Lock & Dam #19 controls the Mississippi’s flow that cleaves west-central Illinois and southeast Iowa. Here, the river once ran with wild rapids as it descended into Missouri; now, it has been (mostly) tamed by the Army Corp of Engineers. Constructed at Keokuk, Iowa, it is 364.2 miles above the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.
The lock and dam system here was designed to make travel easier on the Des Moines Rapids, which had effectively been the northern barrier for traffic on the Mississippi until efforts began in 1837 to address the Mississippi’s shallow depth in the rapids.
The idea for the Keokuk site came from a young US army lieutenant named Robert E. Lee, who surveyed the land for the U.S. War Department in 1836. He suggested that the great power he witnessed in this turbulent section of the Mississippi River, known as the Des Moines Rapids, could be harnessed in some fashion. This part of the river included such notable characteristics as a 23-foot fall in a 12-mile stretch.
The main lock was constructed from 1952 to 1957 and is 1,200 feet long and 110 feet wide with a lift of just over 38 feet and large enough to handle a full-length tow of barges. It was put into operation in 1957 at a cost of 13.5 million dollars. (The 1957 lock replaced a 1910-1913 lock, which was a variant of the standardized Panama Canal design and was 110 feet wide, 358 feet long and 57 feet tall with a 40 feet lift.)
The movable portion of the dam is 4,620 feet long with 119 separate 30 feet rectangular, steel-skin plated, sliding gates. The gates are either installed or removed and river flow is controlled by the number of gates installed. They are removed by a gantry crane that travels on the service bridge above the dam. At the time it was completed it was second in length only to the Aswan Low Dam on the Nile River.
When the accompanying hydroelectric powerhouse was also completed that same year it was the largest capacity, single powerhouse electricity generating plant in the world.
The Power House and spillways are owned and operated by Ameren Missouri and have a 142 megawatt capacity. The powerhouse contains 15 generators, originally designed to produce 25 Hz instead of the 60 Hz alternating current used today. Keokuk and Hamilton Water Power landed contracts in 1910 to deliver 44.7 MW of electricity to three customers located in St. Louis, MO (more than 100 miles downstream), at a time when no electric power had been transmitted more than a few miles; Union Electric Light and Power Company, Laclede Gas Company and United Railways Company, which operated the St. Louis Street Railway Company. Union Electric Co. purchased the facilities in 1925. The 25 Hz generators powered industrial customers and were used to power St. Louis streetcars.
After World War II, a number of modernization improvements were undertaken. The 25-cycle generators were progressively converted to 60-cycle generators beginning in the 1940s with the final units converted in 2002. Electronic automation replacement for some mechanical systems began in the 1980s. Ameren Missouri, the current powerhouse owner, began replacement and conversion of the original 1913 turbines with more efficient stainless steel turbines. Today, Keokuk Energy Center remains the largest privately owned and operated dam on the Mississippi River. The lock and dam, as well as the rest of the river, can be viewed from a distance on the Observation Deck of the Keokuk Rail Bridge.
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Dallas City and Fort Madison lie in the impoundment created by the control of water between Lock & Dam #19 and Lock & Dam #18 at Gladstone, Illinois. Locals call this section of the Mississippi a “poor pool” because its elevation is ten feet lower (518 feet) than the flow at Gladstone. This wreaks havoc during times when great volumes of water flow from the upper river because when the floodgates are open, the ten feet short in height is “evened up” with the rest of the river, causing localized flooding when most of the river stays in its banks, although occasionally the length of it floods with or without controls set by men!
As coveted as riverfront properties usually are, most of the houses built on the water’s edge of the poor pool here are older, modest, one-or two-story framed affairs that have gone through many families and many more renovations. Most have a perpetual wall of sandbags surrounding three sides of their property; this is due to the almost annual ritual of too much water flowing from the many swollen fingers of tributaries that drain into it. The lavish, more expensive homes stand far away from the floodplain on the bluffs in Hancock County, Illinois, and in Lee County, in Iowa.
One such home is what locals call the “Betsy Ross″ House, a stately, three-story mansion duplex built in 1858 and shared by the families of William G. and Jacob W. Albright, two brothers who made their fortune here after leaving Philadelphia for the promise of Manifest Destiny. The double Italianate residence built just outside Fort Madison on a limestone cliff overlooking the river, cost the staggering sum of $14,000. At the time, its size and grandeur rivaled the territorial governor’s mansion.
The Albrights seem charmed--the perfect template for the developing myth of “the All-American family”--with a long, historic pedigree: William G. Albright married Cynthia White, whose father, Edward, was one of the first settlers in Hancock County and whose grandfather, Peregrine White, was born on the Mayflower. William and Cynthia were good folks by all accounts. The children Harry, Caroline, Phoebe, Grace, William Jr., Virginia, and Cynthia, were raised up happy and spoiled.
Brother Jacob W. left Philadelphia in 1839 with his wife, Rachel Wilson, the granddaughter of seamstress Betsy Ross, who, when she was a child in Philadelphia, helped her grandmother sew flags, and later duplicated the design of the original “circle-of-thirteen stars” flag as small replicas for sale and for special occasions. They bore three children, Daniel, Katie, and Jacob Jr.
For rough-and-tumble Iowa at the time, the Albright home was nothing short of a king’s castle in far-away Europe. Cooking was done in a basement kitchen; food transported up to the butler’s pantry on the first floor via a dumb waiter. The food was then plated and served in the formal dining room, made possible by a flurry of servants. In the summer months, while the lesser townsfolk sweltered in their ramshackled hovels below, the Albrights enjoyed the cooler breezes skimming off the river.
But, as goes life, the contentment enjoyed by these two families was too short-lived. In 1878, a yellow fever epidemic, spread rapidly by infected mosquitoes, ravaged the Mississippi River Valley, killing over 20,000 people, including several members of the two families, including every one of the Albright children.
The house, once so lively, was now a mausoleum--black velvet curtains blocked out sunlight; the staff let go; the survivors in seclusion until they, too, succumbed to the Death Angel’s grip. In 1905, at almost 93 years old, Rachel, the last surviving member of the two Albright families, sewed her final flag and donated it to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church which the family had joined in 1847, her parochial sanctuary, away from her secular one. On the night of Tuesday, April 18, 1905, Rachel Wilson Albright passed away from dropsy. Her funeral was held at St. Luke’s. The silk flag she sewed before her death remains on display there today, preserved under glass.
The Betsy Ross house sat empty, collecting memories and dust, until 1920 when Americus and Mercy Gates bought it and lived there--until suddenly fleeing the premises two years later. Trying to unload the place in a hurry, they sold it at a fire-sale price to their granddaughter, Aileen Christine Ringling. Ringling, married to a son of the famous circus family, was an aerialist and performed in the equestrian circus acts in the 1940’s; later she was a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Retiring to the area in 1972 to raise exotic animals, she died a recluse in 2010.
Ringling was an “odd duck” according to the few older folks who had contact with her over the years. Taking a cue from the Winchester Mystery House out west whose unstrung owner claimed to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles, she, too, had made quirky renovations to the home that included numerous oddities such as doors and stairs with odd-sized steps that went nowhere, windows that overlooked walls, and unplumbed toilets. Local legend attributed these oddities to her belief that “Injuns were stalking her.”
The mansion, whose only current occupants are the Albright children’s ghosts, was individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. In 2014, it was included as a contributing property in the Fort Madison Park-to-Park Residential Historic District.
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Let’s take a little break from Ol’ Man River. Come along as we take a quick, strange tour of the aforementioned Winchester Mystery House, on the map in San Jose, California:
Located at 525 South Winchester Boulevard, the Queen Anne style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. The house that Sarah Winchester built and freaked out over is predominantly made of redwood; however, because she disliked the look, demanded that a faux grain and stain be added over it. Approximately 20,500 gallons of exterior paint were required for its destiny to manifest.
The popular San Francisco Bay-area tourist attraction has 161 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms, 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, six kitchens, two basement levels and three elevators. Cost of construction was $5,500,000.
In 1922--only five months after Mrs. Winchester’s death--the house was auctioned off to the highest bidder, the winner turning it into a place for curious-seekers to walk and gawk through when doors were thrown open to the paying public in February, 1923. The mansion is a designated California historical landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a tourist destination of grief and paranoia.
Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in the summer of 1839 and was an excellent, all-around student. Growing to a petite 4′10" and 95 pounds, she developed a reputation as one of Connecticut’s great young beauties, and was given the dainty appellation, “the Belle of New Haven.”
On September 30, 1862, a still-strung Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, the son of the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and its chief financial officer. The famous (or infamous) Winchester rifle, a spin-off of the 1860 Henry rifle, was among the earliest and most successful weapons in terms of performance repeating rifles at the time, causing well over a million fatalities. The Model 1873 especially sold well, being marketed by the manufacturer as, “The Gun That Won the West.”
The couple’s honeymoon was tragically short-lived, coming to an abrupt end when their only child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, died six weeks later from marasmus, a children’s disease in which the tiny body wastes away, a frail little victim of malnutrition, probably due to insufficient breastfeeding from a malnutritioned mother. More grief followed: In the span of one year, she lost her mother, her father-in-law, and her husband William, who died on March 7, 1881, of tuberculosis.
Upon William’s death, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $550 million in 2020). She also received nearly half ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $27,000 a day in 2020, which made her one of the wealthiest women in the world at the time.
Legend has it that a Boston medium told her while supposedly channeling dear, dead William, that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel west, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles, although it’s possible she was simply seeking a change of location during her lengthy bout with depression. Other sources claimed that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts and that her only panacea was moving west and continuously building a house to hide from the spirits that fell from the firearms of her late in-laws.
The Mystery House is most famous for its quirky renovations such as doors and stairs with odd-sized steps that go nowhere, hallways that abruptly end, and unplumbed toilets. More than 2000 windows were built facing walls, providing no view; some doors led straight into brick walls. One, on the second floor, appropriately nicknamed, The Door to Nowhere, leads outside to absolutely nothing—no staircase, no balcony, no hallway. If you were to walk out this door you’d drop two stories to the garden beneath. Another doorway would drop you one floor into the kitchen sink.
Her eccentricities didn’t stop with the building. Sarah liked to know what her servants were doing at all times, so several of the windows enabled her to spy on them or overhear their conversations. If anybody dared to give her advice on construction, they were given their walking papers at the end of that day. She had bells rigged throughout the house so that when she needed something no matter which room she was in, a servant could come to her. After the 1906 San Fansciso earthquake severely damaged a wing of the house, she just had it sealed off, never bothering to fix it or tear it down.
Beyond the oddities, the mansion has gold and silver chandeliers, hand-inlaid parquet floors and trim, and a vast array of colors and materials. Due to Mrs. Winchester’s debilitating arthritis, special “easy riser” stairways were installed as a replacement for her original step construction which allowed her to move about her home freely as she was only able to raise each foot a few inches.
It was said there was only one working toilet in the original seven-story mansion–that all other restrooms were mere decoys to confuse the spirits. It was also said that confusing the spirits was the reason why she slept in a different room each night. The home’s innovative conveniences were rare at the time of its construction and included steam and forced-air heating, push-button gas lights, and Mrs. Winchester’s personal (and only) hot shower from indoor plumbing.
Winchester never skimped on the many adornments to its architectural beauty. Many of the stained glass windows were created by the Pacific American Decorative Company. Some were designed specifically for her, and others by her, including a “spider web” window that featured her favorite web design and the repetition of the number 13, another of her fixations (multiple rooms in the house have thirteen windows, there are thirteen bathrooms and there are even trees outside sculpted into the numbers one and three). A second window was designed by Tiffany himself so that when sunlight strikes the prismatic crystals, a rainbow is cast across the room. Cheerful.
Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester died on September 5, 1922, of heart failure. A service was held in Palo Alto, California, and her remains lay at Alta Mesa Cemetery until they were transferred to New Haven, Connecticut, where she was buried next to her husband and their infant child. She left a will written in thirteen sections, which she signed thirteen times. All of her possessions (apart from the house) were bequeathed to her niece and personal secretary. Her niece then took everything she wanted and sold the rest in a private auction. It supposedly took six trucks working eight hours a day for six weeks to remove all of the furniture from the home.
The West wasn’t won with plowshares, baby!
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