As a kid in Illinois, part of the folklore that got drilled into my head alongside Abraham Lincoln and the Great Chicago Fire was that the biggest earthquake in American history did not take place in San Francisco or anywhere near California, but in southern Illinois - a tremor so strong that it rang bells in Philadelphia and made the Mississippi River run backwards. Later on I found out it was really centered just south of Illinois, in New Madrid, Missouri, and occurred in 1831, but in my mind it was still a monster on a par with Godzilla. The New Madrid earthquake was something I've always wanted to learn more about, especially having driven through the area several times over the past few years. It killed me that there was never enough time to pull over and check out this storied place. But now, with the RV, we can.
New Madrid lies in the bootheel of Missouri, flat river lowland prone to flooding, and it was here that I first saw cotton fields. (The lady at the museum told me how in the days of Big Cotton, one of the growers was so powerful that he nixed his land going over to Arkansas and arranged for it to go to the Show Me State instead, creating that crazy, lazy bootheel hanging there like an appendix, that makes you scratch your head whenever you see it on the map.) Present-day New Madrid has a few thousand people and its own levee on the Mississippi River, which you can see and drive upon in a beautiful river outlook that is also a part of the Trail of Tears, where Cherokee refugees waited in the cold for ferries to bring them across from Tennessee.
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| Gorgeous Mississippi River overlook on the levee |
Less than 100 yards downhill stands the historical museum. It is only two rooms, and then a second floor. No problem getting in with the wheelchair, but there is no elevator to the upstairs so what they do is show you a photo album of the items there. This tiny place really couldn't raise the money for an elevator, I think, plus the woman who showed me the pictures told some pretty good stories that the folks going upstairs weren't hearing. The earthquake exhibits are all on the ground floor. Otherwise everything is flat and no surprises for the chair.
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| Upstairs |
Half of the museum is about the earthquake, and the rest is mostly Civil War and Indian artifacts, plus some 19th-century household and heirloom items that were contributed by the oldest families in
town. It was all interesting, and we spent an hour and half.
If you're interested about the earthquake, it hit during a winter night and turned everyone out shivering in the cold as they endured the aftershocks. There were three quakes stronger than 8.0 on that first night (scientists now lump all three into one rolling terror) and there was a 8.0 earthquake the next day and another in the days following. Each one of them was a monster quake, and then there were hundreds of smaller ones for months afterwards. It changed the course of the river, split open the earth and left features in the landscape still visible today. (At least one of them is doing duty as the friendly neighborhood sand trap at a nearby golf course.) The cool thing is that there is a New Madrid fault to this day, although you can't see it because it's under several feet of caved in earth and sand. But I see a movie coming on here... Paging Tom Cruise and Ben Affleck.
The museum is $5 and definitely worth a visit if you like history. Be sure to check out the Trail of Tears river outlook right up the street.
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