Dr. 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 road to getting federal land into private hands through purchase was often complicated in the early 1800s. -
William H. McLane, born July 6, 1816, was the youngest of six sons of John McLane and Lydia Lawrence McLane. -
Perhaps the most prominent man and largest landowner from Lincoln County, North Carolina, to move to Missouri in the early 1800s was Captain Henry Whitener. -
Early settlers in the old lead belt that became Washington and adjacent counties were French until the late 1790s. -
One of the factors that plagued east-west transportation in the Missouri Bootheel was blockage by swamps running mostly north-south. -
Missouri’s counties are named for national or religious heroes, Presidents, geographic features, and politicians, among others.
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Even though Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, the invention caught on slowly. -
A Civil War map in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland reads, “S. E. Missouri, Country Around Ironton” on its reverse. It is a sketch map of the Arcadia Valley from Pilot Knob to Arcadia, including Ironton. The map was prepared in 1861, according to its title in the National Archives, “1861 Confederate Map of Ironton, Missouri and Vicinity.” -
Otto Widmann is unknown to the average Missourian but is an icon to those who study Missouri birds.
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S. Henry Smith, founder and editor of the Fair Play newspaper in Ste. Genevieve, possibly under the influence of some writings of Mark Twain, prepared a tongue-in-cheek story about a ramble through town on Christmas, 1873.
