For many people the implication from the title of this piece might present a daunting proposition. In my case, growing up in a town of around 400 inhabitants simplifies things immensely.
There is a lot to share and the amount of information I’ve uncovered is simply too much to be used here, which is a bit unfortunate. So before we get started, a few pieces of information are critical.
- Upon starting this I realized an obligation to provide some historical perspective to give you a better flavor of the place.
- Keep in mind the town has deteriorated significantly since I moved away a quarter century ago. It had been in decline for quite a while prior to that, as you shall see.
- If you’ve ever been curious about the dynamics of small-town America, this is your big opportunity.
The town is Thebes, Illinois, located in Alexander County, the southwestern most county of the state. From Thebes, Chicago is twice the distance than is Memphis, Tennessee. Birmingham, Alabama, is as close as Chicago.
Thebes was first referred to as Spar Hawk Landing due to two brothers by the name of Sparhawk harvesting poplar trees from the area and floating them down to New Orleans for use in keelboat manufacture. The manufacturer was so enamored with the quality of this timber they sent crews to help with the harvest. These crew workers brought their wives and families along, thus a settlement was born.
The name of Thebes came about when the town was platted on March 2, 1846. The name of Thebes works well as this area is known as “Little Egypt” and Cairo is about twenty miles south. Many of the towns in this part of Illinois have Egyptian, Greek, or Middle Eastern originated names such as Dongola, Metropolis, Sparta, and Karnak. In fact, I spent thirteen years being educated at Egyptian School; the mascot was a pharaoh.
In 1846 a courthouse was built in Thebes on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Designed by Henry Ernst Barkhausen it cost $4,000 at that time. Abraham Lincoln campaigned for president here and Dred Scott was incarcerated in a prison cell (more aptly described as dungeon) in the basement. A plan sheet for the building, found at the Library of Congress website of all places, says the men’s cell is 15’6″ x 15’6″.
The courthouse still exists and has been restored. It even has its own website and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972. It currently contains a museum and is being kept going by a small but highly dedicated group of persons. Looking at the website, I’ve met or know a fair number of the people found pictured.
At one point business in town was quite good, with there being three railroad stations, eight taverns, a movie theatre, a large hotel, a dynamite plant, and numerous retail stores. The population reached its peak in 1920 at 857 and has been declining in the century since with the estimated 2016 population being 359.
The hotel cost $50,000 around 1900; the Bureau of Labor Statistics will only provide the present worth of money back to 1913; according to them a $50,000 amount from 1913 equates to $1.3M in present worth. It was built on the river front in a location that I would later know as a city park, of sorts.
From Google, here’s the approximate location of the hotel in 2008. The street is paved; it appears the river had recently been in flood stage. Sediment is a distinct issue every time the Mississippi River recedes.
If there is any sort of claim to fame Thebes may make, its playing a small part in the 1926 Edna Ferber novel Show Boat wouldn’t be the best. The use of Thebes was tangential to the story as it was the home of Captain Andy Hawks and his family.
A genealogical website about Alexander County claims Ferber spent time living in Thebes while writing the book; the wikipedia entry on Ferber claims she wrote it while spending time in Paris and makes no mention of Thebes whatsoever. Regardless, this isn’t the most enduring legacy of Thebes and time has made the book quite obscure.
Show Boat was made into a Broadway musical and a feature film based upon the play was produced in 1929.
The feature Thebes is likely most known for is shown in the leading photograph. It is home to the only railroad bridge over the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis. It was opened in 1905 and has remained in service since then.
Building it was quite the accomplishment in its day. According to historicbridges.org this is one of the earliest examples of work by Ralph Modjeski who would become a very well known bridge designer. The overall structure length is 3,817 feet long with the main span being 671 feet in length.
It is also referenced as being one of the early surviving examples of large-scale concrete arch bridge technology as the approach spans on both sides are a series of concrete arches.
A 1905 report by Modjeski and Alfred Noble to the Southern Illinois and Missouri Bridge Company (found in the archives of Southern Illinois University – Carbondale) says 26.9 million pounds of steel comprise the bridge; another source stated over 400,000 cubic yards of concrete were used. Interestingly, the linked report says the cement came from Indianapolis and was chosen due to its finishing properties.
Design characteristics provide around 60 feet of space between water level and bottom of the bridge during high water conditions and just over 100 feet during low water.
The piers are quite stout, as demonstrated by numerous barges over the years. Nothing sounds quite like a barge hitting one of these piers on a warm summer night. It’ll wake the dead.
Incidentally, I’ve heard the automobile manufacturers briefly shipped cars via barge back in the 1950s. My father has told a story about yet another errant barge hitting one of these piers and sinking with a load of brand new 1955 or 1956 Ford cars. I’ve found nothing to prove nor disprove that story.
Mention needs to be made about Ralph Modjeski. Born in Poland in 1861, Modjeski emigrated to the United States with his mother in 1876. Modjeski returned to Europe to study at l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, graduating at the top of his class in 1885; he obtained American citizenship while there. The Thebes Bridge was one of his very early assignments as a chief engineer; other notable bridges in which Modjeski would serve as chief engineer include the Broadway Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge that connect Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with Camden, New Jersey.
As an aside, I’ve been over the Ben Franklin Bridge. Twice. On a family trip in 1988 that included a stop in Philadelphia my father made a wrong turn and we descended upon New Jersey. As it included a toll (in other words, paying for his mistake) my father got royally peeved and we promptly turned around and went back (thus paying a second toll).
So I’ve always been uncertain if I’ve been to New Jersey or not; I was there but didn’t set foot on the ground. I do remember the sound of the 302 V8 in my parent’s 1985 Ford LTD Crown Victoria as my dad was hot-footing it back to Pennsylvania.
The courthouse can also be seen here. From industrialscenery.blogspot.com
This is the time to transition this assortment of thoughts into reflections upon small town life and the dynamics of Thebes, with particular attention to my childhood of the late 1970s and 1980s. Everything here ties together one way or another, which is exactly how things work in small towns.
While nearly all of us are too young to remember World War II, there was great concern along coastal areas of the United States about German forces invading the country and wreaking tremendous havoc. As far inland as is Thebes, where there would have been ample advance notice of any invasion, such trivial matters didn’t stop my grandfather’s younger brother Stan from creating a frenzy. A bullshitter for the ages, Stan persuaded a group of town elders one quiet weekend the Wehrmacht was about to invade – on foot and across the bridge from the Missouri side.
Upon a well-armed posse marching out to the foot of the bridge, Stan went around town telling everyone he could find about the intellectually challenged individuals who were assembling and ready to fight the fictitious German invaders to their last breath. The members of the posse were teased for the next twenty years.
Seen here is a satellite image of Thebes. Of note is the distinction between downtown and uptown. The difference was literally a hill of 8% grade and about a quarter mile long (it’s the jog in the road in the tree covered area). The hill also explains the sparseness on the left side of the map. One too many floods prompted a huge federal buy-out in the 1980s and many houses were simply torn down in lieu of being repaired yet again.
So hang on; I’m going to be referring to these points while sharing various memories. However, my aim is to allow you to follow this narrative without your making umpteen references to this map.
The old, old Thebes school. This building burned in the 1950s
I grew up (Point A) in a house with seven acres overlooking the Mississippi River. My parents had purchased it in 1976 from the original owner, who built it around 1967. The old Thebes school was still in use and teachers had to close the windows despite the heat; it seems the workers building the house were yelling and cussing so much it was disrupting class. Many of the cars of my father (seen here and here) were parked here at one point or another.
This was their second house in town; their previous house (Point G) was about 500 feet across a ravine and was purchased in 1968 from the parents of one of my father’s high-school classmates. My parents later sold this house to Charlotte and Mac. Charlotte and Mac loved Ford Mustangs, having two ’66 fastbacks for a very long time. Those eventually went away…for something.
When we moved into the new house in 1976, our closest neighbor (Point B) was Mrs. Stehr. She was a widow in her early to mid-70s and she was as tough as trying to chew roofing nails. She had a few acres that she couldn’t easily mow with her 6 or so horsepower Snapper riding mower; my father would bush-hog it a couple times per year for her using his old Ford tractor.
With the tall grass, snakes were plentiful. There was a story about her spotting a cottonmouth while hanging laundry out to dry. Knowing she needed to eradicate it, Mrs. Stehr bent down and clothes-pinned its backside to some weeds. She ran into the house for her 0.38 so she could administer some hot lead therapy.
The part of the story that surprised everyone is she didn’t have her pistol on her at the time.
Mrs. Stehr drove a blue 1970 Chevrolet Nova two-door.
Some years later, Mrs. Stehr moved north to live with her daughter. Purchasing her house was Mary Jean and Steve; they had lived downtown (just to the right of Point Q) and while the river had never quite flooded their house, it was too close for comfort.
They still live there; google earth reveals a white Ford F-350 parked in an outbuilding, likely a tow vehicle for an RV. Years ago they also had a 1947 Willys Jeep and a white mid-1970s Ford pickup.
They also enjoyed their 1971 to 1976 GM B-bodies as they had a loaded ’72 Pontiac Bonneville at one point as well as a white 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Both had been low-mileage bargains obtained from retired couples.
One day their son purchased eight white compact Ford Courier pickups at an auction. With those Courier’s lined up in the yard, my mother jokingly asked if the Olds and F-150 had had a litter of pups.
In 1980, right after my mother’s younger brother “Ron” and his wife got married, they bought a house (Point O) that my parents had had as a rental. At that time Ron had his 1976 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Since Ron had a bit of a commute and wanted to prolong the Monte, in addition to providing his wife / my aunt a set of wheels, he had a series of beater cars including a VW Bug and, my favorite, a 1968 Dodge Coronet 440 sedan.
My father gleefully sold the house to Ron as being a landlord had been a nuisance to him. Perhaps a tenant some years before caused that. After my father had to evict those particular tenants he found the basement full of marijuana plants. The marijuana in and of itself didn’t bother him; having to dispose of it did.
He got to deal with marijuana another time, too. I was down in the woods near the house one day when I was about 13 years old and found marijuana plants growing. That they were planted in a tire filled full of well watered potting soil, with a beaten path to get there, made me suspect it wasn’t a volunteer plant.
Dad and I took a walk and cut all the plants off at ground level, taking them back to the house. I ran them all down the garbage disposal. However, that was only after my mother put them all in a vase to admire them for the afternoon. It is a beautiful plant.
Again it wasn’t the plant but the disposal. Plus, dad was like president of the school board by this time so having marijuana on the place would have been problematic. My suggesting he could claim glaucoma prevention got me nowhere.
Also, for any who may be aghast about our not involving law enforcement, consider what I’ve said before but am compelled to say again: Law enforcement where I grew up was a theoretical thing. There was no town marshal and the sheriff’s department was pretty invisible; years later they would have their patrol cars repossessed. The state police consisted of two troopers in the entire county, thus we tended to be self-reliant and take care of problems ourselves.
Remember, this is small town America where there are few to no secrets. My parents threatened and coerced me into secrecy about the marijuana find as they knew this was juicy information for a thirteen year old boy. The statute of limitations was reached a while back.
Subsequent to the flood buy-out, Orville and Irene bought property and built their new house (Point C) quite near ours. They had lived downtown (Point P) next to the Methodist Church. Orville had two Oldsmobile 98 sedans, a 1969 and a 1975. Several years ago I wrote about Orville and how he built his house when in his 80s.
For whatever reason, there are some events I find amazing that have no resonance with my father. For instance, he owned the town jail (Point S)!!! Yep, you read that right – the Shafer’s owned the jail. Granted, the jail was long out of use and he had simply purchased the lot it was on, but still. Despite my pleadings, he never took me there to see it. I finally did see it some time after he sold it in the federal buy-out.
Or I guess that’s when he sold it. He doesn’t seem to remember. How can one forget something that HUGE???
One thing is certain – the Shafer’s at one time or another owned many different parcels throughout town. How so?
For starters, another of my grandfather’s younger brothers, Leland, the one who gave me Mercury poisoning, owned the post office building, seen here on the right. Hmm, I just realized; Shafer’s owned the jail and the post office. Such has to be unusual.
Leland and his wife Geneva’s house was on a lot near the court house. Geneva was the post master for a long time; the substitute post master was my mom’s cousin.
On the right side of the picture, there is a snippet of a greenish car. There isn’t quite enough to definitely determine what it is, but it looks like a 1959 Edsel; if so, that may be one of the two Edsels Leland bought new.
Here’s a ’59 Edsel. I’m thinking that may be what is seen in the picture.
Incidentally, the post office picture appears to be at the front end of a flood. I remember walking into this post office (after a vast exterior upgrade) during another flood in 1978 or 1979 and had to walk on planks over the water to get in the front door. The water was already about 12 inches to 18 inches deep by that point. That flood did consume the post office that time.
At some point my great-grandparents lived in a house east of town (Point T). Perhaps this was when they had their 1937 Ford. That was long before my time.
Or their 1939 Ford. However, I knew my great-grandmother Shafer (my great-grandfather had died in 1966) as only living in town (the now vacant lot between Points L and K). They bought that house from their fourth son, my Uncle Donald.
Donald is who purchased my ’63 Ford Galaxie in 1964.
Donald and his wife Bobbye lived nearby (Point F) and added an addition to the house for Bobbye to operate a small grocery store. The place has deteriorated greatly since Bobbye died but right in front of this utility pole is where Donald parked the old Galaxie and it was sitting there when my father, Uncle Stan, and I pulled it home in 1986.
Getting the Galaxie home was no big deal but doing so did look a little, uh, rustic. Dad was on his Ford tractor pulling the Galaxie, Stan was steering it and fighting a flat tire, and I was following in dad’s 1984 Ford F-150. As we passed Louie and Pauline’s (Point E), Pauline saw the procession and had a mild scowl on her face. Whatever. Pauline was particular about some things (seen here) although it was always hinted I needed to be nice since Pauline’s brother was married to Wanda, my Grandma Iris’s older sister.
Pauline didn’t drive but Louie and their son Buddy did. In addition to their 1975 Chevrolet Nova they had a 1970 or 1971 Ford Torino sedan.
The Torino eventually went away for an N-body Buick Somerset / Regal (whatever GM called it that year). It’s doubtful any of these three cars ever exceeded 45 miles per hour during their ownership.
Another Shafer parcel was that of my Aunt Elizabeth, dad’s younger sister, and her husband Lyle (Point K). For a while they had a brown 1975 Toyota Corona with an Fe2O3 infection (that small town in me is too polite to say “rust”) that went away for a 1981 Ford Mustang. Lyle also had a ’60s Chevrolet pickup for a brief while that went away for a 1976 Ford F-100.
They had purchased the house from Miss Lulu, a retired teacher from the old Thebes School.
The Thebes School was consolidated into Egyptian School in 1968; this is a picture from the 1959 Thebian yearbook. The guy on the left chasing the girl is my then fifteen-year old father. The school was directly west of, and across the street from, Elizabeth’s house in what is now the huge vacant lot.
Another digression is needed. Miss Lulu has been gone for decades and never married, so I suppose spilling an ancient town rumor is now safe. Anyway rumor had it Miss Lulu was born with ambiguous genitalia and simply lived as a female. Thinking about it, that may have come from Stan so the validity is highly suspect; then again he lived next door to her for years, so maybe he had first-hand knowledge….
If one was to believe in ghosts, Miss Lulu may have been visiting Elizabeth from the great beyond as something kept turning her blender on in the middle of the night. It happened despite Elizabeth always keeping it unplugged.
Elizabeth and Lyle later sold that house to Ernest and Carolyn; Carolyn had babysat my sister and I several years earlier.
At the risk of another digression, here’s an example of small towns. This is my father’s junior class, my father being second from the left in the middle row.
The guy standing next to my father married at sixteen due to getting his girlfriend pregnant. It was his parents from whom my father purchased his and my mother’s first house. This gentleman now lives in Georgia.
The boy second from the right in the back row was Dad’s first cousin, their mothers being sisters (yes, two of these three). They would later serve together for years on the school board at Egyptian School.
The boy third from the left in the rear row was my godfather. He’s the one who took his Ford Mustang II to Italy around 1980 when he took a job teaching fifth grade at an Air Force installation near Brindisi.
The girl at left in the bottom row had been my 4H club leader (a youth service organization) and had a son a year behind me in school. We were friends for a while but had a falling out.
The girl third from the right in the bottom row had a younger brother who was manager of the Ford dealer in Rolla, Missouri, during the time I lived there in the early to mid-90s. Dad and I visited him one night and he told about borrowing an old widow’s 1954 Chevrolet for joyrides.
The boy on the right of the rear row had a brother who later lived next door to my parents first house. His brother was one of the three Bob’s in town – there was Fat Bob, Black Bob, and Rapid Robert.
Fat Bob (who wasn’t fat) lived next door to my parents. His nickname (as did everyone’s, come to think of it) came about from my Uncle Stan as he needed to differentiate between the Bobs. Bob and his wife, who was a Holocaust survivor, had about 47 kids – or so it seemed. In about 2002 Bob was driving his 1976 Dodge pickup (1977 shown) when my paternal grandmother pulled in front of him with her 2000 Ford Taurus. The Dodge was the clear winner in that skirmish.
Nobody was hurt.
Black Bob (due to his thick black hair as a youth) lived on the edge of town (Point J) and owned the gas station downtown (Point Q). In the early 1990s I mowed Bob’s yard for him and he was profoundly particular about how I mowed the terraces in his yard. At the time he had an early 1980s Chevrolet pickup and a 1985 Chevrolet Caprice.
krcu.org
Here’s a picture of Bob’s old station during a 2016 flood. Bob was around 80 when I mowed for him, he sometimes wore a shirt, and he didn’t have a black hair anywhere I could see.
Rapid Robert lived next door to Donald and Bobbye (Point H) and drove an old Ford Maverick. That man never stopped moving and was always working on something. I always suspected it was so he wouldn’t have to be around his wife Eunice.
Bob provided Eunice a yellow, very well equipped 1973 Ford LTD which was a nice car that looked infinitely better than a ’73 Impala or Fury.
Speaking of yellow LTDs, Ed and Grace (Point L) had a yellow 1975 to 1978 LTD with non-covered headlights. It was nice but not as nice as Bob and Eunice’s. Grace also had a killer sense of humor from what I heard from my godfather’s mother Edna (who was also my first grade music teacher and was the inspiration behind this long ago CC). It seems Grace found a favored Christmas card that she sent to quite a few people.
The caption was along the lines of how one can tell they’ve been naughty.
from auto week
Perhaps some might be wondering – why all the American cars? Where’s the imports? Other than the lone Toyota, the guy down the street from Elizabeth had a series of Datsun pickups. His wife’s sister was Charlotte, the female half of the couple my parents sold their first house. Everything in a small town goes full circle.
Writing this has been oddly invigorating. It’s odd how such seemingly typical events may not be so typical when elaborating on them. Will I go so far as to say Thebes is unique? Not really as all small towns have their own particular dynamic.
Would I go back? No; there’s nothing for me there as even my parents moved away in 1994. The town has deteriorated too much and many of the people mentioned here are long gone. For my chosen profession career opportunities are quite limited unless I wanted to drive 50 miles each way or work in a different state – and pay income tax in both states like my parents did. A very compelling argument could be made it’s people like me who are killing such small towns. Many of my classmates, along with their parents, have moved away to larger areas for more opportunity or better services. As an example, after Bob closed his station, I was ten miles away from the closest gas station.
That said, a little outside of town I did find a fairly new 2,200 square foot house with a full basement on just over two acres for $140,000. While that’s relatively cheap, and I can theoretically retire in about seven years, I am not tempted.
I know full well I’ll never be a part of such a place again – and I’m good with that. Besides, I can still go back and drive around town. It’s a small place so it’s not like driving every street there will take very long.
An interesting look into the roots of Jason Shafer and a small mid-west town! Very enjoyable read!
Awesome writeup, thank you!
I passed through your neck of the woods, through Cairo to be exact, in the summer of 2008 on my old motorcycle (’77 Yamaha XS500) as part of a huge road trip out to the west coast and back from NY. It was me and my brother and 3 other friends, all on 40+ year old Japanese bikes we had fixed up and thrown duffel bags on. We spent the night prior at a campground on the Mississippi. The older gent who managed the place was initially highly skeptical of having 5 young guys on ratty looking bikes staying at the campground, but in the morning he came over to chat with us, and warned us about Cairo. It’s a rough town, absolutely do not break the speed limit rolling through town, he told us. Sure enough, we’re riding through and the second we enter city limits, an unmarked crown vic pulls out from a side street. We’re tootling along at 5 under, he’s right behind us. We make it to the edge of town and he looses interest. Man Cairo was indeed rough. Like a ghost town, a very sad sight. Dilapidated and abandoned store fronts, just totally decrepit.
I first heard about Cairo, IL (Is it pronounced “KAY-ro”?) reading or watching a movie version of “Huckleberry Finn”. Sad to hear it’s so dilapidated now, although an image search turns up pictures of some beautiful Victorian houses there that I’m sure Mark Twain himself would recognize:
It’s pronounced Care-O.
While this statement could be painfully obsolete, the last I knew there were still a few old moneyed holdouts with houses such as these in Cairo. I’ve seen the house you have pictured; there is another house there called Magnolia Manor that has also gained a small degree of notoriety due to being open for tours.
A great read. I have always lived in largish cities. As a kid I had trouble understanding how people in the small county-seat town near where my mother grew up could know who I was. I learned that anonymity was not a thing in a small town (and that one, at about 3000 souls, was a metropolis compared with Thebes.)
My sister married into a farming family. The nearest town (Medaryville) was around the same size and was a little rougher than some of the surrounding towns. Perhaps because it had been heavily populated by railroad workers at one time. Back in the 80s my sister told me how the convenience store along the highway was open 24 hours. When she expressed surprise that there could be enough nighttime business to support a 24 hour store she was told that the cost to stay open round the clock was less than the cost of the insurance if they closed, due to the history of after-hours break-ins.
I love this post. I’ve mentioned previously that I grew up on 10 acres in a small rural town in Northwestern NJ, and the stories and the characters in pieces like this resonate with me. Each individual factoid may seem banal in and of itself, but when woven together into a meandering quilt of ‘blurbs’ they paint a picture that ends up feeling very familiar. I’ve never ventured very far into the interior of the country, and as an East Coaster I’d likely feel like a fish out of water. (In truth the Midwest terrifies me, probably irrationally, but despite my rural roots I’m generally seen as a bit of a city slicker, so yeah.) But reading this was a blast, and it sparked so many silly, long-forgotten memories from my childhood and stories overheard in diners, garages, next to woodpiles and so on….so long ago.
Remarkable story; thanks for the excellent write-up. Makes me wish I’d paid more attention to the history of my (also sadly fading) town growing up. The image of the “militia” mustering to ward off the foreign invasion was perhaps the best part, but the whole article was outstanding.
Interesting article Jason, thanks. I had seen your teaser bridge shot and been thinking “But didn’t he grow up in Cape Girardeau?” but since it was a railway bridge I’d figured it was Thebes.
“Former county seat” tells me quite a bit, as my Mother in Law’s hometown of Falmouth MI is also a former county seat. The mighty Clam river is not as mighty as the Mississipi, but doesn’t do as much damage either, apparently.
A friend writes a blog on Indiana courthouses (https://courthousery.com/ for those into such things) and he recounts some tales of near warfare (and maybe one instance of actual warfare, if quickly over) in towns vying for the wealth and status of being the county seat. Those folks were right to care as former county seats tend to not do well over the long term.
Thanks for that link — I’m a fan of County Courthouses as well. Your friend’s blog will provide lots of good reading material for me!
I didn’t realize it was Thebes either, figured it was Cape G all this time. I myself stem from a village of about 5000 which I thought was small. I stand corrected. Your high school reunion looks like it could fit into a medium size Starbucks but the average attendance of those things means the actual attendees could probably squeeze into one booth.
In any case, it was a fascinating look behind the curtain that would not have been nearly as interesting without familiarity with the writer. Should I find myself in the extreme southern tip of IL, I will surely drive through it.
One curiosity remains – What was the impetus behind the auction purchase of eight Couriers? And what ended up happening to them?
Before that another thing struck me; surely the 3 railroad stations in a town of 400 must have been for freight or possibly a couple of spurs to places like the dynamite plant?
Note that I am not questioning the number of hotels, I’d have to do some research to compare to the town I grew up in during the same era; it also had rail and river traffic. 30 years ago there were 8 hotels (pop. 10k) with several others having been converted to restaurants.
I might have to do some reminiscing of my own.
There were 43 in my graduating class. And, from what I understand, my 20 year high school reunion was held in a bar. So, yeah, a Starbucks would have not been stressed to have held such a reunion!
The Couriers had all belonged to the Corps of Engineers. Steve and Mary Jean’s son cleaned them up, did some body work, added some visual appeal such as pinstripes, and resold seven of them, with the eighth being kept for them.
I was waiting for you to say that he started a Courier service. 🙂
Or perhaps he sold them to the Courier air conditioning people???
Jason, I think I heard somewhere that although there are many towns with Egyptian and Greek names, they are all pronounced in a distinctly American way , such as Cairo being pronounced Kay-ro. Is that correct?
Some are pronounced differently but Cairo is pronounced “Care-O”.
I don’t know about Egyptian and Greek names but in my native Kentucky many towns with French names are pronounced in a distinctly non-French matter. The seat of Woodford County, Versailles, is pronounced (more or less) as “Ver-sales”. The town of Paris, Kentucky is pronounced “Pair-ess”; if you were to pronounce it in the French manner people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. In my native Henderson County, Kentucky there is a community named “Robards”; you can always tell if someone grew up there or not by how they pronounce the word. If they say “Row-bards” then you know they are not native to the area, people who grew up in the area pronounce it as “Robberds”.
In the Toledo, OH area, we have a town called Maumee, named after the river that goes through town. Native American name, and we can always tell when an announcer on TV isn’t from this area, or a newscaster is new by how they pronounce it. If it’s “Mau-mee”, he’s not from here. If he says it as “Mawmee”, he/she is probably local. The main street in Maumee is Conant St. A fair amount of the time, it’s pronounced in a car ad or whatever as “Cone-Ant”, and it makes all us natives laugh. Once in a while, they fix the ad to the correct “Cone-unt” right away, but usually the ad is left alone on it’s run.. Then you have Nevada St on the East side of Toledo. All the other state named streets are pronounced correctly, but for some unknown reason, it’s pronounced “Ne-Vay-da”. I remember going to Detroit years ago and looking for a road pronounced “Shay-Nurr”, totally unaware I was on it already as it’s spelled “Shoenherr”.
Thanks for this enjoyable look at your hometown. I remember ratty little places like this along the Mississippi in the 60s. My father was desperate to get out and explore and hike in Iowa in the early 60s, and so we’d drive out to that great river, park somewhere along its banks and just start walking along a country road or such. Can you imagine what the locals thought of us, in 1961 or so? Nobody ever did that back then.
And after our “hike” we’d go to some little cafe so he could have some coffee and pie. We’d get some serious stares, especially when my parents spoke German. Those little river towns were already in terminal decline then. Some of the folks lived very primitively in shacks on stilts along the river.
Small towns have been dying all over the country but especially in the farming Midwest for a long time. In Iowa, the highest density of rural population was in 1890; it started going downhill after that and has never stopped. Mechanization and the Model T were of course the main drivers of that. In 1890, a farmer could make a decent living on 40 acres. Today successful farms in the Midwest are closer to 100 times that big.
I used to drive a lot out in the country in Iowa in the early 70s when I was back there, and we’d look for the last remnants of little “towns”; meaning a store and a couple of other buildings at a cross roads. There were a surprising number of them still to be found, meaning a pile of decaying lumber on a foundation. These skeletons of towns were just being left to rot. Before cars, folks needed to be able to get to a store that was no more than a couple of miles away, and there were enough folks nearby to support it.
Of course in recent years the bigger small towns are being ravaged by the same continued decline in rural population and folks willing to drive ever further to get to a Walmart or Costco. The process just keeps swallowing up more little towns.
How long do you expect Thebes to survive? I suppose a few folks will keep living in their houses until….
There is a part of me that is surprised Thebes is still around. The last time I took the time to drive through town (and it’s been a few years) it seemed to be very much on borrowed time. As much as I hate to say it, the town has become a real shithole. It was far from that point when I lived there despite being in decline. But I’ve been gone for 25+ years. And it’s degree of shithole is why I had debated talking about the place plus why any pictures of it from Google in current times are few.
You are also correct – there are an abundance of such towns along the Mississippi River. Sadly, this particular decay is devouring the entire county. Cairo, the county seat, is a town I covered a while back and let’s just say few are the towns that have squandered their advantages (access to two rivers, an interstate, rail, and an airport) as effectively as has Cairo.
If it helps any, there would have likely been a similar degree of confusion and surprise had you been speaking German while walking the river banks in 1985 to 1990. However, directly across from Thebes on the Missouri side there were a number of people who could speak German (or some, such as my grandfather) and you may have had an unexpected conversation!
We also soon learned that there was a very large German-speaking Amish and Mennonite community just south of Iowa City. That’s how I came to spend summers with one family. My mom needed cleaning help, and someone recommended a Mennonite woman. Since my mom couldn’t speak English yet, her German (such as it was) was very helpful, and unexpected.
Enjoyable story, Jason! You really make a sleepy small river village come alive…
Whoa…was this picture of a hipster taken in 1971 or today?
Needs thick-rimmed glasses + skinny jeans + craft beer in hand for it to be the 2018 variety. Madly searching for a running VW Westfalia for #Vanlife would be icing on the cake for those of us West of the Hundredth.
“Needs thick-rimmed glasses + skinny jeans + craft beer in hand”
Don’t forget the tattoos! 🙂
Wow, Jason, what a great post! Informative, entertaining, a bit melancholy and of course filled with trademark Shafer humor. You did Thebes proud!
The decline of these towns is rather sad to see, especially after the optimistic beginnings when interesting buildings and bridges went up. I may have a distorted perception, but this decline of small towns seems especially acute in the U.S. as compared to Europe. There still seem to be plenty of small hamlets not in terminal decline in the U.K. and on the continent.
Like so many of us here at CC, I remember people and places by the cars that were there, so I totally relate to your observations.
Thanks for fantastic Friday tour along the mighty Mississippi.
It’s very much a huge issue in Europe. It’s what’s fueling the current protests in France. And fueled Brexit. I’ve read numerous articles in the past few years about France’s dying small towns, with many empty storefronts on the main streets. All the same factors are at work: there’s no meaningful employment or future in small towns. Farming becomes ever more mechanized; now robotic farm equipment is going to make things worse.
Italy has had a massive crisis of dying rural towns for many decades. You want to buy one?
The superficial difference is that the buildings in European villages don’t come falling down as quickly as the cheaply built wood structures in American small towns. If you neglect a wood building, it will be beyond saving or use within a few decades or sooner. European houses built of stone, block and concrete and last much longer. And this trend is more recent in Europe.
Small towns have been dying in the US since the 1920s and 30s. Rural density peaked in 1890s and has been dropping ever since. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, there were lots of little ghost hamlets to be seen in Iowa in the 60s and 70s, They existed only to provide a few basic services to the once-dense local farmers before the Model T came a long. And that process continues.
The EU tried to protect its farmers more from the changing reality of the global farming trend to huge mechanized farms, but that was not sustainable and eventually the forces of the market have hit rural Europe all over. Every country is experiencing it, on a large scale. And this is very much impacting the politics in Europe. These folks feel marginalized and left behind, and they hate immigrants/refugees as they see them as a threat to ever-reduced resources.
In the former East Germany, the big problem is a lack of marriable women, as many more women moved to cities in the West than men. This is really fueling the right wing party there. If you’re not a local, you don’t dare show up at a nightclub in one of their towns. You’ll be perceived as competition for the very few available women still there.
I could go on, but this issue is a gigantic one affecting all of the developed world. Big cities is where the action is, and the brighter and/or better educated kids head there. The ones that stay behind are increasingly bitter about it as they’re left behind economically.
I don’t think I need to say that this factor is why we have the current POTUS. And why a number of European countries like Austria now have right-wing leaders. It’s merely the hottest political issue in the developed world.
Thanks Paul. I figured my limited perceptions of the European small town situation didn’t align with reality, I figured they were declining too, just not necessarily as badly–in this case, I guess, looks can be deceiving. I’m well aware that many of the smaller European cities are a mess, so the issue reaches far and wide.
I should add that this issue is not just driven by changes in agriculture. There were once many small industrial-manufacturing businesses in small towns everywhere; US and Europe. They have mostly died out too, because of consolidation and/or off-shoring. As we move towards an econo0my based more on services and technology, small towns are at an even worse disadvantage. it’s well known that modern businesses, especially high-tech, thrives better in a location where there are a significant other number of companies in the same field. That provides for cross-fertilization and a built-in labor pool Silicon Valley and Hollywood are the two best examples, but there’s others too, in many dustiness. The thrive when they’re clustered.
East German industries were utterly non-competitive after unification, so that has had a huge impact there in particular.
GN specifically mentioned the UK, as if that were his main point of reference, and I thought he had a point. Possibly due to distances involved (?) there isn’t quite the rural/urban divide in Britain as compared to the US, and the issue of towns “dying” is a fraction of what it is in the US.
I used to take American tourists to (or through, as they usually weren’t the destination) small towns and villages in the UK, and they frequently wondered what people did for a living or how they got their groceries or whatever, and had a certain perception of the attitudes they would find among the local population – and their perceptions were frequently way off. Rural areas didn’t thrive in the same way in the UK because the horny handed masses were kept in their place – there wasn’t a pedestal to fall off
Decay features far more prominently in post-industrial small towns, and in many cases they are nicer places to be than they were 20-30 years ago, thanks to a revival of sorts, or to put it another way – the only way was up. It’s very unusual for the whole population to decamp, and if the place is vaguely scenic they’ll be replaced by people who work from home having sold their London studio apartment for $68 billion.
Thanks. Truth be told, I was quite under the weather when I started this and needed something to keep me distracted. Also, I had to find a place to end this as, at 4,200 words, it’s long.
So I skipped over Ed and Grace owning a very early K-car along with Miss Minnoe and her ’72 Coronet wagon.
Don’t know too much about cars but did enjoy the article especially since my Dad was from Thebes – His parents were Ed and Grace. I do remember the LTD and the K-car. Never understood how that little woman drove that giant LTD. I’ve seen recent pics of Thebes and it is sad to see how empty the town is now. They have done a lot of work on the courthouse and it looks great! Thanks for the memories.
Thanks Mr. Shafer, this was a very interesting and in some ways sobering read. I must say, it sounds like the Shafer clan must have owned half the town at some point!
As Paul notes, it’s not just a US, or Canada, or wherever happening. I can relate to small town Western Canada, but what really shocks me is the state of small towns in Japan. There has been a huge movement to bigger cities, and that combined with an ageing population, has resulted in lots of abandoned buildings. Very sad really.
Ageing thanks, and I enjoy your writing.
Lovely writeup, Jason, thank you. This is so different from the 100K+ person suburb ensconced in the million+ person metro area in which I grew up. Your reminiscences remind me strongly of how everything exists both in place and time. It may be the same name on the map, but as time moves on it really isn’t the same place anymore, for better or worse.
Great article! You brought back an interesting memory. While on the way to visit my grandmother in Olive Branch, Illinois (very near Thebes), I was “full lights and siren” pulled over by a patrolman in Cairo. The offense was 32 miles per hour in a 30 miles per hour zone. This was way back in 1993; and I think the speeding fine was $90.00. The cop said I could have lost control of my car and caused a terrible accident driving so wrecklessly. Needless to say, I never hurried through Cairo again.
Your grandmother is from Olive Branch? What a small world. I went through Olive Branch twice daily for thirteen years on my way to school. The girl I took to my senior prom lived in Olive Branch.
Thank you for taking the time to write this Jason, I always enjoy the stories that you recount of your family and their cars. I hope that they also appreciate the effort you have taken to preserve your family history!
Thank you.
I’m a bit uncertain about the appreciation…I tell these the way I remember it and often somebody feels the need to nitpick miscellaneous and inconsequential details. Due to that I’ve concluded that since Paul welcomes submissions they are free to submit a correction but since nobody has, well, there you go.
Thank you Jason for this wonderful post. I grew up in what I considered to be a small town (20,000 population then), but it was a metropolis compared to Thebes. I now live in a community of 140,000 or so but one doesn’t have to go very far to find small towns slowing dying as people move away. I think that the tipping point for many small towns was the closing of the community schools, which were consolidated into larger facilities in order to be more efficient. Where I grew up this began after WWII when many of the county roads started to be paved; before that many rural roads were impassible for long periods and it was too much effort to try and bus children very far. My sister-in-law grew up in Muhlenberg County Kentucky which has a population of 30,000 or so. When she was in high school there in the mid-seventies there were 8 high schools to serve that population. Now, as the various communities finally closed down their schools, there is one consolidated county high school. I’m sure that this school offers more opportunities for the students than the previous small schools but I’m also sure that many people there feel that their communities have suffered through the loss of “their” schools. Sometimes progress comes with a cost.
“there is one consolidated county high school.”
You’ll see larger school campuses laid out in the middle of nowhere across the Midwest, thanks to this consolidation-
My Uncle was the School Superintendent of a rural district outside of Ottumwa, Iowa, which used a central campus. As the story goes, the communities forming the district built a new building to avoid putting all the students in one town. This would have been viewed as an advantage over the other towns.
As a justification, locals point out that the campus is now roughly equidistant from all the town centers, but I’m sure they abandoned a number of usable buildings when they created the new campus.
I attached a Google earth screen capture of the campus out in the hinterlands (Cardinal Consolidated School District).
Thanks for sharing, good stuff. You can’t go home again as Thomas Wolfe wrote about. . . I grew up in a little eastern TN town of about 15000 folks that is now twice that just in the city limits. Back then there weren’t many folks out in the county but that has filled up too. The southeast is becoming like the northeast with everything growing together. I’m in the same position as you in regards to retirement and have been trying to figure out where I’d like to move to. My late brother ended up in a small Michigan town due to his wife’s family and grew quite fond of it. He was just minutes from the Gilmore Museum. A retired fellow could stay quite busy during the warmer months with all of the automotive events in the metro Detroit, Auburn Indiana, and Hickory Corners Michigan triangle.
“As an aside, I’ve been over the Ben Franklin Bridge. Twice. On a family trip in 1988 that included a stop in Philadelphia my father made a wrong turn and we descended upon New Jersey. As it included a toll (in other words, paying for his mistake) my father got royally peeved and we promptly turned around and went back (thus paying a second toll).”
Sounds like your dad went the wrong way on the I676 expressway – before the age of GPS, I did exactly the same thing!
A good read. I grew up in a small southern Ontario town that seems to be holding its own, but I also left many years ago for college and a job in the big city (Toronto, to be exact). There’s plenty of little places in Ontario that are in decline as well, but some of them become popular with those who retire and want a slower, less expensive way of life than the big city offers. Maybe my wife and I will retire to one of them. By the way, there was a small hamlet in Ontario called Cairo. I passed through it many times as a boy with my family, and I remember it consisting of few old houses and a boarded-up store at a crossroad. That was in the ‘70’s – it’s likely gone now. We would pass through on our way to visit friends who owned a series of Ford pickups, including a few green bumpsides (straight 6, three on the tree, heavy duty suspension and not much else). I still like the old Fords today, and I think of them whenever I see an old bumpside.
Just now I came across a very good analysis of the challenges of small towns and rural areas in the US: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/14/opinion/rural-america-trump-decline.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
A very good article. Looking at the demographic information in the wikipedia entry for both Thebes and Alexander County reinforces a lot of what the article says.
An example from nearby where I grew up…..the mailing address for Egyptian School is Tamms, Illinois. Twenty or so years ago Tamms fought tooth and nail to get a maximum security prison built there. It was successful in its efforts. That was when I could see the forest for the trees, realizing that fighting to get a prison wasn’t a great recipe for economic good times, but it was a source of steady employment. When the prison closed about fifteen years later, that was a real body slam to the area.
This was a treat to read today — and I can just picture sitting down on someone’s front porch in Thebes, and being told the same story.
A couple of random thoughts. For some oddball reason, I have a book at home called “Vernacular Architecture in Southern Illinois.” I checked it immediately, but unfortunately no references to Thebes. Interesting book though — spends a good bit a detail on ethnic communities, etc. that I never knew about before.
Your father’s experience on the Ben Franklin Bridge is amusing. Last year, I had a similar experience… but with no toll. We visited Ottawa, Canada (my first time out of the US), and at some point, I took a wrong turn and crossed the Ottawa River into Quebec. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a big deal, but my wife remembered that I adamantly said at one point that I wanted to live my entire life in the English Speaking world. Now with one wrong turn, I could no longer make that claim. She’ll never let me forget that wrong turn!
Relating to Modjeski’s bridges, my parents’ former house was designed in the 1930s by the chief bridge engineer of a railroad (Reading Railroad) as his retirement home. Someone who spent his career designing bridges to survive direct hits by barges weighing thousands of tons designs an awfully sturdy house. Even for the time, that house was astonishingly sturdy.
Again, thanks for all this!
Fantastic, Jason! I spent many a day in Herrin (and Belleville) visiting my uncles and aunts when I lived in Illinois. Its funny, what I remember best is the crushing humidity in the summer. Please tell us more stories, will you ?
Thank you. There’s more that could be told – when I started putting the thumb tacks for locations in the picture above, it was about to get out of hand. Thus, I’ve skipped some people such as Mildred who drove my school bus. She was a very nice large boned woman of 6’2″ and didn’t put up with crap from anyone. I once witnessed her put the fear of all that is holy in a juvenile delinquent one day and she never even raised her voice.
I always imagined, being a big city kid myself, that growing up in a community like that must be real cool, the river, the nature, al the opportunties to play or hide. But maybe you think about growing up in the city that same way, and is it the thing we can’t have that we always want.
I grew up in a city of 100K in a continuous metro area of at least 1M, several times that today. Plus, my family were 1st gen immigrants and we had no relatives within 500 miles. So thanks for a fascinating (and amusing) look at an America I’ve never really experienced. Here in California, rural decline is very visible in regions that were dependent on logging and mining; the agricultural areas are less remote so have generally grown into big regional centers with more economic diversity.
Jason, I have fond memories of getting to know you at the Dearborn meet-up in 2017, and all your “local color” essays add to it in a very human and charming/sobering way. Thanks sincerely for all your time and reflection putting this together for us.
Me, I’m a boy of the (Cleveland) suburbs—my hometown’s population has declined 20% since 1970—but had a very exceptional growth spurt during my youngest years:
“Between 1950 and 1960, Parma’s population soared from 28,897 to 82,845. By 1956, Parma was unchallenged as the fastest growing city in the United States. The population peaked in 1970 at 100,216” (WIKIPEDIA)
Rural life was very foreign to me then, but through post-HS friends of varying backgrounds (and my current students) I’ve gotten a better sense of it all (past and present).
Thanks again for this, Jason .
Late to comment but not late to read — I knew this article was coming and I eagerly opened it when I saw it. Another great reflective piece from you, J-Shafe.
I read this and I feel I probably would’ve been miserable living in a rural area. I’m not outdoorsy, not in the slightest. I like big cities. I like people but I don’t like everybody knowing my business. These and various other reasons mean I wouldn’t have liked to grow up in Thebes. I sure enjoyed reading about it, though.
You (?) have told me about Cairo in the past and as decayed as it is now, it’s still a place I’d love to visit. When I do, I’ll at least know now how to pronounce it.
An beautiful elegy, Jason.
And you’re right about any retirement ideas. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. (LP Hartley, The Go Between, where a man in the late ’60’s rather bitterly remembers being the go-between in an adult affair in Edwardian England).
It’s amazing how it is that many ordinary features of a time that doesn’t seem all that long ago were themselves from a time earlier again. That they have now gone altogether shouldn’t really surprise us, but still, it does. Particularly for you as the very location itself sinks away, taking with it all connection to manners and ideas and behaviours from perhaps 50 years earlier than your birth.
I feel like I have been on a journey, to somewhere that’s both familiar from my childhood country visits, and that’s also thoroughly not so. And that will become more or less folklore as the environment physically takes it back forever.
Great and interesting article! I too, grew up in small towns in Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois.The one I lived in the longest was a town of 3000 in Indiana that is actually only 20 miles from where I live. Since my folks are gone I rarely ever go there except for an occasional visit with my sister. It is sad to see the way the town has declined over the years. A once thriving downtown is a mere shadow of itself. Most of the residential areas haven’t really changed much, because most people have jobs, it’s just that they are somewhere else. As with most small towns I have seen, what businesses that are doing OK have moved from the old downtown out to the highway. The town I have lived in for 48 years has a population of 12000 and has also experienced a little of the decline that most small towns face. Our town, however, has developed a more positive attitude in recent years and the trend seems to have reversed itself. We also see future prospects looking better since we now have an Interstate highway going past the edge of town.
Having lived in both a city and small towns I prefer the small town even with its current problems.
Jason thanks for the enjoyable and interesting read. It’s interested to read about life growing up in such a small town. There aren’t too many communities around here that are that size anymore. You mentioned how there were few Japanese cars in your town. Even though I grew up in a small city, I was away from the urban centre of Toronto, which meant that there were very few Japanese cars around too. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that they really made some big in roads, whereas in Toronto, they were well established long before that. For example in my immediate family and extended family, I’d say 90% of the vehicles I was exposed to were North American cars, with a sprinkling of Japanese cars here and there. Now, the majority are Japanese cars.
I did things in the reverse of you. After growing up in a small city, I did go to the greater Toronto area for a while, which made me loath big city life even more. Eventually, I settled in a small rural town (about 5000), that is outside a city. There are numerous small towns around the city and while years ago they all were relatively independent, and self sufficient, they’ve all now become more like “rural suburbs” or bedroom communities that wouldn’t survive if it weren’t for the city to supply jobs, shopping and other amenities. Despite the general trend nationwide for people to be moving into cities, there are lots of people around here who are moving into small outlying towns to get way from the urban lifestyle, and for lower housing costs. And while these towns have lots of established true locals, slowly they are getting replaced with more progressive people.