LeClaire cemetery walk depicts history

Font Size:

By Mary Louise Speer | Sunday, October 12, 2008 11:11 PM CDT | () comments

Marie Spinsby of LeClaire, Iowa, talks about her husband’s grandfathers, riverboat captains Isaac Spinsby and Deforest Dorrance, with visitors Sunday at Glendale Cemetery in LeClaire. (Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo

LeCLAIRE, Iowa — Nancy Huffman-Smith cordially welcomed people to her grave site Sunday during the Glendale Cemetery Historic Walk in LeClaire.

“I think it is a great way to tell our town’s history at the cemetery,” Huffman-Smith, portrayed by LeClaire resident Janet Rossmiller-Miller, said.

LeClaire hosted Autumn Market Days this weekend, and the first-time walk featured historic characters from the river town’s early days. Thousands of visitors attended the 20th annual Apple Festival at the Mississippi Valley Welcome Center and strolled through the historic downtown in search of collectibles, food and entertainment.

“Do you want to know how they did laundry back then?” Huffman-Smith, wearing a vintage linen apron, long dress and pantalettes, asked young visitors. “I would take my kids and my laundry down to the creek. That’s why I go barefoot a lot. I would wade into the water a little bit and scrub, scrub, scrub.”

Farm wives, in those pre-electric washing machine days, knew how hard it was to scrub out all the stains, sweat and dirt by hand. Huffman-Smith and her husband, Ira Smith, arrived in LeClaire Township in the mid-1830s. The family lived on Smith Island for a time before moving to the mainland and building a cabin.

Resident David Miller tackled his first-ever role as a re-enactor, playing the part of Charles Parker, a Confederate soldier. He wore a gray Confederate cap, knee-high boots and a simple shirt and pants for the role.

“Charles Parker was captured in the battle of Orchard Knob in Chattanooga, Tenn., in November 1863, and he was brought up here,” Miller said.

Parker and other Confederate prisoners of war were kept in a camp on Arsenal Island. The war ended in 1865, and surprisingly, the soldier decided to stay in Iowa and forge a new life for himself. He worked at a quarry in LeClaire and married his wife, Sarah.

Research doesn’t show whether the couple had children, but Miller suspects they did not. A single headstone crowns the joint grave site shared by Charles and Sarah.

Poet Dick Stahl of Davenport paid tribute to Philip Suiter, the first licensed rafting pilot on the Mississippi River. Steve Suiter of Princeton, Iowa, attired himself for the role of his three-times great-grandfather in dark suit and pilot’s cap.

“I did not know Philip, but I think he liked boats, and I think we would have a lot in common,” Suiter said. “He was legendary. He had a fondness and intrigue of the Mississippi River that instilled in him a desire to learn where all the nooks and crannies were.”

Applecart Orchard of Vinton, Iowa, and Stone’s Apple Barn in East Moline supplied apple lovers with tangy selections of apples and cider during the Apple Festival.

2008 proved a great year for apples, despite a deluge of rain in June, Tom Lunkley of Applecart Orchard said. Their newest fruit offerings are the Liberty Apple, which offers a mix of crisp, tart and sweet flavor, and Asian pears.

“A big, beautiful crop. We may not have (enough) inferior apples to keep up with our cider. That’s a good problem,” he said.

The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.