfield, Mexico, and Cameron.
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Alexander Buckner was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, in 1785 and became a lawyer in Charlestown, Indiana. He relocated to Missouri in 1818 and settled in Jackson. He served in the Missouri Senate from 1822 to 1826, before the state legislature chose him to succeed David Barton as U. S. Senator in 1830.
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We’ve all heard excuses for people’s failures, some legitimate and others not. Sometimes we can find examples of excuses in history, too. Today’s story involves an excuse for a problem with clearing a land title early in the history of Perry County, Missouri.
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The Rev. Timothy Flint left an 1820 account of the Dutch or Bollinger Settlement, 1st to 3rd generation German immigrants who came to Missouri starting in 1800. His book, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, includes details on Missouri in 1815-1822. Thousands of Missourians trace their ancestry to the Bollinger Settlement, so it is well-worth discussing his observations.
