MissouriLife Articles

French Lessons

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:15:40 GMT

Ste. Genevieve helps us look back ... and forward

By Arthur Mehrhoff

Some people sample and collect fine wines, but I like to collect and savor vintage museum experiences. Following a workshop last spring at Cape Girardeau, I visited the Felix Vallé House State Historic Site in historic Ste. Genevieve. The experience of discovering a truly unique aspect of Missouri life interpreted by a first-rate museum made this French-American varietal a very special vintage indeed.

While Missouri was the American frontier for a very long period of American history, it was also the New World long before there even was an America. My German ancestors in the nineteenth century envisioned the Missouri River valley as a New Germany that would preserve their culture in an abundant natural setting; many French people a century before them also projected their dream of a New France into the fertile river valleys of North America. Missouri had a way of transforming such cultural dreams, though, and the Felix Vallé House State Historic Site at Ste. Genevieve tells the story of what happened in the New World to their dream of a New France.

The Felix Vallé House State Historic Site in historic Ste. Genevieve offers visitors an opportunity to see how French cultural traditions, especially their unique architectural style, were translated here on the Missouri frontier. The site features the 1792 Amoureaux House, a rare example of traditional French architecture in North America, and the 1818 Felix Vallé House, a residence and mercantile store that interprets American influence on this French community following the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent American settlement.

Telling the story does require a little bit of French vocabulary. Parlez-vous Francais?

Les Habitants

Or as Mr. Rogers might say, who are the people in your village? Ste. Genevieve was founded by French Canadians (the term Cajun, for example, is a shortened version of Acadians, people from a region in Quebec) who followed the explorations of Joliet and Marquette. According to Bonnie Stepenoff of Southeast Missouri State University in her book From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the 19th Century, by 1750 Ste. Genevieve was a mature village of some six hundred people. It was also a diverse, Creole society, free and slave, French, French Canadian, American-born French of mixed racial backgrounds with few traditional feudal obligations on land ownership, opportunities for a rising merchant class, and even strong rights for women under the law. More French moved west across the Mississippi River after 1763 in the wake of the French loss to England during the French and Indian War. Even though France ceded its western land claims to Spain, Ste. Genevieve remained a French colonial village with light Spanish control or influence.

At the Felix Vallé House, you can see how Americanization and mercantile capitalism brought dramatic changes to this unique cultural landscape. As contemporary America struggles mightily with the concept and issues of cultural diversity, we might want to consider going back to this period and talking with les habitants about their experiences.

Le Grand Champ

The Great Field, or common land, at Ste. Genevieve, represents both a unique and tangible system of land allocation and some highly intangible French beliefs about the New World. Le Grand Champ was three thousand acres of rich, alluvial soil given to Ste. Genevieve by King Louis XIV as common lands. The land was then divided into extremely long, narrow lots, one mile long and 192 feet wide, reaching all the way down to the river. This system of long lot subdivision ensured all farmers in the village access to good river land and reinforced village life, still a core value of French culture. You can still see the long-lot pattern from the air in Louisiana parishes, and you can still see the pattern of tight little villages surrounded by open space on train trips across Quebec. Or you can come here and see both in an impressive diorama of Ste. Genevieve in 1832, on display at the 1792 Amoureaux House.

Behind the very practical applications of long-lot subdivision lay some very deep-seated French beliefs about liberté and equalité. In his famous novel Candide, French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire criticized European society but ultimately recommended tending one’s garden rather than revolution as the answer.

Although he strongly criticized French colonial policy, he, too, envisioned New France as the garden of the world, an abundant new natural environment where Frenchmen could escape from rapid population growth, crowded cities, and oppressive social institutions. As I watch development oozing across the Missouri landscape, I think about Voltaire and Le Grand Champ quite a bit.

Poteaux en Terre

The Amoureaux House faces Le Grand Champ but adds some new vocabulary to our French lessons. The walls of the Amoureaux House were formed from thick, hand-hewn logs that were then set upright in a style known as poteaux en terre, or posts in the ground. It is one of only five known surviving examples of this style in the United States. The vernacular, or common, style of the building is that of the French Norman countryside, but quite intelligently adapted to its specific Missouri setting. Its builders used Missouri cedar, a hardy native species strongly resistant to rotting; it seems to have worked. But they also incorporated a steeply pitched, hipped roof from French Canada to deal with occasionally heavy snow, along with breezy wraparound porches called galeries adapted from the French West Indies to capture as many cross-currents of air in the steamy Mississippi River valley as possible.

How many buildings being constructed these days will attract visitors two hundred years from now? As Bonnie, who is also director of the Historic Preservation Field School at Southeast Missouri State University, observes, “It’s one thing to read about vertical log construction; it’s another to stand in the cellar of the Amoureaux House and touch the eighteenth-century timbers in contact with the ground in their original location.” We hear a lot these days about “green architecture,” but a building that has endured for 215 years surely has something to say to us.

À la Recherché du Temps Perdu

“When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought,” Shakespeare wrote, “I summon up remembrance of things past …” Why should we preserve the memory of our long-lost French colonial traditions for Missouri life? Historians sometimes employ counter-factual history, or alternative endings, to better understand the network of relationships in a particular period. Here we can participate in “sweet, silent thought” about how Missouri might have developed differently, perhaps revealing some cultural heirloom seeds awaiting transplantation to the right conditions.

For example, I often think of Sacagawea’s son Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, unwelcome in two worlds, and how he might instead have helped bridge American Indian and American cultures.

What if we re-imagined cultural diversity? How we subdivide land? How we build our dwellings? These issues remain very much alive.

Jim Baker, site administrator for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources Felix Vallé House State Historic Site, also mentions that the site has become increasingly a focal point for the study of French colonial society, creating a unique kind of knowledge industry with wonderful possibilities for cultural heritage tourism.

“The past is never really finished,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s never even really past.”

Perhaps it’s time for a cultural exchange program with ourselves, to clarify who we became and think about what we have left behind that we might yet go back and reclaim.

April 2008

Has Our Past Become a Foreign Country

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:54:51 GMT

*By Arthur Mehrhoff* How to Make Our Past and Our Places Meaningful Without Manipulation "You have to know where you are before you know who you are" --Wendell Barry At MissouriLife’s Weekend at the Lake this past October, I met a remarkable woman, Honey, from storm-ravaged Mississippi who was staying with some friends here in Missouri while recovering from her ordeal. She described her desperate attempt to “save some memories” of her late husband while Hurricane Katrina dismembered her beautiful household and threatened her life. In the face of imminent disaster, she had to quickly decide which pieces of her past to salvage from the wreckage caused by the storm. Her story made me keenly aware of the fact that we might all face Honey’s dilemma: What are the essential things we need to save when confronted by a whirlwind? Both of my parents passed away due to long-term illnesses while I was still young, so writing for me became a way of going home again. Growing up in the faded glory of T.S. Eliot’s old Saint Louis, where “the yellow smoke rubbed its muzzle against the window panes,” places became my imaginary ocean. While my father was alive, embarking on a voyage in our big-boat Plymouth (gas was thirty cents, not three dollars) was a major family event. My sister Nancy and I peered out the back window to watch the changing colors of the illuminated fountain in Forest Park. We admired the venerable bird cage at the Saint Louis Zoo from the 1904 World’s Fair (giggling at uncle Lyman’s story about the bird that pooped on his hat), marveled at the Central West End’s turn-of-the-century gates and mansions, or, if I was really lucky, attended an exciting baseball game at ancient Sportsman’s Park on Grand Avenue near my grandparents’ houses, hoping that Stan the Man would bang a homer off the North Side YMCA building. These placesbecame the reminder strings around my finger. It was not just the city, however, that fascinated me. I hazily recall boarding a diesel train at Union Station, destination unknown: mighty Bagnell Dam and the postcard-worthy Lake of the Ozarks; the Hannibal of Mark Twain; mysterious Meramec Caverns, St. Joseph and the Pony Express; W.C. Handy and the St. Louis blues; Count Basie and Kansas City jazz; the magnificent Capitol in Jefferson City; the mighty, majestic rivers coursing through our state. To me this state seemed to mean, as in Willa Cather’s lovely phrase, “the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.” The biggest adventure of all was traveling to Columbia each autumn to attend football games with my father. But the games, although we usually won, are not what I remember. I noted the changing landscape along the route, the spectacular fall colors along with the growing number of vacant and abandoned farm buildings,the city reaching farther and farther into the countryside each year. I marveled at the Gothic towers of the Memorial Union at the University of Missouri, my first glimpse at a college campus, and the overwhelming power of the names of war casualties etched into stone. Nostalgia is history without the pain. I once tripped and slid down the white stone “M” at the north end of Memorial Stadium. It was a rather quick and painful descent that is also part of my past. My father’s death in 1963 ended the adventures. My mother’s death three years later closed the logbook. In one sense, Missouri Journal is my attempt to save some memories. However, my personal journal must connect with you to be truly meaningful. I think most of you also cherish similar feelings toward those special places that distinguish Missouri life. Such places make our culture memorable and meaningful; their destruction diminishes us as a people, just like Alzheimer’s disease diminishes an individual. And therein lies the problem. The past, writes cultural geographer David Lowenthal, has become a foreign country. We find ourselves surrounded by monuments, memorials, and places whose origins and symbolism mystify us even while the hurricane force of globalization knocks us around. We need these place-markers, both to anchor us in the storm and to safely navigate a successful course for the future. There is a wonderful cartoon called “The Self-Made Man” that looks like a Picasso drawing, with everything in the wrong place. We need the past to create the future; to get things in the right places. Heritage tourism and ecotourism have become major growth sectors in the global economy as people search for authentic places in a sea of sameness. Economists and futurists both note this growing trend toward an “experience economy;” companies and communities now must make meaning as well as products. The key question becomes how to make these places and experiences meaningful rather than manipulated. Missouri Journal will consider some of these critical issues for our communities and offer some navigational aids of its own, in future columns. As St. Louis-born T.S. Eliot marvelously wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we started, and to know that place for the first time.” The sight of the Gothic towers of the Memorial Union helps me remember and connects me once again to the past, which helps me navigate through an uncertain future. There is an old tradition of tipping your cap as you pass through the archway of the Memorial Union. I hope you will join me in looking at old, familiar places once again for the first time. Let’s all tip our caps. April 2006

Arrow Rock What Time is This Place

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 02:25:52 GMT

*By Arthur Mehrhoff* When an old friend who shares my community design and preservation interests visited me last summer, I took him to see celebrated Arrow Rock, the first Missouri town named as one of America’s Dozen Distinctive Destinations by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This artifact in scenic Saline County lived up to its reputation as Missouri’s timepiece of preservation, but numerous for-sale signs made me think about the future of Arrow Rock’s past, along with our own — probably because the past seems present in Arrow Rock, population seventy-nine. As Friends of Arrow Rock Executive Director Kathy Borgman says regarding local industry, “Preservation is it.” It wasn’t always like that. Arrow Rock, named for the abundant supply of flint, which attracted American Indian tribes, seemed to be on the cusp of Missouri life before the Civil War. It’s located about twenty miles north of Boonville near the Missouri River on rich, black alluvial soil that Lewis and Clark lyrically described in their journals as “butifull counterey … interspursed with prairies and timber alternetly.” At the edge of the prairie, it quickly became an important ferry-crossing on the Missouri River between Saint Charles and Independence, transforming Arrow Rock into a bustling commercial center of one thousand people just before the Civil War. Its frontier energy attracted ambitious and talented people like Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham, and the environment they created still evokes their lively presence. A sympathetic observer can crack the code here and release the past, like an heirloom seed that germinates one hundred years later. Today, Arrow Rock is literally off the beaten path. The ever-restless Missouri River migrated nearly a mile away; riverboats gave way to railroads which gave way to state highways and the Interstate. Although the main road, Missouri Route 41, doesn’t go directly through town, Arrow Rock still seems to call visitors. Traveling to Arrow Rock felt like entering a decompression chamber from the constant yada-yada of modern life as I drove through fertile farmland still unblemished by billboards. Even the rubble-stone foundation and covered bridge walkway of the Visitor Center at Arrow Rock State Park evoke antebellum America. The Visitor Center in Arrow Rock State Historic Site offers the ideal opportunity to orient yourself. Browse through a copy of Michael Dickey’s Arrow Rock: Crossroads of the Missouri Frontier in the bookstore to get your historical bearings. Amble leisurely to the historic Huston Tavern, the fascinating Friends of Arrow Rock museum, Main Street stores, and workshops that still resemble scenes from a Bingham painting, on up to the nationally recognized Lyceum Theatre. That little tour through town offers the right speed and scale for stepping — not driving — back in time. Arrow Rock has acquired quite a pedigree over the years. Dr. Tim Bauman, an anthropologist researching Arrow Rock archeology, noted “the historic preservation movement [in Missouri] began in Arrow Rock.” The Daughters of the American Revolution convinced the State of Missouri to buy the historic Huston Tavern and establish Arrow Rock State Historic Site in 1926. Their efforts reflected the emergence of Colonial Williamsburg as the model for historic preservation in America after The Great War. Devoted preservationists established the Friends of Arrow Rock in the late Fifties. The organization became the gold standard for preservation in Missouri and continues its efforts to this day. Restoration of the George Caleb Bingham Home, now a Historic House Museum, began in 1964; the federal government designated it as a National Historic Landmark in 1968. The entire incorporated town of thirty-five acres was placed on the National Register in the Seventies. Many Missouri towns are beginning to understand what Arrow Rock achieved. And therein lies a problem. People constantly reinvent meanings, continually valuing and devaluing the past. What does Arrow Rock do after success? It possesses considerable name recognition and has established high standards over several generations. What of the next generation? Although I learned that the for-sale signs were no longer there as the properties have sold, Arrow Rock still faces another uncertain transition in adapting to the flow of American life. For example, only two children under twenty-one live in Arrow Rock, a common situation in many small Missouri towns. The quiet intimacy of the town may seem too quiet to teens. Mary Duncan, one of the proprietors of the Huston Tavern, also notes that most residents are now retirees, and many property owners live elsewhere. The river of public resources and attention may also be shifting once again. Public treasures like historic Arrow Rock can no longer rely on federal and state governments. Mike Dickey, site administrator for Arrow Rock State Historic Site, mentioned that the state sales tax for parks and historic sites originally enacted in 1984 faces a tough renewal challenge. Resources depend upon what people value, and that may ultimately be Arrow Rock’s greatest challenge. Attendance at many living history sites, including Colonial Williamsburg, has declined dramatically in the past two decades. Some observers blame the lack of history education in schools, mind-numbing television and video games, and the general inability of younger people to sit still without being entertained (what my Grandma Rockey would call sitzfleisch). Richard Forry, field operations coordinator of the Northern Missouri Historic District for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, cites a cultural shift away from heritage appreciation. Other observers offer more immediate and tangible causes for declining visitor attendance. Mary Duncan of Huston Tavern cited an increasing lack of discretionary income. People may be looking around Arrow Rock, but not buying as much or as often. Kathy Borgman sent me a newspaper article which examined the impacts of airline deregulation on American travel patterns, increasingly away from local heritage sites like Arrow Rock to pre-packaged travel destinations made of myth. (“We’re going to Disney World!”) The Real Deal now has some formidable competition. Arrow Rock has met similar challenges. Museums and living history sites all over the country are learning how to balance being a muse and being amusing. None other than venerable Colonial Williamsburg has introduced live theater performances into its regular programming. Their research into declining attendance figures found that visitors to historic sites want to make emotional connections and have highly interactive experiences that appeal to both adults and children. Now actors portray real characters from Colonial Williamsburg who interact with audiences to discuss issues leading up to the American Revolution. Arrow Rock offers enormous opportunities for making emotional connections from early America to modern Missouri and American life; we’re still wrestling with race relations, the power of the federal government, what historians call The Columbian Exchange with Hispanic America, and our treatment of the natural environment. Does it really make much difference to Missouri life if people no longer visit tiny Arrow Rock as much, or at all? I think it does. It’s the Real Deal. Although I love the magnificent Gateway Arch, I think Arrow Rock offers an equally valuable and in some ways better setting to remember our heritage. We still need to find ourselves in relation to the essential Missouri. Forry suggests we need a sense of chronology to develop both our individual and cultural identities. (French philosopher Henri Bergson called this durée, but I promised my editor I wouldn’t use words like durée.) Forry believes we, too, are responsible for passing on cultural artifacts like Arrow Rock and for reinterpreting them for future generations so they also can remember and can become part of that great story. Arrow Rock is a conservatory of antebellum America, a living legacy of The Essential Missouri. Mike Dickey concludes, “It is the people of Missouri who will decide if Arrow Rock is worthy of continued preservation for future generations.” We are now the river. June 2006