Bonnots Mill; Fall Supper Time Is Here!

It’s that time again—when all the local parishes are having their fall suppers. To find out what’s when, you can either look at the gigantic Coke Building sign on Jefferson Street and the Expressway, or you can look at the schedule on the Catholic Missourian’s website.



Sunday was Bonnots Mill. St. Louis of France parish always gets the award (in my opinion) for most scenic parish hall space. It’s up on a bluff overlooking the Osage River, with only oaks and ash trees between you and the deep blue sky. (For more pictures of this, see one of my earlier posts about Bonnots Mill.)



We got there in midafternoon, so we missed the lunchtime and dinnertime rushes. It was ham cooked with pineapple, and German pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, sauerkraut, coleslaw, homemade pickled beets and bread-and-butter pickles, applesauce, a platter of sliced yellow and red heirloom tomatoes, and homemade bread.

Plus, as always, your choice of desserts from the glorious dessert table.



The “country market” had a nice selection of bake sale items, canned salsa and preserves, as well as some great-looking garden-fresh vegetables, including sweet corn, some beautiful eggplants, and tremendous, puckery, deep pinkish-red heirloom tomatoes and yellow tomatoes. (Oh, we will miss them in January!)



Someone at the parish has created a bunch of nice postcards of the St. Louis of France church (with its distinctive “Star of David” on the steeple) and of the town of Bonnots Mill—several of the postcards were reprints of historic photos—and all these were for sale. (Ten cents a piece!)

Our m.o. is to go for a walk after the picnic—it helps after such a great meal! So we drove to the town of Bonnots Mill (as opposed to hiking straight down the side of the bluff between parish hall and church). Sue likes to take pictures of antique buildings and the railway. (And so do I—but I don’t do nearly as well as her!)



There’s some really cool stuff in Bonnots Mill. Here’s the historic Dauphine Hotel, which opened for business in 1875. Now it’s a bed and breakfast. (Oh, and that’s the post office, to the right.)



While we were walking around, a fellow in a pickup stopped and told Sue that the church was open this afternoon, if we wanted to go up there and take pictures of the inside.

Oh, boy! We love seeing the interiors of these churches, and we’d never seen the inside of this one before. What a treat!



But even more of a treat: There were people inside! We met a friendly lady named Jeanne Knollmeyer, who chatted with us about the history of the church. Much of our discussion revolved around music, since the church had a guest organist that day, a talented fellow from Clinton, Missouri, named Sam. (Is it Sam Lucas? I can’t recall his last name, but the Internet reveals that a fellow with that name is the organist at the Clinton United Methodist Church.) Anyway—he was up in the choir loft playing, beautifully, the church’s hundred-year-old organ.



It sounded great—the acoustics in the church are superior, and the organ had a nice sound and seemed perfectly in tune. Beautiful music, the first time we’d been in that beautiful, historic church. What a treat!



Next Sunday (Sept. 22) is Frankenstein—Our Lady Help of Christians parish is having its supper. This is a special year for them, as the church is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. It’s definitely going to be a party there this year! And they always have such good homemade whole-hog sausage . . .

Community Effort

More reflections on the subject of church suppers. One of the things I marvel at during these parish festivals is that they are truly a communal effort—men, women, and youngsters all have something to do; all can contribute. And the organization is truly impressive.

As we dined in the cafeteria at St. Anthony’s at Folk, Missouri, last Sunday, we sat beside one of the older members of the parish, who offered us some information. For instance, each family was in charge of donating five pies and three loaves of bread. (The pies, she noted, could not be cream pies, since the church’s refrigerated storage would be devoted to other foods.)

She also mentioned that the meat was local; in fact, her family’s farm had provided some of the beef. The sausage, also from local meat, had been prepared by a locally owned meat-packing company down by Vienna, and the people of Folk had stuffed it themselves a few days before the festival.

The Work Schedule!

After eating, Sue and I entered the church to look around. In the narthex I spied a stack of sheets listing the work assignments for the day’s events. Very interesting! Here are the categories, with the number of people listed for each shift. I’m leaving off personal names.

Most jobs have two shifts; the first starts at “beginning” or “10:45” and lasts until 3:00; the second shift starts at 3:00 and lasts until “end,” or about 7:00 p.m.

Dining Room, 26 persons per shift
Bread and Pies, 3 or 4/shift
Steam Table: 4/shift
Tea and Coffee: 3/shift
Kitchen: 5/shift
Dish Washing: 5/shift
Supper Tickets: 3 or 4/shift
Carry Food and Trash: 3/shift
Sandwich Stand: 4/shift
Sandwich Stand Tickets: 2/shift
General Raffle: 2 or 3/shift
Selling Raffle Tickets: 2/shift
Game Tickets: 2/shift
Arts and Crafts: 4/shift
Bingo: 5/shift
Toy Store and Grab Bag: 2/shift
Bounce House: 3/shift

Then, the folks assigned to the following jobs work all day, “start–end”:

Cookshed: 10 people
Carryout Meals: 5 people
Sausage Fryers: 9 men
Cooler and Meat Sales: 4 men
Shooting Match: 9 men
Splatter Cards: 3 people
Beer Stand: 10 men
Traffic: 10 men
Games: one shift, from noon to 6:45, a total of 15 folks, to oversee kiddie games of “Golf,” “Muffin Pan,” “Hoopla,” and “Plinko”


Analysis?

Looking at the names on the list—and observing workers at the festival—you can see there’s a separation of labor by gender, as might be expected; men typically work at the beer wagon, help drivers find parking spots on the grassy hill nearby, cook the meat, and oversee the “shooting match” (which their immigrant grandparents probably called a Schützenfeste).

Women are generally in charge of the baked goods and desserts, the beverages, dishwashing, side dishes, and most things pertaining to children.

Women and men work shoulder-to-shoulder in the kitchen—feeding thousands within a few hours requires a lot of heavy lifting, so any notions of cooking being “women’s work” are brushed away, since man-muscles are clearly needed.

The names on the list also provide hints to ages and family relationships—the teens and young adults are undoubtedly the ones with names like Tyler, Megan, Brooklyn (yes! such a name in little bitty ol’ Folk!), Ashley, and Cody. They carry platters of food to tables, serve the beverages, and bus, clean, and reset the tables. They’re working at the Bounce House and the games of “Muffin Tin.” The boys carry bags of trash out to the dumpster.

Folks of my generation have names like Kevin, Jennifer, Mike, and Lori. They’re doing all the stuff that’s responsible, complex, and hard: Kitchen. Beer wagon. Sausage frying. Shooting match. Sandwich stand.

Then there are the people with names like Gertie, Dick, Norma, Betty, and Herb—the retirement generation; they’re selling supper and raffle tickets, and some of the women continue with kitchen work. They also work at the “country store.” Most of these can be sit-down jobs, and most allow for plenty of “visiting.” They’ve earned it. Twenty years ago, at this exact same location, these persons were handling the tough, demanding jobs; fifty years ago, they were bussing tables and taking out the trash.

Finally, the surnames—a study in Germanness. Here are some names from the Folk parish: Baumhoer, Gabelsberger, Heckman, Huhn, Luebbering, Temmen, Veit, Welschmeyer, Stegemann, Lueckenhoff, Hagenhoff, Woehr, Massman, Reinkemeyer, Kempker, Werdehausen, Scheppers, and Leucke. And more. And if you visit the little cemetery across the road, you know you’ll see these same names well represented.

There’s something really cool about all this; from Augustus to Andy to Ashley, from Johanna to Judy to Justin, and Henrietta to Hank to . . . “Fallon”??—well, yeah!—there’s a daily continuity here that families spread across the continent miss almost entirely.

Fall Supper Time

Fresh, local, whole-hog sausage. Beef roast (or turkey, with all the fixings). Kraut, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, applesauce, homemade bread, and your choice of homemade pie or other dessert. Sometimes there are extras; Taos, I recall, always has cooked turnips!

The rural ethnic-German communities in the area have begun their fall suppers. There’s at least one to attend every Sunday, from now through Thanksgiving. (These are not to be confused with the summer “picnics,” which end about Labor Day—these feature fried chicken and plenty of fresh local summertime produce—slaw, tomatoes, peppers, etc.)

The fall festivals—which include activities such as quilt raffles, bake sales, kids’ games, bingo, and the beer wagon—are fund-raising efforts by the parishes. And efforts they must be! Everyone has a job to do; thankfully, “many hands make light work.”

Last Sunday was the festival at Folk. (That’s Folk, Missouri, located west of Westphalia off Route 133—and just north of Painted Rock Conservation Area).

We usually take some time, after eating, to look inside the sanctuary of each church. They are always quite beautiful, and each unique according to the history and personality of the parish.





Schedule

I wish I could give you a definitive calendar of the upcoming church suppers this fall, but I’m not Catholic, so I’m not privy to the diocese or parish newsletters that provide such information. Pity.

As far as I know, the only other ways to find out “which suppers are when” are by:

1. Scanning for ads in the Jeff City newspaper;

2. Reading the Coca-Cola building billboard facing the 63/54 Expressway at its Jefferson Street intersection (one of our Munichburg treasures); or

3. Simply asking your Catholic friends.




I guess I could, some year, make notes of which festivals are on which weekends, since these rarely change: “Oh, we’re always on the second weekend in September.”

But frankly, it’s more fun to look at our beloved Coke Sign. Long may she wave!





(Thanks, Sue, for letting me post some of your lovely pictures from St. Anthony's in Folk!)

Painted Rock Conservation Area

Painted Rock has been a favorite getaway for Jefferson Citians for generations. It’s just far enough away to keep it special, to make it a destination instead of a place to hang out by default.

This is another of those public lands that offer a variety of features, macro and micro, in both natural and human history. Comprising 1,480 acres, it’s a substantial area that can be visited repeatedly and continually yield surprises.

Where is it? Painted Rock CA is along the Osage River south of Jefferson City, southwest of the tiny town of Folk, off of Highway 133 between Meta and Westphalia. It’s about seven miles southwest of the junction of Highways 63 and 133. (That’s a pretty loop drive, by the way, between Westphalia and Meta, and then back to Jeff City through St. Thomas. I’m just sayin’.)

Human History

The Missouri Department of Conservation acquired the land in 1981, but it’s been used as a park and preserve since the last quarter of the 1800s. At that time, the land was leased and used by a group of affluent citizens of Jefferson City for hunting purposes. In 1907, when the land appeared to be in danger of being subdivided and sold, the group of hunters organized formally into the Painted Rock Country Club and purchased the property—1,086 acres.

The country club, whose members included Governor Herbert Hadley, had a clubhouse on the land, gathered there on the weekends, and had fall and winter hunts for deer, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, quail . . . this at a time when game was becoming increasingly scarce in the state due to the lack of centrally organized conservation efforts.

Again, these were prominent people; in 1909 the group’s annual banquet was held at the Governor’s Mansion, and it’s widely agreed that this club’s members were instrumental in developing and supporting Missouri’s first statewide hunting laws as well as creating (in 1936) the state’s department of Conservation.

The club’s heyday was in the 1920s, but it declined somewhat during the Depression; the land was sold in the mid-1940s and then sold again in 1952 to Sam B. Cook, a prominent Jefferson City banker who was the son and grandson of men who had been members of the country club. In 1981 he sold the property to the Missouri Department of Conservation, which developed the trail overlooks, interpretive signs, and other information, and worked to improve the quality of the area’s oak-hickory forests.




But the human history of the area goes back much farther than the country club. In fact, one of the first points on the interpretive trail is an Indian burial cairn (sadly vandalized long ago, so apparently there’s no good way to be sure of its age, or much else).




Also, there is the feature that gives the area its name: red pictographs of a buffalo and other symbols painted high on bluffs overlooking the Osage River by Indians between A.D. 1200 and 1300. For decades, the “Painted Rock” was a landmark for explorers, traders, and others who navigated the Osage, including Zebulon Pike, who noted it in 1806.

We tend to forget how very important rivers used to be in trade and transportation. The reason the state capital is at its current location is because the state’s early leaders specified that it had to be on the Missouri River, within forty miles of the mouth of the Osage.

I’ve never seen the “Painted Rock” pictographs; I don’t know where they are. The MDC literature for the Osage Bluff trail states they are “not accessible by the trail.” You can see recent images of them here. Apparently they are growing fainter and disappearing as the rocks weather; some disappearing in the last two hundred years.

I’d love to see the pictographs someday, whether from a boat or on foot. But for now, for me, the name “Painted Rock” can refer symbolically to the lovely splotches of mosses and lichens painting the many stones and outcroppings along the trail. This area must be home to dozens of species of bryophytes and their miniature amigos, crustose, foliose, and fruticose.




Hiking

There is much to enjoy on the 1.6 mile Osage Bluff Scenic Trail, a loop that begins at a nice gravel parking lot and leads through pleasant forested territory before reaching tall bluffs and a nifty observation deck overlooking the Osage River, with a view of Bloody Island (which has its own colorful lore).




The trail then skirts the river, gradually descending to its lowest elevational point (a footbridge that crosses Cove Creek), then ascends a cool, fern-covered, north-facing hillside to emerge on another observation deck overlooking the Osage. Then, it’s another fairly level hike through oak-hickory woods back to where you parked.




There are some fairly steep sections of the trail, but these have long, mild switchbacks that make the grades less strenuous. Another issue for some hikers could be the rockiness at some places; yes, this is the Ozarks, and rocks are forever poking out of the soil. You know. “Ozark potatoes.” So flip-flops and penny loafers just aren’t a good idea. If you have Leki poles, you might be glad you brought them.




More Things to See

Probably the most remarkable things about Painted Rock are the breathtaking views of the Osage River from along high bluffs. The southern viewing platform is 140 feet over the river, and you have a tremendous view of the Osage Bend (yes, which the town of Osage Bend is named for; that burg lies across the river, within the river’s big loop). You can see flat cropland and farmhouses, and gentle distant hills that, the interpretive brochure points out, would have become steep Osage bluffs if the river had flowed to the west instead of its current course.

Also at the southern overlook, there’s an eastern red cedar clinging to the bluff that is approximately six hundred years old. It’s not very large. Sue, the bonsai artist, always admires it—and many other cedars on these bluff—for their strong, twisted shapes and tremendous character.




I should mention that there are a number of wooden benches at different points overlooking the Osage. We usually like to bring an apple to gnaw on while we enjoy the view. These overlooks are fantastic places to see sunsets, I might add.




Along the bluffs overlooking the river is also a good place to look for soaring birds, ranging from turkey vultures to bald eagles, as well as great blue herons and others associated with large rivers.

Another thing to enjoy at Painted Rock are the unpainted rocks—I mean, the basic geology of the area. The Gasconade Formation rocks that poke out in places were deposited as ocean sediments over 400 million years ago. There’s lots of sandstone, chert, and dolomite about, much of it eye-catching as you walk.




There’s a point, about midway in the trail when you’re getting close to river level, where you pass a remarkable shelf of dolomite and chert—which is a cool grayish-purple—there’s nothing under it, as a softer, tannish dolomite layer beneath it has eroded away.




Atop the shelf layer is an icing of sandstone, which sparkles when it catches the light. It’s so soft, it looks like it’s melting from the elements. There are holes, tiny caves, in it.




We always pause at this outcrop and smile as we fancy that this outcrop, with its decorations of various mosses, looks like a miniaturized version of the bluffs around us. It’s fun to take pictures that represent this; with a little imagination (or confusion), you might think you’re looking at a long-distance view of the bluffs, or a side of a mountain.




I really like to go hiking where I can be delighted by both small things and expansive things, and if you’re like me, you’ll enjoy Painted Rock Conservation Area, too.




Sources

“History of Painted Rock Country Club Tied to Development of a State Conservation Program,” in Gary R. Kremer, Heartland History Volume 3 (Jefferson City, Mo.: City of Jefferson, 2004), 28-31. (This essay includes some neat pictures of the country club's parties and outings.)

Osage Bluff Scenic Trail: Painted Rock Conservation Area, trail brochure published by the Missouri Department of Conservation (n.d.), available at the trailhead.