A Small Town Tells It Like It Was
Pubic storytelling preserve’s a town’s local history
You’ve heard the old joke, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it?” The same could be said about “the old days.”
Except you could add, “But the town of Augusta is doing something about it!”
The town is keeping the old days alive by remembering them together, and putting those memories on the record.
The people of Augusta are big on history and local connections, says Angela Stephens, president of the Augusta History Museum, which hosts a monthly event titled “Tell It Like It Was.” Each installment brings local people together to reminisce and learn about all things local.
The event this month, on Jan. 13, drew around 60 people, its biggest audience yet. Except for a three-year break during COVID, the event has been running since 2019.
Augusta residents do have a lot to say, says Paul Ovaitt, who founded the monthly series in 2019. “I was the town handyman for a long time, and my customers were always telling me stories,” he said. He finally started writing them down, telling himself. “These are good stories, and they’re our stories.”
He was later in conversation with Walter Kamphoefner, an Augusta-area native noted for his scholarship on German immigration in America, and Kamphoefner told him, in so many words, that what Ovaitt and other locals are doing to preserve local history “is important—historians at some point are going to appreciate what you’re doing there in Augusta.”
Ovaitt, who publishes his interviews of local people in the Boone Country Connection (both the website and monthly newsletter), described his mission as “not just drawing old stuff out of people, but what they’re thinking about now. We’re all making history.”
Taking over the series from Ovaitt in Jan. 2023, said Stephens, has satisfied her own desire to know the town and its people better. She and husband Damon moved to the area in 2018, and her role at the Augusta History Museum, including the monthly series, “has been a blessing. I’ve met people I never thought I would get to meet.”
Her favorite part of these evenings—it could almost be called the smallest part—is the little “awws” she hears in the audience when something has really hit home. At the January session there were lots of those.
“We want to capture these stories before these people are gone, so we can memorialize them and share with younger generations,” she said. She records every session and publishes them on the Augusta Museum website.
Stories of a Long-Time Family
The featured guests this month were local father and son Aloys and Eric Struckhoff, ages 92 and 60. The speakers sat up front beside a cozy parlor lamp, with projected images to accompany and prod their memories. Audience members called out questions and contributed details.
There were anecdotes and details from very old to recent: ranging from the early 1800s, when the Struckhoffs arrived in Augusta, on up to recent decades. Stories of floods, ferries, trains, coon hunting, courtships, baseball, church life, train hopping, and much more. There were glimpses of a different lifestyle. Of local viewpoints. There were big stories and little ones.
Aloys, a child of the 1920s and 30s, told how at the start of his lifetime his family still farmed with mules. How their farm in the Augusta Bottoms was always getting flooded. About the family’s firewood enclosure “half as big as this building (the Harmonie) and stacked as high as this ceiling”—and a flood hit.
“I just watched it all float down the river.”
You heard a gasp from the audience. “That was worse than losing a crop,” someone said.
Aloys answered, “It was fun times, I’ll tell ya.”
He told how the KATY train was a presence in his life from childhood on. How it brought workers from Rhineland, 43 miles upriver, to help the local farm wives. The hired girls “would come on Monday and stay till Friday, or even longer,” he said.
The help was sorely needed. “The poor women,” he said. “They had all that canning to do in the summertime. They were busy women, baking bread seven times a week.”
Participants were curious about Nona, a train stop about a mile west of Augusta, today just a few aging buildings. “That’s where I got my first pack of cigarettes, when I was pretty young, about 13 or 14,” said Aloys. “I was hauling wheat with Dad. I went in the store there and I thought, ‘Mom and Dad will never know about this one.’ So I ordered a pack of— Raleighs, I believe.
“And before I got home, Mom knew about it.”
He had stories about church and school (Immaculate Conception) “up in the hills.” The building had a coal furnace in the basement. But that coal didn’t get there on its own. “It had to come on a rail car”—down in the bottoms. “We had to haul it up there to the school first. And then we unloaded it.” This would involve a team and wagon and four or more farmers. “And then us boys had to shovel it into the furnace all winter.”
Eric told one of his Uncle Paul’s stories. About a spring day when Paul and a few other kids were allowed to drive a horse and buggy to school. During the day the horse ate “too many greens.” Later, as the buggy traveled down Shell Hill, it pressed against the horse’s rear end, and—“The horse sneezed and shot manure all over everyone.”
“After that time, they walked, I guess,” said someone in the audience.
Aloys talked about the many ways he’d earned money. Sending coon skins down to St. Louis for seven or eight dollars a hide. As a teenager, working with Herbie Struckhoff to collect milk up and down the river valley, from Warrenton to Chesterfield. A stint as a painter. Then 13 years as a drywall taper—“I didn’t put any drywall up, not one piece. But I did tape a hell of a lot of it.”
Then about 30 years as a carpenter. His carpentry projects included the Labadie power plant, the Washington hospital, the Bank of Washington building at 14th and Jefferson in Washington, the prison at Pacific.
Family tragedies: how his father Edmund was killed when his tractor overturned. How a brother John died at three months. How a later brother, also named John, was killed while working on a car and the car fell on him. How that brother’s son, another John Struckhoff (known as “J”), died in a car accident.
More Recent Times
Eric, who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, had more recent stories to tell. “There was one time, Dad was working at the Labadie Power Plant, it was me, Marty [Eric’s brother], and Tim Kuchem. Highway 94 always had tar spots—the tar would come up through the asphalt—and we’d go out there and poke the bubbles down.”
It wasn’t a safe place for boys to be playing on a highway, he said. His Dad arrived home as the boys “were out there popping bubbles.” His father swung his truck off the highway straight into the grass, and came fast for the boys. “I was probably five. I remember thinking, ‘Dad must really want to pop bubbles with us.’”
Aloys pulled the boys off the road one at a time and spanked them around in a circle. “Neither of our feet hit the ground.” Eric’s takeaway from the event: “Dad did not like tar bubbles.”
The time Eric and a few other boys ran away by hopping the train. “I thought the train stopped in every town. I was probably nine. We hopped on here and thought it would stop in Matson. And it didn’t. It just kept going. We got to to Defiance—it just kept going.”
The boys finally jumped free and headed back home. A local mailman on his route, Earl Mallinckrodt, came across them, walking the railroad track, picked them up, and “dropped us off home.”
“We never even told Mom. I bet it was 20 years before she knew.”
One of the great things about the Augusta of his childhood, Eric said, was how many kids there were. Where he grew up, along Highway 94 just outside the main town, there were 21 kids in just three adjoining houses.
And although the crucial town of Washington was near, it wasn’t extremely near. “Dad always said when I was in high school, for anyone in Augusta, it was about 10 miltes to Washington. For anyone in Washington it was about a hundred miles.”
But even local travel could be a big deal. “I remember weeks, months, where Mom never went anywhere except to go to church.”
His mother, along with many others, would call their grocery orders in to Mel Fuhr, owner of Fuhr’s store. “He had a little pickup truck and would pack it just full of groceries and just drop them off. Whenever you got your check, you’d just go in there and pay your tab. I guess Mel did that for 40 years. He was Uber Eats.”
And More
Just that one evening of talk produced more tales and details than we can fit in one article. The aunt of Aloys who, living in Washington, said she’d get a divorce before moving across the river. The old family picture taken on the Washington side of the river because no one there would make the long journey to Augusta. How moms made dresses for their girls from patterned flour sacks. How in one old photo, two out of three kids are barefoot, but the one with shoes has a hole in the sole.
How there were eight grades at the church school, multiple grades per room. How the school had three nuns: two to teach, one to cook. How Aloys met his wife, Rita Voss, a girl from Washington, at a baseball game in Dutzow .
How the Struckhoff family had no electricity when they lived in the bottoms, and just a weak variety when they moved into the hills. “There was a line, but there wasn’t any power in it. It might have just run an electric shaver or something like that.”
Stephens closed the event with a question: What is your hope for Augusta in the future?
“Something back like it used to be,” said Aloys. “I mean, it’s so dead now. There ain’t no families here now. But Augusta used to be a pretty fun place to go.”
His son agreed, saying new businesses were key, but added: “It has to be organic. Somebody local who’s got their blood and sweat in the business.”
He added one more reminiscence. “I remember Fuhr’s store being lit up. Sometimes we’d come in to get groceries—they were open I think until 8 o’clock, just on Friday night. It might have been six. But I know it’d be dark.”
And the store would be lit up, he said, “like Madison Square Garden.”
No one spoke up with a detailed wish for Augusta’s future. Which is not surprising. It’s a new and changing world. An online world. A world of remote participation. And Augusta’s now a town without ball games, without a tavern, without kids playing in the street and moms walking home with groceries. Who can predict how any of that might change?
But the townspeople did seem to be answering that last question all evening long.
Whatever else they might wish for tomorrow, they seemed to be saying they want it to include the memories of yesterday. They want to keep knowing they were once a town—and not very long ago—with the sound of “old man Holt” hammering in his blacksmith shop. A town with a train. And people on the street. And footpaths and horse paths. And a friendly grocer. And people whose names and houses you remembered all your life. And people you could say to, “Remember that time…” and they did.
Speaking afterward, Eric said, “What I think people want, they just want a place where it’s organically fun, and pleasurable, and safe.”
Maybe getting the old times remembered, written, and recorded is not just nostalgia, but a step towards the future. Getting down into words what the town considers good.
This story first appeared in The Missourian newspaper