Welcome to Memphis, Missouri

The "other" Memphis was an unlikely aviation hub of a bygone age.

by

EDITOR’S NOTE:

This is the second of an occasional series of articles that explore other towns across the United States that share the name of our hometown.

Ed Miller of Keokuk, Iowa, was always happy to see his great-grandson, James Brooks III, who would visit him every year or so. He enjoyed hearing how James was doing in Memphis, where Ed himself had lived for many years. Perhaps that was even where Ed had picked up his love of model airplanes, which he still handcrafted from raw wood, using his own lathe. And seeing his great-grandfather’s plane collection had made quite an impression on young James. Though he had left Keokuk many years before, James always made a point of visiting Grandpa Ed.

But during one such visit, something odd caught Ed’s attention. Perhaps James made a reference to the long drive that he and his wife, Memphis painter Melissa Dunn, had made. “That’s funny,” Ed would have thought. “Memphis is less than an hour away.” Perhaps James mentioned his job at FedEx. A FedEx hub in Memphis? Highly unlikely. Or maybe Ed noticed that James’ car had Tennessee plates.

“I thought you'd been living in Memphis all this time,” Ed said.

“We do live there, grandpa — Memphis, Tennessee!” James replied. “Don’t you think we’d visit you more if we lived in Memphis, Missouri?” Recalling Ed’s dawning realization years later, James says, “He just took it in stride. He was like, ‘Oh, okay. That makes sense.’”

Unflappable Ed’s confusion is understandable. Having lived in the Memphis west of Keokuk for many years before the Second World War, and joining the First Christian Church there, it loomed larger in his life than any home of Elvis. And besides, he was mostly concerned with Keokuk, the mighty Mississippi, and the lock and dam. On the shelf of his riverside home were three albums’ worth of Polaroids showing steamboats he’d snapped while they churned past.

But if Ed Miller, a Navy veteran, mostly loved watercraft, a fascination with aircraft and motor-tinkering was something he shared with, and bequeathed to, his great-grandson. And it’s all quite in keeping with the history of that other Memphis in Missouri, where aviation once played a significant role — not something many towns of less than 2,000 people can claim.

Of course, there weren’t even railroads in Missouri at the town’s founding in 1843. Samuel Cecil, a Scotland County settler and farmer, gifted 55 acres to establish what would ultimately become the county seat. Though a local historical marker claims Memphis was named after the Egyptian city, the fact that Cecil's wife and three eldest children were from Tennessee suggests otherwise.

Beyond that, it’s hard to establish any connection between Memphis and its sister burg in Dixie, but it did go on to see some of the northernmost actions of the Civil War. Nearby Upton, on the Iowa border, was allegedly an Underground Railroad stopover, and Memphis itself was a Union Army base during skirmishes with Confederate guerillas in the countryside from 1861 to 1862.

By 1871, the Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska Railway ran through Memphis, better connecting it to the world at large. Within two decades it would theoretically be possible to travel by rail and barge between Memphis, New York; Memphis, Missouri; Memphis, Nebraska; and Memphis, Tennessee. But by the end of the century, an altogether different sort of transportation would put the Missouri town on the map.

Over the ensuing 20 years, inventors throughout America tinkered with any and all approaches to rising above the earth. Marcellus McGary of Memphis, Missouri, was one such enthusiast. Throughout the 1890s, the Memphis Reveille ran several reports on his efforts, including, in 1896, news of the maiden voyage of his craft, the Columbus, “a cigar-shaped rubber balloon five feet long” with a gondola below featuring wings that could “move like a bird.” McGary caused it to rise and fly forward for some distance, albeit in near silence, for the wings flapped using “a small device made of rubber bands.”

McGary merits a mention in Michael Busby's Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery, an inquiry into the many and varied eyewitness accounts of flying machines in that era, perhaps America’s earliest popular wave of UFO sightings. As Busby writes, many of them involved actual airships being built by inventors, especially in Iowa, with much of the activity centered in Keokuk. That’s where McGary was building his craft as early as 1892. The following year, the editor of Iowa’s Farmington Herald wrote that McGary approached him on the street in Keokuk, then demonstrated to him a scale model, inspired by the motions of both bird and fish, sporting “a system of wings and fins operated by an electric motor capable of producing great velocity.”

We may never know with certainty if McGary rejected electricity in favor of rubber bands. In any case, he attempted a test flight in Burlington, Iowa, later that year, but was stymied by his inability to find a local source of gas for his balloon. And so he took his prototype to Chicago, presumably in time for the World’s Columbian Exposition taking place that year.

Thomas Pynchon imagines that very scene in his novel Against the Day, describing “aeromaniacs” gathering outside Chicago with their machines, “their wings both stationary and a-flap, gull and albatross and bat-styled wings, wings of gold-beaters’ skin and bamboo, wings laboriously detailed with celluloid feathers, in a great heavenwide twinkling they came, bearing all degrees of aviator from laboratory skeptic to Jesus-rapt ascensionary, accompanied often by sky-dogs.”

After Chicago, McGary toured with his models and aircraft, undaunted, for years. But in 1904, as Missouri’s Macon Republican reported, “An airship belonging to Marcellus McGary of Memphis, Mo., exploded on the [St. Louis] World’s Fair grounds aeronautic concourse today, totally wrecking the gas bag. The airship, which was the result of 13 years of work by McGary, was made on the model of the ‘horsefly.’”

And there, in the back of the bare metal building, was the crown jewel of the collection, a Pheasant Aircraft Company H-10, complete with a pheasant painted on its tail fin.

Of course, by then, balloon-based airships were being eclipsed by a machine made by two newspapermen-turned-bicycle-builders named Wright from Dayton, Ohio. But the success of the Wright brothers didn't diminish the dreams of flight in Memphis, Missouri. Quite to the contrary.

In 1917, celebrity aviatrix Ruth Law captivated record crowds at the Scotland County fair, flying loop-the-loops in a military plane; the era of barnstorming, where flying circuses of stunt pilots performed daredevil aeronautical feats and sold airplane rides, had begun. (see our July 2019 cover story on "The Flying Omlies.”) After the First World War, a glut of airplanes and parts further stoked public interest in such spectacles. It reached its height when Charles Lindbergh of St. Louis flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927, perhaps the greatest barnstorming stunt of them all. Meanwhile, the unregulated, wide-open market inspired countless small airplane manufacturers to sprout up across the country,

In Memphis, Missouri, in the year before Lucky Lindy, they’d already seen more practical aeronautical outcomes. When an April snow rendered Scotland County roads impassable, one Lee R. Briggs, a local airplane enthusiast who had served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and founded a flying school, was called into service to make local deliveries, dropping the mail of a few households at a time across the countryside. Though the first official American airmail run was in 1911, this was something entirely new to the locals.

And so, in June 1927, Briggs, designer Orville Hickman, and a handful of others founded the Pheasant Aircraft Company. It was major news in the pages of the Reveille. By August, the first Pheasant made its maiden voyage, piloted by Leslie Smith, an early associate of Lindbergh in his barnstorming days.  And soon the product was selling. By December 3rd, nine had been manufactured. But just two days later, as business was really taking off, a casual tragedy struck that was all too common among aviators: Lee Briggs fell from a Pheasant when his student pilot banked too hard. Neither had been wearing seat belts and both died instantly.

Still, the company marched on, selling some 30 more planes through 1928. The Pheasant was gaining a reputation, placing well in national racing meets. Meanwhile, over that same stretch of time, Leslie Smith, chief pilot on the airmail route from Chicago to St. Louis, with a stop in Memphis, had become something of a local celebrity. His narrow escape when flying blind through the fog over Chicago, darting among apartment buildings, was the stuff of legend. But Smith too succumbed when foul weather caused him to crash in the Missouri countryside in June 1928.

By the following year, still in debt, the Pheasant Aircraft Company was sold and moved to Wisconsin, where production petered out. The dangers that had claimed two Memphis-based aeronauts were widespread, and as federal regulations increased, so too did barnstorming become less lucrative. Still, as the century wore on, the Briggs-Smith Memorial Airport honored the local airmen’s memory, and amateur flying continued to thrive around Memphis. Perhaps it even fueled James Brooks' great-grandfather's passion for model-building.

And down in Tennessee, what line of work has Brooks pursued over his many years here in the ‘other’ Memphis? Why, he’s a technical writer of FedEx airplane manuals, of course.

As I approached the Missouri town this past March, hoping to delve a bit deeper into this aeronautical vortex, I really should have been rowing. The floods that had threatened my visit to Memphis, Nebraska, now in my rearview mirror, were also turning the fields of Iowa into swamps. But this Memphis was dry and sunny, and I soon settled into the freshly remodeled digs at Toni Loges’ Rock Hollow Lodging, not far from the town center. Tucked in a small fold of land, you could feel you were staying in the country, yet the key attractions were all within walking distance.

I’d heard rumors there was a fully restored Pheasant H-10 aircraft somewhere in town, one of only three in the world, and everyone said Larry Wiggins, a veterinarian, was the man to see. Stopping by Doc Wiggins’ office, I asked if he was in. “He’s in there getting ready to amputate a calf’s leg,” I was told dryly. Luckily, I ran into him later at the ever-popular Catfish Place, a few miles east of town.

He and his partner were very hospitable indeed, and soon he was giving me the address of his warehouses. “I’ve been here 54 years,” he said. “And I’m busy every day. There wasn’t any veterinarian in the county when I started. So I come up here. I graduated June 9th from the University of Missouri, and was living up here June 10th, and I’ve been busy ever since. And one of the first things I heard about when I came here was this Pheasant Aircraft Company.”

So many in the town treasured that slice of history that they formed the Pheasant Airplane Association, and a few years ago, PAA member Ron Brown spied an ad for a Pheasant in an aviation magazine. Within five months, Memphians had raised the $70,000 to purchase it. And luckily, Doc Wiggins had somewhere to put it.

As it turned out, that community effort to preserve the past was not limited to aviation history. Memphis, Missouri, it would seem, is a town full of history buffs.

“We've got 11 buildings here in town,” he said, letting me inside one of them. “We’ve got about 350 restored tractors, and I know the history of each one of ’em. And we’ve got all kinds of stuff that was made here in Memphis.” And there, in the back of the bare metal building, was the crown jewel of the collection, a bonafide H-10, complete with a pheasant painted on its tail fin, a flourish added during restoration. Made with fabric stretched over a steel frame, the heaviest thing on it may have been the wood-grained instrument panel.

As it turned out, that community effort to preserve the past was not limited to aviation history. Memphis, Missouri, it would seem, is a town full of history buffs. The next day, Scotland County Historical Society member Julie Clapp led me through the impressive collection held at Downing House, a fine old upper-class home built in 1858, now restored as a museum. Two rooms are dedicated to Ella Ewing, known as the “Giantess of Missouri,” who, at 8’4”, rode her physique to celebrity in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, though it ran counter to her deeply religious predisposition, touring with the Barnum and Bailey Circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West revue before her death in 1913.

“The home was built by William G. Downing,” Clapp told me. “He and his family came here from Virginia in the early 1850s. They were wealthy landowners there, and brought 13 slaves with them to Scotland County. Eleven men and two women.” It’s a chilling footnote, and a foil to the region’s contemporary friendliness. Happily, the building was later the well-loved home of professionals of a higher calling than slave-owner, throughout most of the twentieth century: Dr. & Mrs. A.M. Keethler and family. “He delivered over a thousand babies here,” noted Clapp.

Then, just as we were speaking, an elderly couple entered. As fate would have it, it was Dr. Keethler’s granddaughter, Virginia, now Mrs. Morris McNabb. Most likely one among those thousand babies he delivered there, she had grown up in the home but had not seen it since the 1970s. And in that single moment, the abstract history collected in bits and pieces, documenting the aspirations of pioneers of both land and air, and those serendipitous angels of history that determine there’ll be an airship here, an Underground Railroad there, all seemed less chilly and unfeeling. For in a land such as this, in the far corner of Missouri, where history is a treasure, it’s easy to see that notable deeds great and small were just what the people of Memphis happened to do. As Ed Miller might say, “Oh, okay. That makes sense.”