Walt Disney's boyhood home

On the road again July 21, 2008 – July 27, 2008 We are now in the northeastern section of Missouri near Hannibal in the middle of Mark Twain country and have seen no sign of flooding except for some fields down by St. Genevieve which is right on the Mississippi River. The first thing we did was go into St. Louis to the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. This is the home that Grant lived in for 5 ½ years, the longest of any home other than the White House. The house was originally built as a two room two story home by a man named Long in 1816, from 1818 to 1820 the house was owned by the Hunts who made a few additions, in 1820 “Colonel” Frederick Dent bought the house and made his own additions. Dent’s oldest daughter was Julia who became Mrs. Grant and in the late 1860’s they purchased the home from her father to cover his debts. After their marriage Ulysses and Julia built a small cabin near her parents called “Hardscrabble” but they only lived there about 2 or 3 months before Julia’s mother died and her father asked them to move into her family home. This made for some interesting times as Frederick Dent was a slave holder and Grant was totally against slavery. The “Hardscrabble” cabin’s site is now part of St. Paul cemetery, but the cabin itself has been moved to Grant’s Farm across the street. The National Historic Site contains ten acres of the original 850 acres and in 1903 August Busch purchases a large section of the property as a retreat. In 1954 the property called “Grant’s Farm” was opened to the public as a wildlife conservation area. Today the farm is home to over 1000 animals as well as the breeding and training farm for the famous Clydesdale horses. There has been a member of the Busch family living on the farm since 1915. We were wondering what will happen to the farm and other properties owned by Anheuser-Busch since it was sold to a Belgian company. We then drove down to the river front of St. Louis to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. This is a large green park area along the river with the center piece being the Gateway Arch. Under the arch there is a large building that contains a museum that covers the country’s westward expansion as well as the trams to the top of the arch. Standing at the bottom and looking up the 630 foot arch Shirley decided that she would not be able to handle going to the top even though she had been up the space needle in Seattle. Since Shirley wouldn’t go up the arch Jim decided no to also. On research back at home it was found out that the observation platform of the space needle is at 520 feet while the observation room at the top of the arch is at least 600 feet up. After a day of pouring rain we had a little cabin fever, so even though it was still very overcast we took a drive to Marceline, MO, the hometown of Walt Disney. Our first stop was at a 1913 Santa Fe train depot that has been turned into a museum about Walt and his family. The Disney family moved here from Chicago, IL when Walt was a young boy and lived on a farm just outside of the town itself. Comments state that this was where Walt was the happiest and he remembers the town fondly, to the point that Main Street in his parks is based on Main Street of Marceline. In Disneyland in California the Emporia is based on the Allen Hotel and even has a small sign of the hotel on the building. On the farm there is an old cottonwood tree under which Walt used to lay and study the animals around him, later this study help with his cartoon characters, that he called his “Dreaming Tree” and every time he was back in town he found time to spend under his tree. The tree has been named an American Forest Historic Tree and seeds have been collected from it and planted so that people can buy a seedling from this famous tree. After a lightning strike injured the tree a seedling from it was planted nearby, since then high winds have torn the original tree apart. Near the tree is the barn where Walt put on his first production which consisted of small farm animals and household pets. Walt was on the Olympic committee for the Squaw Valley Olympics and after the Olympics were over he donated the flag pole to his hometown and it now stands in front of the Walt Disney elementary school. Every time a park or building was named for him Walt was there for the dedication. We finally saw some of the flooding problems. On our way to Marceline we crossed several rivers that were well over their banks. At the Middle Fork of the Salt River a house was actually surrounded by the water. On the way out the right lane of US 36’s west bound lane was closed because of being under water, on the way back both west bound lanes were covered by the overflow of the Chariton River. On our way home from Marceline we stopped at Mark Twain State Park to see his birthplace near the town of Florida, MO. Samuel Langford Clemens was born in 1835 on the night that Haley’s Comet crossed the skies and said that he hoped to live long enough to see it again, the next time the comet came was the day he died in 1910 at the age of 74. It was now time to go into Hannibal and see what all the hype was about. Hannibal was the home of the Clemens family and the basis for some of Mark Twain’s books. Mark Twain is the pen name for Samuel Clemens and is a riverboat term meaning 2 fathoms, 12 feet, or safe water. We will be calling him Mark Twain from now on as everything in the area does and little is mentioned about Clemens. He was 13 when he his father died and he left school to help support his family by working at the newspaper as a type setter. Twain joined the Marion Rangers a Confederate Militia but “resigned” left when Grant was near, guess he didn’t want to get hurt. The books Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are based on his life in Hannibal and the characters are based on himself and friends, Huck Finn is Thomas Blankenship, Becky Thatcher is Laura Hawkins, Aunt Polly his mother and Tom Sawyer is a combination of all the boys he knew. Along the river there were T-rails and sandbags on top of the levees to help hold back the flooding. In 1993 the high water mark was 30 feet and the highest so far this year was 29.5 feet, hopefully it will not get any higher. Things do look good right now and the river level was way down, in fact the gates on the levee were open. July 28, 2008 – Aug. 10, 2008 Due to all the roads that were closed or flooded in northern Missouri we decided that we had better make sure that the route we were taking out of there was open. Luckily we were going to be alright. We did see that after we got west of the Missouri River on I- 70 the river levels were down. We took a detour to Kansas to see Chris and his family so hopefully by the time we get to Iowa things will be a lot better and all the rivers will be down. We surprised Chris when we dropped in the day after we got set up. We took a day and drove over to Independence, MO to see the Harry S Truman Presidential Museum and Library. When Truman was selected for Vice President in 1944 it was know that he would soon be the next president due to FDR’s health, but we don’t think anyone expected to be as soon as it was, April 1945. One of the first things he did was to organize and start NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, on April 12, 1945. This was the first American military treaty with European nations. In May 1948 when Israel was established, the United States, behind Truman, became the first country to recognize the new country. Truman was the first president since the Civil War to commit predominately to the achievement of civil rights to African-Americans and other minorities. After 8 years in office his popularity had dropped to about 30% but history has been kind to him. The biggest controversy of his terms in office is the decision to drop the bomb on Japan. This made us wonder what history will have to say about Bush fifty years from now. Harry, his wife Bess, daughter Margaret and her husband are all buried on site at the library. After we left the Library we drove over to 219 N. Delaware Ave. to the house that Harry and Bess lived in with her mother. The original house was built in 1867 by Bess’ grandfather. In the garage was a 1972 Chrysler with plates reading 5745, VE day, that was the last car that Truman drove. Since we were not too far away we then drove to Kearney, MO to see the home that Jessie Woodson James was born and grew up in. In 1845 the James family moved into a two room cabin built in 1822 and the cabin was in the family for the next 130 years. At the home they had a museum with a film about the James family and Jessie. When we sat down to watch it we wondered which version it would be of the many around but then got a very different version than either of us had heard before. The James family were southern supporters and didn’t like the way the banks and railroads behaved after the surrender, so the boys decided to keep on fighting. We think that they liked the life they learned while riding with Quantril during the war and didn’t want to give it up. When no one had been able to catch the boys, the Pinkerton Agency fired bombed the home cabin in 1875 which killed the youngest boy and cost their mother her arm. The film also stated that if he hadn’t been a robber, they thought that Jessie would have been a Baptist minister like his birth father had been. Jessie is considered to be to America what Robin Hood is to England, a great folk hero with alleged robberies in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia and Mississippi. The cabin was shown to the public after Jessie’s death by his mother, later by his brother Frank and finally bought from Jessie’s grandchildren in 1978. Jessie was originally buried at the cabin so his mother could keep an eye on the grave but after her death they were both buried at the local cemetery. Saturday afternoon Chris and family came out to where we were staying and set up a tent to spend the night. With the temperatures in the 100’s we spent a lot of time in the lake trying to keep cool. It has been a long hot summer for us and we are hoping that things cool off pretty soon. In fact we are looking forward to getting to Michigan and cooler temps. On another day we drove over to Abilene to the Eisenhower Center that contains the boyhood home, Presidential Library and Presidential Museum of President Dwight David Eisenhower affectionately called Ike. Ike was born in Texas and moved to Kansas when he was 8 years old. When his mother died in 1946 the house was opened to the public to honor the veterans of World War II as well as the famous general, so all the furnishings are original to the Eisenhower family. Ike applied to both Annapolis and West Point when he was 21 but was too old for Annapolis, he did get an appointment to West Point. He was looking for a free education and a chance to play football but ended up in one of the greatest classes to graduate. In his class of 1915 more than one third of the men earned at least one star during their life time, with two earning the highest honor of five stars, both Ike and Omar Bradley. During World War II he was in command of all the Allied forces in Europe and afterwards was Army Chief of Staff, where he joined the services under the Department of Defense and also worked to end segregation in the military. His 1952 election campaign was televised, a first. As president his administration urged the start of NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Act, which was passed in 1958, there was economic and technology expansion, end of McCarthyism, worked to end segregation in southern schools, ended the Korean War and kept the Cold War cold. Since we had seen where Jessie James was born and raised, we thought that we should also see where he died, so off we went to St. Joseph, MO. The house in which Jessie, living under the name of Tom Howard, was shot had been moved two blocks and set next to an old hotel turned into a museum. The inside of the house there were two rooms that represented his life, the living room where he was shot and his bedroom, the rest of the house was a gift shop and a room about the exhumation in 1995 to determine that Jessie had really died at the time and not faked his death to live in peace. Jessie, Tom Howard, was supposable shot in the back by Bob Ford, with the bullet going into the wall in front of him as he straightened or cleaned a picture, depending on what story you hear. After we left the house we spent several hours going through the Patee House Museum next door which once was the Pony Express headquarters. Throughout the museum there were displays that had something that was out of place and we had fun trying to find them, we found some easily but had a hard time finding others if at all. Between all of our trips we spent time with Chris and his family, so it was a good couple of weeks. In our drives around Kansas we saw signs reading “1 KS farmer feeds 128 people + U”, what it doesn’t say is for how long. If it is for a month or longer we could see it but if it was for a day or week, we thought it was a rather low number. We also had not realized how rolling Kansas was, we had always thought of it as flat. Our drives were very enjoyable watching the land rise and fall ahead of us. Aug. 11, 2008 – Aug. 17, 2008 It seem that it would be a good idea if we went up into Nebraska before heading to Iowa and back to the Mississippi River, so we headed north to Lincoln, Nebraska. Our first trip was to Homestead National Monument near Beatrice, NE. The monument is on the first documented homesteads of the Homestead Act of Jan. 1, 1862, filed just after midnight by Daniel Freeman. The last filling was in 1974 in Alaska just before the act ended in 1976 in the lower 48 states, the final end of the act was in 1986. During the Homestead Act 270 million acres was “given” away which is about 10% of the total U.S. To receive 160 acres of land you had to file a claim, be 21 or the head of a household and had never taken up arms against the country, built a house on the land and grow crops in a five year period, if all of this was done you would receive title to the land. Eventually communities grew up around the homesteads which was the purpose, to help settle the western part of the country. Part of the monument is the Freeman schoolhouse, the last one-room school to be in operation, which closed in 1967. On another day we went to see the SAC (Strategic Air Command) museum. During World War II the Air Force came into its own and in 1947 became an independent unit of the armed forces. All of this was due to the work of Gen. Curtis LeMay who took a disorganized group of pilots and made them into a of well organized and efficient attack force. After the war, in 1946, LeMay became head of SAC and developed into the most powerful and efficient military force in the world. Eventually with the breakup of the Russian states it was decided that we no longer needed SAC, so it was deactivated in 1992. As we drove around Nebraska we found that it was the flat land that we had expected Kansas to be, or at least the part we were in was. The campground we stayed at in Nebraska had some of the worse campers we have ever encountered. Our site was only three up from the road but everybody kept cutting through on both sides of us and even driving through the sites next to us if they were empty. Definitely no campground etiquette.