Show Me Missouri: Jefferson City (6.15.24)

We drove north, the evening of June 14, 2024, to a tiny town on the edge of Lake Osage named Four Seasons.   We had a time share condo for a week, and I pored over guidebooks to decide what to do with ourselves.  We spent our first day, June 15, in Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri.

I quickly learned that the two poles of the state are St. Louis, on the Mississippi River, and Kansas City, on the Missouri River.  St. Louis is on the east edge of the state and Kansas City is on the west.  St. Louis grew from riverboat traffic and manufacturing.  Kansas City grew from meat packing and supporting the military and explorers going west.  When a capital was chosen, representatives of the big cities compromised and put it in the middle.  Jefferson City is on the Missouri River, which bisects Missouri.  The Missouri River Valley is the rich farming area of the state, and the place where the early settlers brought slaves.  Those geographical features strongly affect Missouri's history.

We explored the Capitol Building, inside and out, to get an overview of this fascinating state.  

The Capitol Building is surrounded by Beaux Arts statues from the early 1900s.  Two matching statues represent the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the two arteries that service the state.

Dave and I browsed the Missouri State Museum, housed in the Capitol basement, with displays on the history and economics of Missouri.  

There were portraits of the Missouri governors in the museum, but I looked in vain for Lilburn Boggs, who signed the Extermination Order to rid the state of the Mormons.  His portrait was in storage.  The curator, though, was very familiar with Boggs.  Boggs eventually left Missouri, nearly joined the Donner Party that died in the Sierras, and spent the rest of his life in California.  In frontier America, many of the leaders, from Daniel Boone on, were wanderers.

I stared in delight and awe at the Thomas Hart Benton murals in an upstairs meeting room.  To the consternation of the committee who hired him, Benton didn't focus on the exalted history of Missouri, but on its teeming, tangled history, filled with common working people and villains, as well as heroes.  There was one large corner painting, each, for St. Louis and Kansas City, with the rest of the walls covered with a miscellany of scenes.

Benton even squeezed in paintings of politicians and judges.

I think this segment of the wall shows homes being burnt and a man being tarred and feathered during the Mormon War.  Maybe...

One of the main tourist attractions in Jefferson City is the old state penitentiary.  It is a massive, forbidding structure that was built in the 1830s, soon after Missouri was created as a state in 1821. It was retired from use in 2004.  

Our guide spent her career as a jailer.  She was obviously a tough woman.  When I asked her what she had learned from prisoners, she said, "Not to believe a word they say."  The cell above belonged to James Earl Ray, who killed Martin Luther King.  He was a prisoner in Jefferson City before he committed that crime.

Our guide told us about the riots that had roiled through the prison, including one in which the black prisoners, housed in a separate building, refused to riot with the white prisoners.

We were invited to walk along the catwalks from sets of cells on one side of the prison to sets of cells on the other.  I walked upstairs to try, but I felt queasy just considering the narrow, flimsy walkways.

We walked into the cells on the main floor and then went into the basement of the prison and walked into the solitary confinement cells.  The tough jailer said there are ghosts in the basement and she won't walk down the passageways alone.

We next toured the gas chamber.  On the wall there were pictures of the inmates who were put to death.  They were disproportionately black.

It felt ghoulish to sit in the chamber where so many inmates had been killed.

We also saw the area where families and witnesses waited and watched.

Along the walkway to the gas chamber was a cement cross, requested by the inmate advisory committee.  They suggested that it was a last warning to inmates to get religion and "think about where you're going to be tonight."

Surprisingly, Dave and I still had an appetite after touring the prison.  We found an excellent barbecue restaurant before driving back to Four Seasons.