town, I stopped to see Linnie Crouch, a Butler legend. Well, I didn’t see him. He’s six feet under in Oak Hill Cemetery. I hope he lived an interesting life. Good, bad, I don’t know. He died in 1898. But his fame extends beyond the grave, almost six inches. His plot sprouts the world’s smallest tombstone, certified by Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It’s less than six inches square. He may or may not have been a Bushwhacker. But I’ll bet he knew a few.
Driving down the highway, I did a double-take. Ahead, a garbage truck slowed to pick up a load. The sign on its side proclaimed, “Bitter White Trash.” I looked again, closer this time, to read, “Better Rate Trash.” Hey, my road is long, and the key to keeping my interest involves random sights, random thoughts and the ability to sort through trash.
Many Missourians are sensitive about the persistent belief that the state is overrun by white trash. It’s a lasting scar that came from the shapers of popular opinion back during the years leading up to the Civil War. For political purposes during those prewar years, the abolitionist media portrayed Missourians as Pukes. The word was capitalized to formalize this subhuman culture, interested only in drinking whiskey, fighting and owning slaves. Missourians were almost universally described as illiterate and obnoxious, with vacant pig-like eyes and tobacco-stained teeth. Truth is, there were Pukes among Missouri’s Civil War population. But like any other subclass of heathens, they were outnumbered by law-abiding citizens. They just shouted louder, shot more often, and burned and looted and raped their way into American lore. And with the help of the Union press, the whole state was branded with an image that persists today. Pukes. Bushwhackers. Hillbillies. Bitter white trash.
I didn’t intend to pick up the scent of Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers and cavalries in blue and gray. But that’s the allure of taking a random route and pinballing through frontier territory. I learned that while things have changed, much remains the same. Many western Missourians still hold to Southern sympathies. Documents in Missouri’s “Bushwhacker Capital” of Nevada proclaim that “19 out of 20 Vernon Countians were Confederate sympathizers. Not counting Bushwhackers, the county sent more men per capita to the Confederate army than any other in Missouri.” That could explain why Union General Thomas Ewing issued his controversial Order #11 in 1863. To flush out the Bushwhackers, Ewing burned four counties to the ground. Ewing’s torching of Missouri’s Kansas border wasn’t the first act of eminent domain, but it’s among the most heinous. His reign of terror punished the innocent as well as the guilty. There is still deep resentment among farm families in western Missouri who suffered in Ewing’s effort to eradicate the Bushwhackers.
For a closer look at Bushwhackers, I pointed the mother ship toward Nevada, pronounced with a hard “a” (nuh VAY duh). Minutes later, I crossed the radar of another hard “a,” just doing his job, and he handed me a warning ticket for speeding. Fitting, then, that my first stop downtown was the drafty old jail. It’s a museum now, and I suspect local parents relish taking their miscreant teens to view the “cell room of medieval malevolence.” They actually kept prisoners here until 1960. Its stone walls shout century-old hieroglyphics, haunting testament to time spent in Hell. Accentuating the spooky aura of the jail, somewhere outside its thick walls, the mother of all sledgehammers repeated its dramatic thud at half-minute intervals. I searched for the sound, conjuring images of anvils dropping into claw-foot bathtubs.
The dull pounding persisted, every 30 seconds, reverberating through downtown. I followed my ears around the business district, past the courthouse, a work of art under a red tile roof. I followed the sound, passing murals that leapt from brick walls like giant tattoos, telling vivid stories of the Katy Railroad and the Civil War.
I remembered what a waiter on the Delta Queen had told me: “When you enter Nevada, listen. You’ll hear the sounds of old W.F. Norman.”
And suddenly, there it was. Right in the middle of town. The W.F. Norman Sheet Metal Manufacturing Company sends its stamped tin ceiling art everywhere in America, to places as far-ranging as the wedding-cake ceilings of the Delta Queen to the ornate mouldings atop Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel, where President Grant and Sam Clemens smoked and drank.
I was fascinated. Right here is a uniquely American art form that flourishes only in this one red brick factory. This town owns the tin ceiling market, thanks to the perseverance of a company well into its second century of turning ordinary sheet metal into architectural ornaments.
The W.F. Norman Company stamps tin into original designs, based on customers’ wishes. Even today, the company produces exact duplicates of mouldings and marquees, crestings and caryatids, to restore America’s stately mansions.
At the edge of this tin ceiling factory, I stood outside an open window, not a jon boat’s length from the ancient stamping apparatus. An iron-bottomed hunk of oak timbers, heavier than a Chevy Tahoe, raised slowly toward the ceiling, straining its giant hemp halter, and dropped like a guillotine on the unsuspecting sheet of tin. The tin was impressed. So was I.
The huge press offered a time-capsule trip to the Industrial Revolution, and with some adjustment I suspect this contraption could hammer a Humvee into gargoyles. Ropes as thick as Popeye’s forearms raised and lowered the giant press, the same way it operated nearly two centuries ago.
Best anybody can tell, the press was built not long after Zebulon Pike explored the nearby Osage River. W.F. Norman bought the press in 1897, and began transforming copper and brass and bronze into balusters, finials and weather vanes. Many of the tin ceilings survive. In fact, next time you’re downtown anywhere, walk into an old building and look up. Chances are, you’re looking into an original tin sundae, stamped into a ceiling by this most unique company.
As I stood at the W.F. Norman factory, on the outside looking in, I realized it wasn’t my high school history teacher, nor my unnatural attachment to my 1952 World Book Encyclopedias that launched me on a journey to see every square inch of Missouri.
It was a waiter aboard the Delta Queen.
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