Shelter Insurance Fountain

Shelter Insurance is famous for its five acre garden and many weddings, picnics, and ordinary day outings have utilized that beautiful space. Also, the park is the setting for the annual garden concert series which celebrated 33 consecutive years this summer. Less well know is the fountain.

I have been taking my kids to that fountain for nearly twenty five years. That time period spanned my life as a young father in college to a working professional teaching at Columbia College lucky enough to have two kids left at home. Usually we will get ice cream and go sit and watch the fountain and we are almost never alone. When I took these pictures I was there for about an hour and during that time at least twenty people had come and gone before I left. It is also a nice place to talk and the sound of the water, besides being relaxing, conveniently makes eavesdropping nearly impossible.

Although many people just drive by I urge you to stop in and park and enjoy the fountain while perhaps starting a new family tradition.



One thing about the harsh economic times is that it provides us an opportunity to rethink how we live, spend our money, and utilize the time we have on this earth. Sometimes you don't have to travel far to find sights to see and things to do.







During my lifetime a lot of things have changed in Columbia. I am thankful that the Shelter Garden and fountain are not among the things I love that have disappeared. Thanks to Shelter Insurance not only for providing jobs but also a wonderful aesthetically pleasing addition to our community. All corporate entities should be such good neighbors.

If you are driving by on West Broadway some evening, during the season when the fountain is on, do yourself a favor and stop for awhile.

Graham Cave State Park

Located about 40 miles from Columbia, just off of I-70, at the East 170 Exit heading toward St. Louis, is Graham Cave State Park.


View Larger Map

Graham Cave may be one of the best kept secrets as far as campgrounds go if you are looking to get away from the crowds, like hiking, and are looking perhaps for something a little bit quieter. If your looking for a the RV kind of atmosphere but would like to be next to the park there are two private campgrounds located on both sides of the interstate along the access roads each less than two miles from the highway. We checked both of them out and they were both clean and well equipped with nice swimming pools. At least one of them had wifi access. As near as I can tell most private campgrounds now have wifi access which is an interesting sign of the times.

We visited Graham Cave in a scouting expidition in anticipation of a family campout. My impression is that the campground is spacious, well maintained, and under-utilized. We are going to spend two nights there in the near future. Here is a visual tour of the campground and the pictures are in the order that I took them:






The actual entrance:


Jenifer and Hannah outside the park office:

They were looking at this map which shows up well in the picture below:


Parts of the park roadway are wide and spacious:


Other roadways are narrow. The speed limit is 10 mph and there IS law enforcement with radar to enforce it.


Shower house and bathroom located in the camping area. There is also an on site host nearby:



One of several trails located in the park:




The next five pictures are from the western boundary of the park which is bounded by the Loutre Creek which latter turns into the Loutre River.

Why the boot ramp is out of commission I have no idea but the banks of the creek/river showed signs of recent flooding. We have had a lot of rain here in Missouri lately.





There in the middle of the picture is I - 70 At this point in the park you are perhaps about 100 yards from the interstate.



This area is at the end of a huge parking lot. There is also a small playground, one of at least two located in the park, not shown in the picture. The cave is located up this trail but we did not visit it since we are saving that for when we actually do camp:




If I had to characterize this park in one word it would be "lonely." It seems more isolated than it is with the interstate running on the southern side of the park. Overall a nice park and one that is located rather conveniently to Columbia.

Missouri Department of Natural Resources web site for this park:http://www.mostateparks.com/grahamcave.htm

New Princible at Lang Middle School

Today is the last day for Shelli Adams as principal for Lange Middle School. Shelli is leaving to finish her dissertation for her doctorate and she is being replaced by Dr. C. Bernard Solomon. Dr. Solomon is moving over from his position as assistant principal at Oakland Junior High

Photo of C. Bernard Solomon and Shelli Adams taken on 29 June 2009 in the administrative office of the John B. Lane Middle School, Columbia, MO
I would like to wish Dr. Solomon the best of luck at his new school and the soon to be Dr. Adams the best of luck as she completes her doctorate. As principal Adams was accessible, efficient, and ran a large organization with grace and good humor. You need all of those qualities in a middle school.

When our daughter transitioned from Shephard Elementary to Lange we were concerned about the move to a much larger school. Fortunately we have been pleasantly surprised at how wonderful the faculty are and how good of a princible Shelli Adams was.

Rocky Fork Primitive Baptist Church and the Mordecai (Mordica) Family

Located North of Columbia is the historic Rocky Fork Primitive Baptist Church. I have many relatives, from the Mordica side of the family, buried there. These relatives are descendants of Moses Mordecai, before the name became anglicized, and before most of the family had unfortunately become assimilated.

The Mordecai family has been in Missouri for over 150 years and is mentioned in the book Missouri Pioneers Volume I, by Audrey Woodruff and Nadine Hodges, the History of Boone County, Missouri published by the Boone County Historical Society and which is currently out of print but available online, at least in parts, from Google Books. Also, the Daniel Boone Regional Library has two copies in Columbia and one in Ashland.

This is an excerpt about Moses Mordecai from the Jewish Encyclopedia online:

American trader; founder of the Mordecai family in America; born in Bonn, Germany, in 1707; died in Philadelphia May 28, 1781. He went to America about 1750 and settled in Philadelphia, where he engaged in the brokerage business. On Oct. 25, 1765, Mordecai signed the celebrated Non-Importation Agreement, by which the merchants refused to import goods until the repeal of the Stamp Act. In 1777, after the outbreak of the Revolution, he signed an agreement to take the colonial paper currency sanctioned by the king, instead of gold and silver.

The family is also mentioned in Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period by Ruth H. Block; Journal of Southern History, Vol 69, 2003 and the book Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period by Jean E. Friedman published in 2001 by the University of Georgia Press (ISBN-13: 9780820322520) and here is a synopsis of that book from the Barnes & Noble web site:

In Ways of Wisdom, Jean Friedman traces how Jacob Mordecai and his family, German American Orthodox Jews*, adopted the Anglo-Irish enlightened pedagogical system developed by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria. In 1808 Mordecai founded the Warrenton Female Academy on the enlightened principles described in the Edgeworths' guide, Practical Education, and he enlisted family members to teach and manage the school. Rachel Mordecai, inspired by her father's progressive methods, initiated an Edgeworthian experiment in home education on her young stepsister, Eliza. Rachel's diary, reproduced in full in Ways of Wisdom, chronicles the moral instruction of Eliza. While retaining the traditional didacticism of wisdom literature, the diary also describes Eliza's resistance to enlightened discipline and method.

Our family history is indeed the age old history of assimilation of the Jewish people witnessed by the fact that my relatives are buried in church cemeteries rather than a Jewish burial ground.









Some Mordecai/Mordica graves:







This is at the very back of the cometary on the western border:


Located at the back of the cometary are many stones, or markers, which have been removed but not discarded. My father tells me that these are foot markers that were put at the foot of the grave in addition to the more familiar headstone.

More footmarkers with initials?
Standing at the western end of the cemetary looking east.

Our disrespect for the dead manifests itself in many ways. The most recent event was when St. Mary's Church in Wimbledon, the one in England of tennis fame, sold parking on grave sites for 20 pounds in the annual money grab that occurs during the famous Wimbledon tennis match. When pictures of cars parked in a cemetary on graves were released along with the story (I first heard of it on the BBC) this statement was released which is basically an after-the-fact-we-got- caught "apology:"

Reverend Mary Bide said that although the cars look ‘odd’, they were only parked in the oldest part of the graveyard and funds raised would make a ‘valuable contribution to the Church and the Diocese’.

But the church has since apologised for the car parking arrangement and has stopped the use of the churchyard.

‘Over many years, during the Wimbledon Championships, the parish of St Mary Wimbledon has offered this service to the public,’ a church spokesman said.

In other words this was not a money making scheme but rather a public service and it was okay since it was an old part of the cometary.

I was also appalled years ago when a cometary was moved, including the digging up of thirty graves and the remains for re internment, to accommodate the expansion and development along Smiley Lane in the North part of Columbia which continues unabated:

The next two pictures are of those graves that were moved:

The rest are just some miscelanous photographs:








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*
The reference to Orthodox Jews in the book is an odd one since the division into formal branches I think is a slightly more modern distinction which, although emerging at the time period under discussion, was not yet formally a term in common usage. There were just Jews at various levels of observance. This is my understanding from that fascinating historic period when Judaism in America succumbed to the schism aliment so common in American Christian denominations. My understanding is that the term orthodox was used disparagingly by progressive elements in Judaism (which the author correctly identifies as coming largely from Germany) but that it was latter adapted by the traditional "Orthodox" movement as a convenient shorthand.

See:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Modern_History/1700-1914/Denominationalism/Orthodox.shtml

http://www.religionlink.com/tip_070827.php

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/orthostate.html

Evidently the church web site is no longer maintained. However, Google's cache still had a copy of the history of the church and I was able to get it so the history would not be lost. It is located on scribd at this URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/17427294/RF-History-1971-Mae-Wayland in pdf format.