Riverside Park

Independence, Kansas

By Autumn Finley

Growing up in a flyover state, I never much considered the literary merit of my home in the southeast corner of Kansas. Apart from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the novels I read were never set here. Then, in my senior year of high school, my drama teacher, Heather Wilson, introduced our class to the works of playwright William Inge. We were performing Picnic for the spring play, and we also read snippets of his other plays set in a fictionalized Independence, Kansas. I knew that Independence Community College had the Inge Center and the Inge Festival, but I had never processed that there was a famous playwright born and raised less than thirty miles from my family’s farm.

Learning about Inge made my corner of Kansas feel important. Our class took a field trip, looking at the homes in the historic areas of Independence to gain inspiration for our set. The professors at ICC opened the Inge home for our class to tour. It was then used as a home for their Playwrights in Residence program, and we saw the staircase and landing which likely inspired scenes in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. We visited the Inge cemetery plot, paying our respects while marveling at how a literary giant rose to fame from our tiny corner of the lower Midwest.

However, the place I associate most with Inge is a small picnic spot by the Verdigris River, which can be accessed down a slight ravine beyond the larger picnic areas at the Riverside Park and Ralph Mitchell Zoo. A lone concrete table was nestled in the bottom of the ravine, time wearing it down to a pocked finish, but the area was well-kept and mown for park-goers.

As the spring semester of my senior year rolled to a close, with opening night looming, our cast met up for our own picnic by the Verdigris, overlooking the murky water and an old concrete bridge. We munched on our sandwiches, mulling the fleetingness of our youth, understanding that the innocence of our own childhoods was fading, much like the realizations many of the characters have throughout the play. Helen Potts, a middle-aged character, reflects on the juxtaposition of day-to-day life and the energy of the teenage and young adult characters, saying to her neighbor, “I feel sort of excited, Flo. I think we plan picnics just to give ourselves an excuse … to let something thrilling and romantic happen to us—” The play hinges on love, both romantic and familial, and how those bonds shape people’s choices and dreams. For me and my classmates, our own hopes and plans echoed around the picnic table, the sound eventually carried down the lazy Verdigris.

Now, all that remains of that concrete picnic table is the base that anchored it to the ground. The bridge has been reduced to its pillars, likely worn down by flooding and the passage of time. Despite the rubble and debris dotting a ravine along the bank, the area remains a serene spot to enjoy views of the park to the west and the tangled woods around the river to the east.

A few years after graduation, I took the time to watch the film version of Splendor in the Grass. I knew the screenplay was Inge’s, but I was impressed by how much control he managed to maintain over the set design. The film featured Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean (Deanie) and Warren Beatty as Bud, and there they were on my TV screen, cast into a familiar setting of clapboard houses and screened porches. In that technicolor Independence, Kansas, were the high school students clad like so many photos from yearbooks past, and there was that concrete bridge and picnic area, nearly identical to my childhood memories of the place. Although rendered a brighter green than I remembered, there was the park where I had played with my family before riding the carousel, which still only costs a nickel, the same place I had gathered with friends on field trips. That same place was depicted by the Hollywood-cast coeds, swimming, chatting, and enjoying the everyday pleasures of growing up in small-town USA.

The screenplay itself is a marvel—the storyline, plot, and dialogue rich with commentary about young love and lower Midwest culture in the early twentieth century, yet it was the set design that swelled my pride. Independence seemed so important and large on the screen, perhaps as important as the British settings I was used to studying in college. Inge saw the importance of those literary connections too, tying his work to William Wordsworth’s poem of the same title. In an early classroom scene, Natalie Wood as Deanie recites:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

Of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind”

This universal truth of innocence lost, growth, and distance in time persists as grass withers, dies, and grows again each year. Time moves forward despite personal and communal setbacks. Park benches and picnic tables are rearranged; bridges crumble and fade into memories. Still, we can take strength in the shared understanding of our community places. Inge bridged a gap in my understanding—that my childhood places were worthy of being a literary landscape.

Autumn Finley grew up in Altamont, KS, but has lived and studied in various communities across Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. She is currently an Associate Professor of literature and composition at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO.

Photo by Liz Finley.

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4633 Westminster Place

St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

Tennessee Williams called St. Louis “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1947 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, playing the heel to his childhood home as he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential and celebrated American playwrights of the twentieth century.

Williams’ relationship to the Midwest is the antithesis of The New Territory’s ethos, “Here is Good.” For Tom, as he was known as a young man, here was very bad. But the repression St. Louis represented was a creative pressure cooker, according to Henry Schvey in Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams. Wild birds would become a ubiquitous symbol throughout Williams’ work: “I feel uncomfortable in the house with Dad when I know he thinks I’m a hopeless loafer,” Tom journaled. “Soon as I gather my forces (and I shall!) I must make a definite break… I have pinned pictures of wild birds on my lavatory screen — significant — I’m anxious to escape — But where & how? — . . . What a terrible trap to be caught in!”

Williams nicknamed his river city home “Saint Pollution” and indeed, the city had a few characteristics of a sulfuric runoff swamp. In the 1920s, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America, following New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and it was one of the most polluted urban spaces on the planet, culminating in “the day the sun didn’t shine,” in November 1939.

On “Black Tuesday,” as it came to be known, a weather pattern trapped coal emissions close to the ground, blanketing the entire city in a thick smog that smelled of ash. The streetlamps were lit all day, and in his poem “Demon Smoke,” written in 1925, Williams captured the noisy, smelly, industrialized hellscape:

crash and clap of Olive Street

Where nature and man’s work compete

For mastery in the dingy sky;

Where clouds of smoke

And jets of steam

Defy pure air and sunlight’s gleam.

Saint Pollution was no place for wild birds, though as Schvey points out, Tom’s true antagonist lay “not in the physical city, but within his own family.” His father, Cornelius C. Williams, was either absent, drunk, abusive or some combination of all three. Tom’s mother, Edwina Williams, was a repressed socialite never contented with her station in St. Louis society. Tom’s older sister, Rose, was schizophrenic — diagnosed with “dementia praecox” and confined to a mental institution in Farmington Missouri. “She is like a person half-asleep now,” Tom wrote of his sister. “Quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others.”

All three members of the Williams family were inspiration for various characters throughout Williams’ writing career. “So much of this writer’s work was forged in a crucible of anger and self-conscious rebellion against both family and home,” Schvey writes.

The smokestacks poisoning downtown with demonic coal ash caused all kinds of people to flee west, touching off St. Louis’ westward suburbia as early as the 1880s. The rich built mansion neighborhoods in the clean air, at the periphery of the city, like the Central West End where the Williams family lived for a time, which is now the site of the Tennessee Williams Festival.

In 2021, confronted with COVID-19 restrictions, the festival staged a production of The Glass Menagerie outside of Williams’ childhood home on Westminster Avenue. The production made use of the fire escapes that Williams once walked on, which inspired scenes in the play, as part of the outdoor theater set.

When the Williams family moved out of Westminster Place to their residence on South Taylor, Tom noted the “radical step down in the social scale, a thing we’d never had to consider in Mississippi; and all our former friends dropped us completely — St. Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance.” A sensitive, shy Tom Williams seemed to adopt many of his mother’s opinions of the city. “Social status in St. Louis depended on how much money you possessed,” Edwina Williams complained in her memoir Remember Me to Tom. His mother’s inveterate disdain for the city was based largely on her failure to find a social position equivalent to what she possessed as the rector’s beautiful daughter in her previous homes, Columbus and Clarksdale.

Meanwhile, Tom’s father Cornelius was often drunk and fighting with Edwina — complaining loudly about his wife’s disdain for sexual intercourse, warring over the bottle hidden behind the bathtub. Williams describes a Cornelius-like figure in his short story, “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning,” noting that his father often entered the house with “the intention of tearing it down from the inside.”

With this kind of family life, surely a bookish young man could find sanctuary in school, right? As the historian David Loth points out, St. Louis was a booming metropolis known for the “best city school system in the Midwest, and by several years of national ratings, it was considered one of the best school systems in America.” In University City High, Tom learned Latin and received a classical education in art, reading, and writing, but he was teased for his southern accent and “effeminate” manner.

College was not much better. Williams was so ashamed of failing to graduate from Washington University that he omitted mention of his enrollment from his memoir. “I was a very slight youth,” Williams describes himself. A young man beginning to come into his queer sexuality, he writes, “somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden.”

“Williams was addicted to escaping St. Louis from first to last,” Schvey writes in Blue Song. “It was the great triumph of his life that, unlike his sister, he did manage to literally leave it behind.” After a lifetime of flight, it seems ironic that Williams would be returned to Missouri and buried in Calvary Cemetery alongside his family, but as Schvey notes, “Williams remained tethered to the city for the rest of his life… It was his tragedy that for all his desperate attempts, Tom Williams never really left home. The imagination and willpower that allowed him to devote his life to writing also kept forcing him to return home again in his imagination.”

The restrictive turmoil of the city is a symbolic throughline in William’s work — a wound he returned to over and over.

The Tennessee Williams Festival now carries on his legacy in the Central West End, projecting the author’s words from the cast iron balconies of his former home. A sculpture of the writer decorates the corner of McPherson and Euclid Avenue, across the street from the historic Left Bank Books, capturing a moment in bronze of Williams emphasizing something profound with a cigarette. But St. Louis still owes a debt to Tom Williams — an obligation to prevent yesterday’s traumas and protect the city’s LGBTQ+ community, its wild birds, and its artists.

Devin’s writing is published in Slate, The Nation, The Emerson Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. @devintoshea on twitter, @devintoshea on instagram.

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Main Street
Metamora, Indiana

By Heather Chacón

My first memory of Metamora, Indiana, is of being twelve and sitting on a wooden bench on the front porch of an old house-turned-shop with my friend, Holly. It is December. Above us hang several pieces of artwork for sale, paintings of landscapes and animals on reclaimed barn wood done by a local artist. We are sipping hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream and laughing while her parents shop inside the crowded building, the laughter making what happened next all the more startling. A man suddenly grabs a painting off the wall above our heads and takes off running. He nearly makes it off the porch before being tackled, suddenly and fully about the waist. Other people, whether patrons or employees we do not know, secure the painting. There are murmurs of “shoplifter” amongst the crowd, and eventually the store owner appears to loudly berate the man and ban him from the store. I do not remember any police being called, but the collective scorn from that crowd frightened me regardless.

Had I been more familiar with the history of Metamora, I would have also understood that the concepts embedded in this event — artistic ownership, community censure, thwarted commerce, repurposed materials as the start of mythos-building — were as much a part of this town’s history as the nineteenth-century buildings and homespun atmosphere I loved.

You see, Metamora got its name from the play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), written by John Augustus Stone. Stone entered this play in a competition sponsored by one of the (many say the) most prominent American actors of the nineteenth-century, Edwin Forrest. Keen to find a play he believed would be well-suited to his style of acting and physical presence, as well as show that the young nation could produce works of literary and dramatic merit, Forrest offered $500 for the best original “tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country.” From among the fourteen plays submitted, the Committee of Award (headed by William Cullen Bryant) chose Stone’s.

Initially Stone was elated to win the prize and have his work performed by such an important thespian. This pleasure soon turned to worry and dismay, however, as Metamora became a meteoric success that helped establish Forrest’s professional reputation and personal fortune without yielding such stability for its author. The play’s popularity hinged, in part, on Forrest’s acting talent, but it also gave the American people the opportunity to celebrate a uniquely “American” history.

While some brochures and websites mention the town is named after a play, very few include any details of its plot or popularity. Set in 1600s New England, the melodrama tells the tale of Metamora, a fictional chief cast in the “noble Indian” mode, who eventually kills his wife to protect her from the terrors of settler colonialism and enslavement before being slain by white pioneers. Importantly, by 1829 New England was largely under the control of white settlers, thus allowing northeastern audiences watching Stone’s play the chance to experience catharsis rather than fear of Native American retaliation. Yet Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, insured white Americans’ interest in stories dramatizing the usurpation of Native American lands and “disappearance” of their earlier inhabitants. The play became such a cultural phenomenon that it inspired the name of Metamora, Indiana, when the town was platted in 1838. This was not unique, as towns named Metamora can also be found in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio — locations that had more recently been settled on the frontier.

Forrest performed Metamora to great acclaim until his death in 1872. The play spawned at least 35 additional “Indian” dramas and Forrest made thousands by playing the role. Stone, meanwhile, never saw additional remuneration above his $500 prize money, unless you count Forrest buying Stone’s headstone after Stone committed suicide by drowning in 1834. When Stone died many whispered that Forrest’s unwillingness to share the profits of Metamora contributed to Stone’s melancholy. The scandal clung to Forrest for a while, but ultimately did little to impact his popularity.

Today visitors to Metamora, Indiana, will find little evidence of why the town bears this name or the fact that it was established on land that used to be the home of Miami and Shawnee peoples. Instead, public memory centers largely on its identity as a “canal town.” Metamora was established along the proposed route of Indiana’s Whitewater Canal, an infrastructure project designed to transport raw materials from the state’s interior to the Ohio River. Construction of the canal section in Metamora began in 1836 and was completed by 1847. Yet the canal was unfortunately prone to flooding due to the relatively low elevation of the surrounding land and its proximity to the Whitewater River. By the 1860s, the railroad supplanted canal travel as the preferred means of transporting goods.

With this change, Metamora met challenges well known to much of the rural Midwest: declining populations, gradual shrinkage of family-owned farms, a dearth of well-paying jobs. A resourceful bunch, Metamora residents still used the canal to power several grist mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of which still operates at the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site under the care of the Indiana State Museum. Their grits are extremely good, particularly on a summer day when you can watch them be freshly ground and placed directly in the bag.

In the last few years, interest in the town has risen somewhat, in part due to renewed interest in preserving historic architecture like Metamora’s nineteenth-century shops and municipal buildings. The town’s beautiful natural setting, affordability, and relative proximity to Cincinnati draw visitors who want to stroll around antique shops or take the family on a historic train or canal boat ride. It’s a pity most visitors to Metamora’s functioning wooden aqueduct, the only one still in existence in the United States, have no idea they’re also visiting a town named after the “last of the Wampanoags.”

Maybe it’s time to make sure that darker history is not also carried off into the night.

Heather Chacón is a proud native Hoosier and scholar of nineteenth-century American Literature. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Communications and Media at Greensboro College in North Carolina. When she isn’t grading or in the archives, she enjoys being outside and visiting historic sites—beloved pastimes she first developed in Indiana.

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