Page:History of Southeast Missouri 1912 Volume 1.djvu/136

 76 HISTORY OF SOUTHEAST MISSOURI time Joseph McPerron, Anthony Haden, Robert Blair, Daniel F. Steinback and Isaac M. Bledsoe were elected. These trustees im- mediately entered upon their duties, and under their direction the town continued to grow and prosper for a number of years. It received its first blow in the establishment of the county seat at Jackson. This took away from the town a great deal of its importance and built up a rival near it. It did not re- cover from this disaster until the develop- mint of the steamboat trade at a later time. In LSIS it had only two stores and about fifty houses. Flagg visited Cape Girardeau in 1836 and describes the mills put in motion by a spiral water-wheel acted on by a cixrrent of the river ; these are doubtless the wheels of which it is said that Barthelimi Cousin was the inventor. These wheels floated upon the sur- face of the water parallel to the shore rising and falling with the water and were con- nected with the gearing in the mill house by a long shaft. At the time of Flagg 's visit there was a pottery in operation in Cape C4irar- deau using the clay from Tywappaty bottom. Long, who visited Cape Girardeau in 1819. gives this description of the town and its site :* ' ' The town comprises at this time about twenty log cabins, several of them in ruins, a log jail no longer occupied, a large unfinished brick dwelling falling rapidly into decay and a small one finished and occupied, it stands on the slope and part of the summit of a broad hill elevated about 150 feet above the Mississippi and having a deep primary soil resting on a strata of compact and sparry limestone. Near the place where boats usually land is a point of white rock jutting into the river and at very low stage of water '"Long's Expedition," p. 87. producing a pereeptilile rapid, these are of white liuiestone abounding in the remains of marine animals ; if you travel some distance they will be found to alternate with the com- mon blue limestone so frequently seen in sec- ondary districts. Through the substrata of this sparry lime-stone the rock is literally di- vided by seams and furrows and would un- doubtedly effect a valuable marble not unlike the Daring marble qarry on the Hudson. "The streets of Cape Girardeau are marked out with form of regularity intersecting each other at right angles but they are in some parts so gullied and torn by the rains as to be impassable ; others overgrown with such thickets of gigantic vernonias and urticlas as to resemble small forests. The country back of the town is hilly covered with heavy for- ests of oak, tulip tree and nyssa intermixed in the valleys with the sugar tree and the syl- vatica and on the hills with an undergrowth of American hazel and the shot bush. Settle- ments are considerably advanced and many well cultivated farms occur in various direc- tions." The principal population of the district however was outside the town itself. The dis- trict was large, embracing the present coun- ties of Cape Girardeau, Bollinger. AVayne, and parts of others. The land, too, on which the town of Cape Girardeau was situated be- longed to Lorimier who refused to dispose of it for a long time and thus kept away some settlers who might otherwise have come. Besides Cape Girardeau the principal set- tlements within the -limits of the present county of Cape Girardeau before the transfer to the United States in 1804 were the Ram- say settlement near ]It. Tabor, a chain of settlements extending from the Big Swamp south of Cape Girardeau around to the Jack-